I spent a couple of days at the annual conference of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. Whenever I have gone to this campus I just go to their campus center, attend meetings and come back. I had no idea that they had such a beautiful, sprawling and hilly campus. The conference provided an excellent way to reconnect with many colleagues from other small liberal arts colleges. These meetings provide a forum to share what each of us is doing and the fact that we are so similar in many ways helps. Despite those similarities, there are considerable differences either because of geography, budget constraints and other things. I was pretty excited to hear that Occidental College has launched a very ambitious academic commons project and I requested Marsha Schnirring, the Associate Vice-President for Scholarship Technology there, to share any planning documents with us. By the end of the day yesterday, she had mailed me a few! We are also witnessing significant turnover in leadership in IT organizations and it was great to observe all the shuffles and connect with many of the new leaders, who are also from other CLAC schools and have risen through the ranks. And the hosts were fantastic!

I can’t believe that June is already over. Time to start planning for the new year. At the LTS senior leadership retreat a few days ago, we developed a plan which we will discuss in detail a bit later. I discuss briefly some of the plans in this post.

We plan to spend considerable effort to strengthen our support of digital scholarship and bring coherence and visibility to some of the excellent work that is already happening in the College. Library Collections and Research and Instructional Support groups will be leading this effort for us. So, what is “Digital Scholarship”? Its definition is broad. It can be anything from publishing scholarship digitally to specialized projects using emerging technologies to help share the faculty and student research and scholarship more widely. This creates more recognition for the faculty and students through which additional collaborations and useful dialogs can emerge. It is a lot of work for what may appear to be minimal return on investment. But, if done right and using the right technologies, these can last a long time and the benefits are immense. I always like to point to the Learning Objects project (where, some of the projects were developed 7-9 years ago and they still work!) at Wesleyan and the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at the University of Richmond, which is far more advanced and more recent. BTW, Ed Ayers, the president at Univ of Richmond and a fellow in their DSL, will be delivering a talk at Wellesley in September 18. Mark your calendars!

One of the most frustrating problem for Higher Ed is “reliable data”. I have written about this in various contexts. The issue is not that we don’t collect data or that we don’t retain data, but they are not reliable. Due to varying definitions and general lack of resources and priorities to clean up the data, it is way too complicated to access the data and rely on it to make decisions. Thanks to support from the president and her cabinet, we launched an initiative a year ago to get common data definitions of student related data  and have completed the implementation of a system that will make it much easier to access data and help produce reports. We have done the same for finance data. It will be our goal to advance this forward and also start looking at using the advanced methodologies that this software implements for other data. We have a College wide committee consisting of many of the administrative offices and our staff from Enterprise Solutions who will collaborate on this.

We have some significant changes and improvements in infrastructure. We will be implementing new network hardware in July that will increase reliability and replace hardware that are 7+ years old. We will also be getting rid of the Cisco NAC finally and replace it with a much more functional equivalent – a goal of mine that has taken this long to implement. We also have exciting plans to implement an open source solution for classroom technologies, courtesy of our colleagues at Wesleyan who developed it, which circles back to the value of collaboration amongst the colleagues in CLAC. We had some unforeseen issues with our Virtual Desktop environment recently, but we are believers in this technology and we will be using it more in the coming year. All of these will be led by the staff from Technology Support Services.

Our plans to expand the web applications is in full swing and we are implementing more and more applications using our framework.  Our strategy of using a consistent user interface through these apps has proven itself and we are taking on some complex and major projects such as classroom placement by matching faculty requests to committee assignments for faculty to designing a benefits portal. In addition, Drupal, our web content management system has worked out really well and we have plans to continue to expand its functionality. The Web Applications group will continue to lead these efforts.

Finally, the Communication, Administration and Planning group will spend its efforts on improving communications and a much tighter and better oversight on complex LTS finances. Through these budget controls, we plan to deliver additional services that benefit the community within the current budget.  Our goal is also introduce a more formal process of accountability. We plan to translate our strategic plan, which we will release in the Fall, into what is commonly referred to as a balanced scorecard and monitor how well we are doing what we said we plan to do.

I feel fortunate to be surrounded by enthusiastic, creative and supportive LTS staff and looking forward to working with everyone to move these plans forward.