I am sure I am not the only one who complains that summer is going by too fast! It indeed seems that way… For me, it all began with a trip to Southern Spain in May, that we thoroughly enjoyed, then a trip to Southern California for a wedding in June and then to Canada for a few days in July. When you travel time tends to go by faster than if you are just hanging out at home. On top of all of this, until mid June or so, the temperatures were not the usual warm ones, instead they were pretty cold.

I have been learning a lot more now by engaging with ChatGPT and Bard than simply asking my phone questions by saying “Hey Google” and asking random questions. For example, the hard work of planting some vegetables by my wife in our garden hasn’t yielded much this year. When I probed the AI tools, I learned that when the temperature is colder than normal this happens. They cite many reasons including the fact that the bees don’t come out when it is colder to pollinate the flowers. Got it. Could I have found this out through Google search, yes, but through multiple steps for which I don’t have time 🙂

(more…)

Another Academic Year ended and it has gone way too fast! Most of my and several of my staff’s attention has been on the upcoming Clapp Library renovation. We were off to a quick start last July, but then had to pause in December because of budget issues. Then we spent the first three months this year preparing programmatic enhancements ideas for the Trustees, which was approved in April and we have been back to the intense design phase, which is fast coming to a close. Now starts the real work of planning the move! We are excited and well prepared. Stay tuned.

I came back last Monday after a week in Southern Spain. My family and I rented a car in Madrid and drove to Cordoba, Granada, Malaga, Cadiz, Arcos de la Frontera, Seville and back to Madrid. It was a fantastic trip with so many things to see, but I was expecting to see more Moorish things than we were able to see. Food was a bit bland for my taste, but there were always the add ons 🙂

(more…)

I am on my way to California to attend a two day gathering of Higher Ed leaders. It was approximately 3 years ago when COVID struck us big time, caught us unawares and all hell broke lose. I admire the swiftness with which the senior administration at Wellesley took action. Having a respected physician, Dr Paula Johnson, as the president helped and especially her leadership in a group of Higher Eds in Massachusetts.

I am also very proud of the fact that we, in LTS, are one of the very few organizations who decided to take on the technology responsibilities needed to support our COVID testing and related matters without needing a paid vendor solution. And I think we did a great job and by making the right choices, we saved the College money and served our community better. What we did was a tremendous amount of work and describing all will take a long time, so I will describe just a few highlights here.

(more…)

NERCOMP Annual Conference is one of my most favorite conferences. It provides an excellent way to meet colleagues and network and exchange ideas. The number of attendees is just right for you to be able to touch base with a fair amount of colleagues during the two days the conference is held.

I will discuss a few things related to the conference here, but I encourage you to read my tweets during the conference.

I participated in a preconference panel “Cloud Transformation: Before and After” along with colleagues from Bentley College, Smith College, Barnard College and Simmons University. Most conversations revolved around our experiences implementing Workday and most attendees are in the process of implementing or are on the verge of making a decision. It was fun, but based on what I heard from some of the attendees, it was a bit too long. I agree, 4 hours is kind of long though we had a break in between. We need a half time show like Superbowl to wake people up 🙂

(more…)

My wife and I are here in India after some 4 years and the changes here are significant.

The digital revolution here is frankly mind boggling. The acceleration in it between the last time we visited and now is so visible and amazing.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Just like that, two major projects that we knew were “in the works” became a reality in the last few months and we have actively begun working on them. One is a renovation of Clapp Library, our main library, and the second is also sort of a “renovation”, but of a different kind – Website redo.

Clapp Library is part of the deferred maintenance initiative at the College and it will receive a much needed redo of its internals – HVAC systems, Plumbing and Roof to name a few. The great advantage is that the building will meet the standards that the College has recently committed to, including the use of infrastructure that supports our environmental sustainability initiatives. In addition, the air circulation and temperature in the building will be far superior to what they are now.

Our current website was redesigned 10 years ago and my colleagues from LTS and I were involved with Public Affairs very closely to implement it. That is a very long time in the web world! So, it is time to redesign the website. It is another non trivial and complex project!

(more…)

After a three year hiatus, Workday Rising, the annual conference of Workday, happened in person from September 11th-15th in Orlando. Still following some of the COVID related protections, the total number of in person attendees were limited to just 8,000 though the total attendees including remote participation was more like 19,000. I was very happy to hear repeated statement that for the first time, the highest number of in person attendance is from Higher Ed! Way to go!

On Monday, prior to the real conference started, there were two pre-conferences related to Higher Ed. One focused primarily on Workday Student and the other on all products. I was fortunate to share our story with the audience in both of these, which I believe was well received. One was the advising system that we put in place last Fall using Workday Extend, which has grown from where we began. The second was how we have expanded the use of Workday recruitment to include student and faculty recruitment.

(more…)

I have carefully avoided all travel since the COVID crisis began, for a variety of reasons. For one, most conferences were held virtually. Secondly I was not comfortable traveling in a closed space like an airplane, wearing masks for hours with no guarantee that this by itself protected me enough.

When the call for proposals came in for Workday DevCon 2022, I could not resist the temptation to submit a proposal on the Advising application I had developed using Workday Extend, which has served us really well. To be honest, I was not aware that if accepted, I needed to present the talk in person. Even after I knew this, I somehow thought I could convince the organizers to make an exception. None of this worked out… (more…)