Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
I was out in Jupiter FL during the Memorial day weekend to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation. For me who has been used to small high school graduations (my children’s graduating classes were 155 and 170 students respectively), this was grand. It was held at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where a group had to go early to reserve seats, despite being asked not to do it! Some of us joined a little late after a nice nap. As a result of this trip, I missed the commencement, well sort of… I was out that day, so I watched it on my PDA. It was great quality stream. There were 700-1000 views during the 10:30-1:00 PM live cast. We have heard very good feedback, and I am sure several parents and relatives of international students who could not make it here in person, benefited from watching this remotely.
Information overload is everywhere, it is also local. We routinely hear from our users how they did not know about something important that we have communicated to. This will continue to be the case because what is important and relevant is in the eyes of the beholders and depending on how it is conveyed, it may or may not sound important! One of the major problems is the lack of coherence – information is all over the place. This is where, the promised land of enterprise portals comes in.
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It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote a post here. It is certainly not because I have been busier than usual – in fact I forced myself to work from home a couple of days in the past two weeks to get some real work done. Time just flies, especially when there is a lot going on. Yesterday evening we went to hear a South Indian classical music concert by T.M. Krishna at the Stata Center in MIT. It was a fantastic 4 hour concert that once upon a time only those living in Chennai in South India were treated to. This is one of the benefits of living near Boston – we get to hear a lot of quality Indian music. We used to drive two hours from Middletown, CT to come to Boston to hear some of the best artists. Our jealous friends from central CT, who had two hours of driving left while it was a mere 20 minutes for us now, were making a note that how bright it was (at 8 PM) – as if it was going to last till 10 PM!
I got up at my usual time at 5:30 to see the brightness after a whole week of miserable weather. The apocalypse that was promised on 21st of May has come and gone and we all are still here. I remember the days when the academic cycle’s effect on libraries and technologies were far more noticeable than now – especially on technology support. Summer was a time to engage in all sorts of major projects (because it was the “lean time”) to get ready for the Fall. Whereas this continues to be true (you can tell that the summer has begun by looking at all the books that are waiting to be shelved!), it just doesn’t feel the same. It seems that we are engaged in major projects all the time!
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It is that time of the year when semesters wind down and everyone is looking forward to the summer and graduations. I am off to Florida later this month to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation, and of course play some golf. I was talking to a friend from India this past weekend when my wife was at UConn commencement about how different things were back home. We did not have graduation ceremonies for high school or for finishing undergraduate degrees! We all wrote our final exams and the results were published in newspapers (now they are available online). The day after the results, newspapers carried stories about the disappointed souls – some of them way too disappointed because they did not get the highest ranks in their respective schools! I completed my Masters degree in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where we had a commencement, primarily due to the foreign connections of the IITs. Things are beginning to change there.
For administrative staff in Higher Ed, this is also the time when performance reviews are done and goals are set for the upcoming year. Having worked in Higher Ed for 25 years, I know that these processes have been relatively new. I was a skeptic about this whole thing when we got started, but over the years, I have come to understand the value of the process.
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We had a fabulous parents weekend in Hanover, NH, where we spent time from Friday till Sunday afternoon. Listened to President Jim Yong Kim, a terrific speaker, who described some of the serious issues such as bringing binge drinking and sexual assaults and what the administration is doing to address these. He also discussed the 16 Habits of the Mind and how this will figure in the curriculum planning going forward. We also met with the parents/guardians of our son Varun’s roommates, which is always a lot of fun. One of Varun’s roommate is William Kamkwamba, the kid from Malawi, who built a windmill to power his own home. Tom Rielly, who is a community director at the famous TED conferences, had a part to play in William coming to Dartmouth, so he joined us for dinner one night. We had a fantastic time and talked a lot about emerging technologies and Tom’s views on ubiquitous connectivity.
Tired after long nights on Friday and Saturday, we went to bed a little earlier than normal and were woken up by a phone call from our son Vivek who called us about Osama bin Laden’s death because I did not respond to his chat message. We got up to watch the President speak and see all the celebration on TV. Great news after ten years and amazing how the mission was carried out. I should share with you a tweet from GhostOsama which read “Well this sucks…I accidentally enabled location on my tweets.” On that note about ubiquity of connections…
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Do you know where you have been during the last few days? No worries, especially if you have an iPhone. There seems to be an App for that! I’m sure many of you heard about how iOS 4, the Apple operating system for iPhones and iPads, “secretly” records your location in a file (consolidated.db). If you sync your device to a Mac, you can look at it – here is the recipe. I am safe on my iPad because I don’t have a 3G. On the other hand, I voluntarily let everyone know where I am (using Twitter and Foursquare).
This is indeed big news, but, as Scott McNealy (former CEO of Sun) pointed out “You already have zero privacy, get over it” has unfortunately been true in this well connected world. Your cell phone carriers have had this exact information all along – except, they need a subpoena before they look at it (Hmmm….).
With technologies coming at us such a rapid pace and with companies (OK, not all companies!) paying a lot of attention to friendly user interfaces, technology training is fast becoming a challenge. Take the iPhones and iPads as examples. They are so easy to use that there are no user manuals. Great! Except, many users are not diligent about syncing their devices to a PC or a Mac, until that day arrives when their device dies. Many home users set up wireless and don’t either read or don’t understand the techno mumbo-jumbo that their access point is up for open manipulation by tech savvy neighbors.
Having some basic training would help in these and many other cases. But who has the time and inclination? This is a huge challenge.
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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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With the prevalence of information on the web and all the communication overload, it is very rare that you have to wait for an annual meeting to find out about new things. I remember attending meetings in the late ’80s and early ’90s (mostly related to my interest in Chemistry) after which you came back energized with all sorts of great ideas. Now, I am disappointed about the presentations in most meetings because it is very rarely that you hear of something new.
However, the networking is invaluable. Almost always, it allows you to gauge how your organization is doing in comparison to the others – and we are doing great, than you, and also you pick up little things here and there regarding directions others are thinking about moving in, feedback regarding products that we may be thinking of purchasing (that they are unlikely to put it in writing) etc.
I attended the Executive Summit organized by SunGard, the Banner vendor, in New Orleans from Friday to Sunday. It precedes the Summit, which is essentially a massive Banner User Group meeting. This year, there are over 6100 attendees!
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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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