Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
I have been in Chicago for the last three days attending the annual Workday conference, which they call Rising. It was exciting and today I will be flying back and looking forward to another exciting event – the Inauguration of Dr Paula Johnson, the College’s 14th president. Paula has already brought so much energy, optimism and enthusiasm to the College and I am really looking forward to the new beginning.
It has been a while since I have gone to a vendor sponsored conference like the Rising. There were something like 7000 attendees. There was the usual entertainment, receptions, too much food and keynotes. But I attended some really useful presentations that were well done. You can see my tweets here.
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A Disclaimer: Though I would like to think that I came up with these ideas first and I am the only one who came up with these ideas, the reality is that there are many others who would have come up with the same or much better ideas and worse, some of these already exist and I just don’t know about them!
Credit Cards/NFC (Near Field Communication) – Many banks now give you the option to get emails or texts when your credit card charges are over a certain limit. Now that many merchants are accepting payments via NFC through mobile phone, the same applies. Great feature. What I need additionally is the receipts for purchases also be communicated along with it, so I don’t have to print receipts. Similarly, if I want to return something, no need to hunt down the receipt, just use the same credit card/NFC and the merchant can pull up the receipt. I know that some privacy advocates wouldn’t want this, so make it optional.
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As everyone says “I don’t know where the summer went”. Right, it came and went before we knew it. In LTS, as always, summer was very productive. Our staff worked on several exciting projects, notably, a large contingent of both LTS staff and those from Human Resources and Finance were working extremely hard on Workday related activities as well as others working to make sure that the classroom technologies were in good shape for the start of the semester. Based on the feedback we have received so far, classroom problem calls are down to a handful, which is great news.
We also have had a few glitches that we will be attending to aggressively to sort out. Most notably, our course browser and waitlist system were way too slow for a period of time and we have already provisioned additional hardware with more memory and CPUs which hopefully will help address these issues.
We rolled out an initial version of dashboards for alumnae data using Microsoft SQL server, which I think will vastly simplify the way many offices access this data. The modern and easy to use PowerBI interface from Microsoft drives all of this and our technologists have done a terrific job of packaging the data and creating easy to use interfaces to slice and dice the data. (more…)
The map of our drive from Santa Monica Beach to our hotel, in the email receipt.
I did not travel as much during this summer as I normally do. I recently visited Los Angeles for a few days. I vividly remember the time that my wife and I, both graduate students in New York City, drove from NY City to the west coast and back in 1984. Olympics was held in LA and our friends who lived in the area purchased tickets for Indian men’s field hockey match against Australia. India was a field hockey power house early on. Indian men’s team bagged gold for 7 times between 1928 and 1964, bagging a silver in 1960. It has been all sagging since then!
Travel in the 80’s was exciting in its own ways, with limited technologies. We became AAA members just for this, got all the maps and the TripTik travel planners. Soon, our adventurous spirit took over and we bagged the TripTiks and simply wandered to interesting places that we found in the AAA books. No cell phones, no emails, no Google Maps! We were not that adventurous with food, so we took a rice cooker with us and would cover it with a towel to avoid the motel’s fire alarm from going off! Then we had all varieties of south Indian concoctions to mix the rice and eat with. We also stopped at a lot of our friends’ homes for great meals and memories. It was from there we would call our friends back in NY City to update our progress, whether they cared or not. Calling from motels was a costly proposition for graduate students.
India lost the game against Australia. Frankly they played so poorly that we found a husband and wife in the audience to be way more entertaining than the game. Every time India made a mistake, and there were too many of those, the wife would hit the husband as if it was his mistake and would literally cry… We ended up purchasing tickets for track and field from scalpers near the Coliseum and had a lot of fun experiencing the ’84 Olympics.
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I am sure you all remember these terms from calculus in high school or early years at College. I love calculus and can go on talking about these terms and how I continue to use them even today. But that is not what I want to talk about…
I think it is natural to want to excel in what we do and this in part requires you to differentiate yourself from your peers. I know, I know, our students don’t come to Wellesley College because we provide a high quality library and technology services. However, this is something our students, faculty and staff expect and failing to provide such services will result in dissatisfaction that will begin to show. (more…)
I am asked by a few staff members to explain what is the “vision” I have for my organization so that they can help me achieve it. My answer is “Unfortunately, I don’t have much more than what we have already talked about…” which happens to be an unsatisfactory answer to those who ask this vision question. And what we talk about are broad principles that should govern us as described in our strategic plan. In fact, what many want me to answer are specifics in their area rather than a broad organizational vision.
On the other hand, those staff members who are willing to look at what has made us successful and learn from them and help contribute to our success are doing tremendous things. And one of them is creative uses and reuses of technologies. I want to mention a few here.
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It almost looks like all of the recent advances in technologies were created with good intent as well as to reward the inventors with boat loads of money. I cannot think of any of the major technologies that have been invented by responsible companies to assist the bad guys. However, almost all of these great new technologies have and continue to be used in ways that they were not intended and for the detriment of everyone. Here are a few: world wide web – this has been a game changer and has helped bridge the technology gap around the world in meaningful ways, but has been exploited by the criminals in numerous ways; Mobile technology – again, this has revolutionized communication all around the world while introducing another path for the bad guys; Streaming media – this now helps us listen and watch what we want, when we want and where we want, but this also has resulted in intellectual property violations of all kinds; finally Social Media – well, do I need to say anything about this?
My gripe is with the technology companies, especially the startups, who do not pay enough attention to the implications of what they are putting out. They rush to get their products to go viral and this seems to be the focus rather than use current examples as a guide to structuring the products in a way that they are solid in terms of security and privacy and are sustainable for a reasonable time into the future. Of course, unintended consequences are part of the game because no technologist can ever see before hand how a criminal is likely to think and take advantage of the technology being rushed out. But…
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We hear a lot about mentorship in the context of middle managers who aspire to be leaders. You can read more about Mentoring as an EDUCAUSE Special Topic. I thought this is a great time to talk about someone that I consider as my mentor – John Meerts, who was the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Wesleyan University until he retired on June 30th this year. John was the Vice President for Information Technology Services at Wesleyan from 1996 till 2006, when he became the VP for Finance and Administration. I reported to him from 1996-2009 before moving on.
No matter at what stage of your professional career you are, you always should aspire to be better and an important aspect of that is to have someone that you look up to for advice or from who you learn a few things. To me this loosely defines mentorship.
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Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, CT
I decided to take a week off, but it is turning out to be more like “work from home”. This is life, I guess. No complaints. I did get a few rounds of golf in.
As we are going through the Workday implementation, it is very clear that Workday has a very clear and strict process for a reason. We all have opinions on the process itself, but what I see is that it imposes a level of discipline that we are all not used to. Especially, they have a concept of “In Scope” and “Out of Scope”. This therefore requires us to think very deeply about what we want in scope early on. There are slight variations on the theme that are always supported, it is just that the typical large variations that we are all used to that is not possible.
Why? Because, those of us who have been in this business already have experienced the pain of scope creep. In tech related projects, it goes like this – techies first want as complete a project plan as possible; it doesn’t happen, so they complain; then they deliver some initial prototypes; functional offices are thrilled to see it; their creative juices flow and they now want this and that; a lot of times some techies feed this by saying, “yeah this can be done but you should really see this cool stuff”; such back and forth then becomes the way the project is handled; the project crawls; the ex-enthusiastic techies are now disgruntled and say “I can’t wait to get off this project” because this has become a drag and they want to move to the next exciting project; finally, both the techies and the functional owners complain that the other party is not delivering.
Instead, how about saying “folks, we have a common set of goals. This requires discipline. Let us define what is important for day 1. You should really let the creative juices flow, because this is very important for us to construct a solid foundation, but remember, not everything you ask for will be possible on day 1. Just park the less important ones for later. And please don’t say that everything you come up with is equally important”. In other words, creativity is to be accommodated, but within bounds. If only we can all get to this point, our projects will be better and move faster.
I always feel that Higher Ed administrative projects are treated like research projects. They tend to be explorations. However, researchers set broad and general goals for a research project. This won’t work for administrative projects. We need to be more precise about the end game. The outcomes are not always predictable in a research project, and they typically tend to branch off in other areas. This is the nature of the research game. Unfortunately, the same exact method may not be suitable for administrative projects.
I am here at the Richmond International Airport waiting to get back to Boston after a fabulous conference. This year the CLAC (Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges) annual conference was held at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. The campus is beautiful and the hosts were gracious and extremely helpful and the overall experience was just fabulous.
There is nothing better than a gathering of committed higher ed professionals who work in institutions that are very similar. All the member institutions are small liberal arts colleges and there is a lot of similarities in terms of what we are trying to accomplish and the challenges we face. And we are very open and are not afraid to share. So, it was a lot of fun.
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