Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
In case you have not heard yet, we released “Wellesley’s Quick College Cost Estimator” on Wednesday morning. This is the brainchild of Professor Phillip Levine in Econ department. With just six fairly simple and straightforward questions, you get a good first approximation for the best estimate of what a student’s family is expected to pay to go to Wellesley. Though we don’t have a daughter, I could not resist the urge to check it out and as a parent of two sons (one is still a senior in College), I was pleasantly surprised to see the expected family contributions for various combination of the numbers. Of course, this is due to Wellesley’s generous Financial Aid policy. I strongly urge you to check this out.
This is a collaboration project that we can all be proud of. Yes, it had the usual pain points of meetings, revisions after revisions, and last minute integration of design and programming. But all these don’t matter, because, you forget all of that when you look at the final product, how much it is being used, all the press we have gotten so far and the feedback. Here are some viewpoints from the press:
There are many more, but these give you enough viewpoints.
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Though we had an excellent start of the semester, there were two nagging issues we needed to solve. One had to do with the print management software called Papercut and the other had to with Macs in classrooms. The first issue was related to one of the unusually busy printing season – first two weeks of the semester. In addition, we are now using multi function devices for printing and in order to support them, we needed to move the print server to Windows server, the only supported platform. The Mac issue had to do with the way we have been reusing the computer names and how this “confuses” the active directory, resulting in the users not be able to login to the domain. Notice that both of these problems are related to Microsoft backend technologies. Just sayin’…
Thanks to the teamwork by LTS staff and their hard work, both of these problems seem to be under control. Another case that illustrates that no matter how hard you work to avoid these problems, the real field testing happens only when our faculty and students are here. This is why the best strategies are one that allows us to be prepared and solve the problems quickly. We can never rest saying “we have tested everything and they work”. No, they don’t, sorry!
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Yesterday (Sep 3) was the first day of classes at Wellesley. As far as LTS is concerned, we seem to be off to another good start. We have been able to see that most of the students have connected their computers to the network. Our students brought more Macs than Windows machines – 67% Macs 33% Windows so far. We also should have a pretty good handle on the Smartphones that they are bringing in. My guess is that the Droids will be more than iPhones based on what I saw during the orientation. No, I was not spying on them – we exempt them from Cisco NAC, so the students were bringing theirs in for that!
Some of us also met with the new faculty and presented to them the range of services we support and fielded a lot of questions. They were duly impressed and a couple compared our support to the institutions they come from & mentioned how impressed they were about our faculty support. I also heard from two parents who mentioned how clear all instructions were on LTS website! LTS staff should consider this as an endorsement of the hard and creative work that they do! Way to go!
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During this fall, some of our early applications (such as Tanner) will be used for a third time. Thankfully, they seem to be running fine with just some minor tweaks. Many more will be run for the second time, such as the hugely successful checklist. One component of the checklist is the assignment of a first year seminar and a writing class for the first years. This went through a major rewrite this year based on what we learned from the way placement was done last year. Since we retain historical data in these apps, we can analyze, re-simulate, and achieve better results. One more that we did this year is the automated assignment of classrooms based on faculty preferences. Went extremely well and based on the feedback we receive, we will keep refining the apps. In the meantime, we keep getting a lot of requests and we are moving along…
Let us get on to email attachments! I don’t know if you are one of those who began using email before attachments were implemented in early 1990’s. I was one of them. You needed to run an external program such as BinHex on the file to be sent, copy and paste it to the text of the email. Then instruct the recipient on how to unwind it and hope they have the program that you used. Many of us also belonged to BITNET at that point in time and it provided a relatively easy way to “SHIP” a file, which was considered easier. But then came the Internet, the availability of easy to use mail clients such as Eudora and the implementation of MIME for exchanging images, files etc. These additional entities are the “Attachments”. However, technology has improved tremendously in the meantime and it is time to rethink attachments.
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I was out playing golf at the Nehoiden golf club yesterday evening with my son and a fellow golfer yet again reminded us of how humbling a game golf is. In theory, many of us who have played the game for several years, know what to do – stretch, the grip, the setup, placement of the ball, keep your head down, keep your head down, keep your head down…, practice swing, club face, back swing, read the green, so on and so forth. However, execution is a whole different thing and concentration is a big factor. For the undisciplined person like me, that last email that I just read messes up my execution. And then, I read research papers like “Rotational biomechanics of the elite golf swing: benchmarks for amateurs” (bad idea) and start worrying about how I am doing relative to best practices mentioned there. I need to meditate and do yoga to learn mind control & have a flexible body to be a good golfer!
We, in LTS, are engaged in a lot of “projects” and they pose the same challenges as a golf swing. There are umpteen variables that all need to line up for a successful execution. Just the way that the ball does not land most of the time exactly where you want to, projects also don’t end up where one originally intended. Sometimes, the ball lands in a sand trap and getting it out is not clean and you need to rake the sand to make the trap appear undisturbed – in several projects such mishits and cleanups are necessary.
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Summer is winding down and we have already begun seeing increased activity in the College, preparations are underway for the orientation for students and new faculty. Several of us have been in conversations with some of the new faculty. They are some of the most technologically savvy and need computing power beyond the usual laptops. It is encouraging to see that there is no longer a discipline dependency to high end technology requirement. Faculty from all disciplines seem to need them.
In a shameless self promotion, please watch my participation in a discussion about MOOCs with the Chairman of edX Anant Agarwal on NECN CEO Corner.
I am sure you that many of read this in NY Times -“Universities Face a Rising Barrage of Cyberattacks“. If you haven’t, you must read this. In the early stages of internet, the technologies were also evolving and all of us faced attacks, our networks were penetrated and were used for activities such as storing and sharing large image and video files. Warez was one such common activity. I distinctly remember watching a perpetrator’s every keystroke when we were trying to track down what was going on. It was from Australia and I called the ISP who basically told me that they are helpless to do anything but temporarily suspend the account. Of course, in the heat of the moment, I was asking a lot more of them! As soon as I put the phone down, the keystrokes disappeared!
These problems have gotten much worse and far more serious than stealing file storage. Trying to guard information has become expensive. But most importantly, IT professionals alone cannot be responsible for information security.
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I am here in Jupiter, Florida where the temperatures are much better than in the Northeast. Every night since 7/18/2013, we have been going for a walk in the beach in search of baby sea turtles which hatch this time of the year. We saw several of them. We did see some birds waiting to feast on these turtles, but they failed because of our presence. Though these turtles can live up to 80 years, obviously they have to escape these birds and other predators first. As a bonus, we also got to see a lot of green turtles come ashore to lay eggs. We waited silently and patiently until they began digging a hole after which, we went closer to watch the 45 minute process of laying eggs and then masterfully navigating out of the hole and covering the hole up with sand. One of the mornings, we spoke to volunteers who mark the new spots (of course, they also report back using GPS) as well as dig up the holes from where the babies have already hatched. We saw them dig up the hole and pick up the remains. They do an approximate count of how many eggs hatched and how many did not. We even saw one where the baby was still alive, but struggling to get out. They take such babies to Loggerhead Marine Life Center in Juno beach. I was very skeptical about the whole thing because of our recent disappointment with the Cherry Blossoms in Washington DC. It is all about timing, but I was so thrilled about this experience. Since we are strongly advised against the use of flashlights, we have very limited videos and photos (quality is poor as you can imagine).
During my recent presentation at the NERCOMP workshop on data governance and business intelligence we talked less about the technologies than the need to use the data we have intelligently. The use of data in business has progressed at a much faster pace than in Higher Ed. As you know, the use of data in business goes beyond technologies. There are serious privacy and ethical issues. We won’t go there. But, in case you are not aware of this, I am fascinated by this story on the use of data by Target. By analyzing buying patterns of women, they can predict with high confidence women in their second trimester of pregnancy and target marketing materials appropriate for the new baby. They looked at the buying patterns of a young woman and started targeting similar marketing materials to her. The father was puzzled by all of these mailings & denied his daughter’s pregnancy, but, after a few months realized that his daughter was indeed pregnant!
So why is it that Higher Ed is behind on Business Intelligence (BI)? (more…)
Hope you enjoyed July 4th! As many of you know, I was born in Sri Lanka and lived there for 16 years as an Indian at heart. I moved to India and spent 6 years going to College. I then moved here 35 years ago, studied and settled happily. (OK, now you know how old I am!) All three countries celebrate independence day in grand manner. By the way, I feel bad for the occupiers (in all the three countries I lived, the British were the occupiers) because they don’t have Independence day as a holiday. In Sri Lanka and India, when I was growing up, the Independence day celebrations were a big deal. In the ’60s and the ’70s you still had many who directly experienced the struggle for independence and remembered the sacrifices of their own and others, and the celebrations were grand. As the time passes, the reason for celebrations change, naturally.
Some of us will be making the long trek to Middlebury College next week for a gathering of staff from six colleges – Amherst, Brandeis, Middlebury, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams. About 10-11 years ago, the leaders of IT from Wesleyan, Brandeis and Williams (WBW) decided to bring staff from each organization together for an informal gathering and exchange of ideas. It was a lot of fun and productive. Some of us have moved on to other institutions and wanted to start this expanded group. I will write about this meeting next week.
Based on what I heard at the CLAC annual conference last week and the agenda for next week’s gathering I see that many of us are really worried about our dependence on a variety of things. We seek independence and flexibility that may or may not exist and may come at great costs that we don’t have the luxury to fund.
There used to be a time, not too long ago, when the hardware costs were what the technology leaders in higher ed worried about. Whether it is acquiring mainframes from IBM or DEC or subsequently the mini computers in the late ’80s, these were major investments, that helped exclusively the business processes in the institutions. The early ’90s saw major disruptions when the personal computer revolution came about, and institutions were caught off guard on many fronts. Many institutions were not prepared budgetarily to fund computers for faculty and staff but most importantly, there were not enough staff to support them. The sad truth is that these “personal computers” were developed for “personal use” and the internet changed the game and the transition was ugly. The dissatisfaction amongst the faculty and staff was at an all time high and many leadership in IT organizations changed.
After 10, 15 years, we have forgotten all of these because hardware is cheap and has been commoditized. These two factors has given us the independence and flexibility we want. If a vendor does not provide me what I want, I have many others to turn to. Besides, I can swap hardware A with B with such ease these days, there is very little incremental cost to be able to do it. Virtualization is another huge game changer, which makes it incredibly easy to divide a single physical server into multiple virtual server. So, in general, we are satisfied with the hardware landscape.
The other major area that is vexing for us is software. You have heard so much from me on this, I will keep it brief. Basically, it is a huge mess for certain software and there seems to be no relief in sight. In the CLAC meeting, when someone suggested a possible collaboration amongst colleges to run ERP (eg. Banner) jointly as a way to reduce costs, a seasoned CIO quipped “I don’t see that happening in my lifetime”. I am a bit more optimistic than that. Most of our frustration stems from the fact that despite the fact that these software cost us a boat load of money, they don’t do what we want them to do. I do understand the struggle that the software vendors face in trying to satisfy thousands of institutions each with different expectations, but when I pay annually 4-6 times the full-tuition for students, I expect a lot more and I don’t necessarily care how the vendors accomplish this.
This is precisely why the fiercely independent persona in me loves open source. Of course, it has its own “dependence” – the worldwide community that develops these software and the fear of the unknown. What if the community stops caring about them and stops developing them? Indeed, it is a real issue, but think about it – it is “open” for a reason. If the software stops being supported, you have access to everything you put into it and you can chart the course at that point. This is next to impossible in case of commercial software. Moving from one ERP system to another is so prohibitively costly that with very few bold exceptions, no one dares to even think about it. Did I say I will keep it brief? OK, I will stop.
In similar vein, the journal publishers tie our hands big time. We don’t have much of a leverage to influence the rise in costs. Open access policies and open access journals are beginning to provide us with some much needed flexibility and independence.
The two items I discussed above are at the institutional level. Due to increased awareness and knowledge of technologies, every member of the community seeks technology independence in some sense. The whole BYOD (bring your own device) or the variance in terms of the operating systems and software that everyone wants to use poses new issues. Whereas we want to encourage these to a large extent, because this is essential for creativity and inquiry. However, we need to also think about certain boundaries.
Democracies are successful because independence is combined with certain constraints such as the laws, rules and regulations or else there could be total anarchy. Not everyone may necessarily agree with all the rules and regulations, but the expectations are that all citizens follow these for the collective good. The same way, we, as an organization, with consultation with the advisory committees such as the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies and the president’s cabinet, create the boundaries and try our best to enforce them, all for the collective good of everyone. Of course, not everyone always agrees with what we do. We try our best to accommodate as many variations as possible and try to explain why we do what we do. I prefer to meet with those who feel that our decisions are adversely affecting their ability to conduct research or business.
As someone said “It is hard to hate someone in person”. And I would add “especially if the person makes sense”, even if we disagree.
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.
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I should be writing more often than I have been and I need to fix it. That means I need to get my priorities right! Had a good time visiting Montgomery Bell State Park near Nashville, TN where my wife had a conference. We hiked a lot and I played golf at the Frank G. Clement Golf Course. It is a very well maintained public golf course that is also cheap. There were two major issues at the park – food and wireless. Wireless worked well for a day and then it was out for a whole day. My Verizon MiFi signal was poor, so I had to rely purely on AT&T phone. Given the news about the NSA data mining on Verizon calls, may be Verizon servers were too busy serving up the data that they were not servicing the MiFis!
One thing that I have been thinking about lately is how little I interact with one of the largest constituent base – our students. I am sure that this is a serious issue for most CIOs. We have very strong relationships with all administrative offices and therefore several senior administrators and administrative staff. Similarly, we have strong interactions with a significant number of faculty to support their technology (and in merged organizations, library) needs ranging from hardware to shrinking collections to electronic journals to increasingly digital scholarship projects. Our relationships with students is literally non-existent in comparison.
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