I had an interesting conversation with folks from Handshake, which our Career Education department chose and we are thrilled to support. It was all about “Why Handshake, how did you decide” etc. You take the word “Handshake” out and replace it with “Workday” or some other product and the same applies. I want to talk about how we do it at Wellesley with the hope that this will be useful for others. I am keenly aware that no two institutions are the same in our space and therefore the applicability may be limited!

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I have been pretty upset recently about a whole bunch of things. Here are a few!

SPAM emails and Cold-calls

The sheer number of unwanted emails that I receive daily is getting out of control. I never asked for them in the first place. The CAN SPAM Act was a welcome change in 2003 when it was passed, but many didn’t read the fine print before celebrating. It is about giving the consumers a choice to opt out! It should have given the consumers a choice to opt in instead! Companies are buying bulk email lists at ridiculously low price and mindlessly blasting emails hoping for miracles. Automated SPAM detection is always late in catching up to the tricks of the marketers, so we still see many emails in our inbox. I have tried everything from Unroll.me to unsubscribing to marking them as spam. Nothing works all the time and I hate clutter in my inbox.

Phones are a bit more manageable. I have all my work calls forwarded to Google Voice and I screen calls before taking them. Also, my Android phone now allows me to mark numbers as SPAM, thank you! At home, we are extremely happy that we signed up for NOMOROBO. Though we signed up with Do Not Call Registry very early on, over the years it has become practically useless. NOMOROBO partners with the telephone service provider to detect if several phones are being called at the same time and kills the call after a ring or two. Works beautifully. But I am sure that someone is developing a way to bypass this.

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Technology ecosystems, a complex network of interconnected systems, have formed sometimes for all the right reasons, but a lot of times to fix problems created by badly designed systems. The most recent mobile app ecosystems came about because of conscious decisions made in the  original design itself – realizing that they themselves did not have the bandwidth to provide all the possible functionalities, companies like Apple and Google created frameworks and allowed a community of developers to develop mobile apps for their platforms. In case of Apple, this is a carefully controlled process, whereas in case of Android, it is sort of free for all.

Then you have cases like a poorly designed Windows operating system that gave rise to a multibillion dollar ecosystem for protecting the operating system – virus protection and malware to name a few. And because these systems were originally not designed for the well connected environment we live in, new vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. So, there is a whole ecosystem to protect essentially poorly designed systems!

Reporting and Business Intelligence ecosystems are mixed. The original ERP systems developers designed these systems to be handling large amounts of transactions. As a result these were data black holes and getting the data out from these systems required a complete new way of thinking. So, a badly designed system gave birth to data warehouses that are optimal for reporting. Then the limitations of reporting was realized and this gave birth to a whole new ecosystem called Business Intelligence that allows one to probe the data in real time without having to learn to write code!

The challenge we face is how best to support our community when easy access to several choices exist.

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