Author Archive
Another week coming to an end. Time indeed flies. Several of us traveled to Amherst College to talk to them about Drupal, the web content management system. I thought it was a great meeting. One of the key pieces that we will need for Drupal is Amherst’s Monster Menus. Whereas I was very happy to see the UConn men win last week, UConn women’s loss was not a happy moment. These kinds of unpredictable moments always remind me of how vulnerable all of us are. No matter how good you are and no matter how well you plan, things don’t always go the way that you plan. No worries, there is always the next year or the next project. I also talked to the Friends of the Library on Tuesday about where LTS is headed in the years to come. It was really fun.
Talking about projects, project management and key performance indicators (KPI) seem to be everywhere. Demand for services is far more than the available resources. There are a few institutions that have adopted the project management methodologies and have been reasonably successful, but many are simply unable to. As I mentioned in an earlier post, KPIs are extremely important in conveying how an organization is performing at any given point in time, in comparison to the same time in previous years and how goals are met.
My own feelings about this can be cast as practical project management…
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It has been a terrific day today. The Cricket World Cup that began about six weeks ago came to a fantastic conclusion with a classic game between India and Sri Lanka. Though I was born in Sri Lanka and grew up there, I belong to India, so I support them always and wanted them to win this one. India’s last World Cup win was in 1983.
Sri Lanka put up a total that was considered hard to beat, the legendary opening Indian pair got out early to set up a drama that finally ended in India winning it. Several days of me getting up between 4 AM and 5 AM to watch these games is over. Thanks to advances in technologies, the diehards like us were able to view live cricket through willow tv. Not sure how many simultaneous viewers watched some of these games, but the experience was flawless. After a short nap, it is time to root for UConn Men tonight.
Northeast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) is a regional affliate of EDUCAUSE. Many of the Higher Ed institutions from the Northeast and a few from other states such as New York and Pennsylvania are members of NERCOMP. My association with NERCOMP goes several years back in that I have presented several times at NERCOMP SIGs (Special Interest Group meetings) as well as in their annual conferences. I have also been a member of the Program Committee and I was elected in early March (2011) to serve in NERCOMP Board for the next three years. I really like the the NERCOMP annual conference which provides an excellent venue to network and listen to colleagues on topic of direct relevance to what we do.
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I am sure that all of us have been watching the tragedy that is unfolding in Japan. This reminded me of the Tsunami that devastated many countries after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean on Dec 26, 2004. Though none of our friends and family were directly affected by it, many that we know were involved in helping those who were affected. Seeing how quickly many of these countries recovered, one can only hope that the same will happen in Japan. Technologists are doing what they can to help the countries, including the person finder and other resources that you can find here.
Whether it is the tragedy in Japan or the recent happenings in the Middle East, we have seen how some of the technologies have played an important role. They are typically freely available social media tools that have revolutionized the way we communicate with each other and have helped bridge the gap between diverse world communities. They all share some of the important aspects of the topic that I want to talk about. Whether it is twitter or youtube or facebook, they are free to use and offer a platform for easy dissemination of information. Of course, there are many problems with these models, including the fact that it is easy to be anonymous and very easy to put out unsubstantiated information, but, with few exceptions, self-correction mechanisms come in and solve the misinformation.
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I actually wanted to write a post on a regional CIO gathering organized by Gartner Associates on “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) which was very interesting, but not much there to report. There are some really interesting ideas on how different CIOs measure the collective performances of their own organizations. Steve Laster, the CIO at Harvard Business School, gave some examples, some of the usual uptime stats for standard services such as email. However, a few other examples he provided were intriguing – time tracking by staff and “number of angry calls to the CIO per week”.
In the end, the question that was posed to the attendees by Laura Craft, who moderated the discussion, was “Can you think of IT metrics at the institutional level?” In other words, what are the KPIs for the institution itself and amongst them, which are IT related. This did not result in anything that I found useful, but there were some wild ideas. I told the attendees my experience at Pace, where KPIs were big. There the institutional KPIs were simply “# of admitted students by school, Yield, Financial Aid offered, Net Revenue”. Whereas IT plays an indirect support role in all these areas, none of these are affected by IT performance directly.
We in Library and Technology Services (LTS, the new IS) are continuing to work hard on many different projects and I would like to talk about some of these.
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Watson won handily, and many disappointed humans were blaming him for his answer that Toronto is a US City. Several humans blamed the outsourced programmers in India for this mistake. Blaming is so human, so it is understandable. However, I was very happy to see that companies like IBM are still interested in some of the fundamental research in computing. For the next 6 weeks, I will be preoccupied with Cricket World Cup which is being played in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. So far, no surprises, though England had a scare against Canada (yes, the country where Toronto is, plays cricket) yesterday.
On to the topic at hand… Library and Technology Services (LTS) is in the business of maintaining and supporting the consumption of information. Whereas we also create some of the information ourselves, that is a much smaller portion than making sure that we develop the appropriate mechanism for our users to get access to the information. It is sort of what Google does – billions of people create content, but it facilitates the consumption of this information through search frameworks that makes it easy to get access to information (though some would argue that it does a poor job!). And makes billions of dollars in the process… The question is, who actually is responsible for the information?
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Last Tuesday (2/15/2011) was yet another meeting-filled day and once again I took a resolution to block my meeting maker so I have at least one hour to catch up on things every day. It doesn’t appear that I will be able to accomplish this at least for a week or two. I was floating in and out of presentation by iStrategy, a Datawarehouse solution that uses modern dimensional data modeling techniques for reporting. I also attended a meeting with the faculty in the sciences around High Performance Computing (HPC) needs. Both were a lot of fun… Talking about HPC, I stopped writing for a few minutes to watch Watson compete in Jeopardy!
I was given an opportunity to talk at the Administrative Council at the College on Monday, Feb 14. I was happy to see a good attendance. Some of the attendees had already heard what I had to say more than once, so apologies to those for the repetition… I am going to touch on many of the important things that I talked about there, but if I miss anythign important, please email me and I will be happy to respond.
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Social Media is in the limelight again in the wake of the happenings on in Egypt. I myself have been so busy recently that I have not been able to do my usual level of tweeting and facebooking. We had to open up discussion on the Email/Calendaring to the Wellesley Community and I had to share with the Library and Technology Policy Committee several policy documents. As you know, policy documents take up a lot of time. Policy documents are important, but in my opinion, they need to be relevant, short, readable, to the point and practical. On the EDUCAUSE CIO list I was surprised to find that a few institutions have policies on policy documents. Hmmm… I wonder who wrote that one.
Social Media as we know is a web based technology platform for easy social interaction. Ease of use and access are critical for this to work correctly. As we know, some of the technologies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have fared very well in this space, but a lot of them such as Google Buzz, and Ning have failed to catch on. The most recent rumor is about Yahoo! planning to shut down del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. The struggle for us, the technologists, is what advice to give to those we support regarding the use of these.
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I am sure that everyone is talking about the unusual snowfall this winter, roof collapses, school closings and all that. Someone I know mentioned that he knew it was way too much snow when, after he cleared the snow in his roof, he stepped right into the mound of snow he had cleared. Picture that!
Luckily, technology is well advanced now that many of us are able to get a lot of work done from home during days such as today – no meetings. Unfortunately I had a couple of meetings that I could not skip today, so I drove to work. My attempts to take the car out from the parking spot failed this morning (2/2/2011) and needed a lot of help to simply get it back into the parking spot. I was able to get it out in the afternoon. Then, my attempts to try to steer the car up a steep driveway in the evening was not successful, so I parked right in the middle of the driveway. Even worse, trying to reverse the car didn’t work well – the car got stuck in a snow bank and needed a LOT more help to get it out. Should have stayed in the apartment and worked!
OK, enough of snow talk. I want to talk about how the successful technology projects are never complete. I refer to this as “Forever Beta” along the lines of the Google philosophy. The only “finished” technologies are the ones that are badly designed and rarely used so they die a slow death. And MIT Libraries have a “Beta Graveyard” to collected those that died.
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I am glad to begin my first post on the Wellesley blog about two months after I began my work here. In the two months, I have had a chance to meet with many of the faculty and staff. In addition, it was a lot of fun to meet with two groups of Albright Fellows to discuss how technologies, especially communication technologies, are influencing the world. I have also spent time trying to understand the work of all Information Services staff. It has been a pretty busy couple of months.
However, thanks to all the IS staff, we have made a lot of progress in such a short period of time, some of which I will discuss here.
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