To be honest, we in Higher Ed administration talk about collaboration a lot more than actually collaborate. It happens a lot more successfully on the academic side where faculty collaborate on research projects with their colleagues globally. On the administration side we “consult” a lot and learn a lot from each other, but, at least to me, collaboration means something very different. When you do a Google search for collaboration you get two results:

1. the action of working with someone to produce or create something.
2. traitorous cooperation with an enemy

Of course, I mean the first. The first definition does not include talking and consulting with others!

I have been working in Higher Ed administration since 1986 and I feel that in the 80s and 90s we actually did a lot more collaboration in Higher Ed IT. There are several examples of technology collaborations during those times. It is weird that with such a pervasive use of Internet, where we are a lot more connected, we don’t collaborate as much. There are several reasons why, one of the most important one is the fractured nature of technology. Too many products or customizations of the same product in a way it is very hard for institutions to find commonalities and gain advantage from sharing.

This is why I am extremely proud of, a collaboration around COVID testing with Tufts University.

Thanks to President Johnson’s introduction, I met with Professor Moon Duchin on Zoom to learn about what Tufts is doing with respect to COVID testing. I should confess that I tend to network more with small liberal arts college colleagues than large university technology leaders (using the same commonality argument). But Professor Duchin made it feel like she and her group are truly excited about partnering with us and other interested schools around a few things – Campus Key scheduling app, COVID positive estimator and Queuing for Campus Coronavirus Testing. All these were coming out of her research groups modeling work. I was very excited about this. As I have written before, my graduate work was on using Monte Carlo methods and modeling and this kind of work excites me to no end.

I should say, we got past the first few steps of collaboration very quick – trust and willingness to share by one side and willingness to accept what is being shared by the other side!

Then, Moon introduced us to Tufts VP for Information Technology and CIO Chris Sedore. He and his group were engaged in developing testing logistics technologies. Both Wellesley & Tufts had committed to using Broad Institute  for COVID testing by that time and we were aware of initial issues with Broad’s IT systems. Chris and his group were going to work with Broad directly on optimizing them.

This really was a game changer for us. We hit it off right away because one could sense that Chris would be very easy to work with and we both were talking the same language. Whereas we are very different type of institutions, the common purpose was clearly understood. Scale of testing is vastly different between us, but the end goal was the same – how best to optimize testing and streamline communication related to testing with our community members.

We began serious conversations in mid July and by mid August, we were ready! And believe me, we had no plan B, that is how confident I was. Moon’s team and Chris helped us install all required pieces in cloud services and were there to help answer questions pretty much at any time during the entire period. We worked with Chris on some initial logistical issues with card swipe issues (for example, some of the long term employees coming in for testing had very old and worn out ID cards that would not be recognized by the card reader) and got past these in time for student testing.

We just finished our Fall semester and I am so glad that we chose this path because we had a lot more control over the process and had access to information easily that helped us resolve any issues and answer questions.

I want to thank Moon and Chris for their generosity and willingness to work with us! We are looking forward to a few enhancements to the systems which will make it even more reliable and better.