As I have mentioned in my previous posts, the explosion in technology around us and the desire on the part of our own community members to adopt several of them is real. We, in Library and Technology Services (LTS), have an obligation to manage this process in a way that the College’s technology portfolio is manageable and sustainable. LTS, a merged Library and IT organization, is a small one and we cannot be good at supporting too many technologies at a level of depth that is necessary. For example, information security is of paramount importance and the responsibility for data grows exponentially as one adds more and more systems and services to support and we just don’t have the personnel to support them.

Our recent strategy has been focused more on a handful of principles – low code systems, minimize customizations, highly secure systems, security education of the community, satisfy the needs of the community as much as possible with existing systems and contain the portfolio sprawl. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are here to support the academic mission of the College primarily and need to optimize our resources accordingly. One of the major steps we have taken towards these goals is to adopt systems that require less programming and change responsibilities of the programmers to make them be  business analysts. This has dramatically changed how we support administrative offices.

This change was rooted in the parallel to academic computing support. There are generally no programmers in the group. But they have subject matter experts who work with the faculty and students to adopt technology appropriately for teaching, learning and research. This is exactly what we have done on the administrative side by the move away from programmers to business analysts.

We also have been successful in consolidating services to some of our existing systems. I would like to share a major step in this direction that is taking place as we speak.

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