I had an interesting conversation with folks from Handshake, which our Career Education department chose and we are thrilled to support. It was all about “Why Handshake, how did you decide” etc. You take the word “Handshake” out and replace it with “Workday” or some other product and the same applies. I want to talk about how we do it at Wellesley with the hope that this will be useful for others. I am keenly aware that no two institutions are the same in our space and therefore the applicability may be limited!
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I have been pretty upset recently about a whole bunch of things. Here are a few!
SPAM emails and Cold-calls
The sheer number of unwanted emails that I receive daily is getting out of control. I never asked for them in the first place. The CAN SPAM Act was a welcome change in 2003 when it was passed, but many didn’t read the fine print before celebrating. It is about giving the consumers a choice to opt out! It should have given the consumers a choice to opt in instead! Companies are buying bulk email lists at ridiculously low price and mindlessly blasting emails hoping for miracles. Automated SPAM detection is always late in catching up to the tricks of the marketers, so we still see many emails in our inbox. I have tried everything from Unroll.me to unsubscribing to marking them as spam. Nothing works all the time and I hate clutter in my inbox.
Phones are a bit more manageable. I have all my work calls forwarded to Google Voice and I screen calls before taking them. Also, my Android phone now allows me to mark numbers as SPAM, thank you! At home, we are extremely happy that we signed up for NOMOROBO. Though we signed up with Do Not Call Registry very early on, over the years it has become practically useless. NOMOROBO partners with the telephone service provider to detect if several phones are being called at the same time and kills the call after a ring or two. Works beautifully. But I am sure that someone is developing a way to bypass this.
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Technology ecosystems, a complex network of interconnected systems, have formed sometimes for all the right reasons, but a lot of times to fix problems created by badly designed systems. The most recent mobile app ecosystems came about because of conscious decisions made in the original design itself – realizing that they themselves did not have the bandwidth to provide all the possible functionalities, companies like Apple and Google created frameworks and allowed a community of developers to develop mobile apps for their platforms. In case of Apple, this is a carefully controlled process, whereas in case of Android, it is sort of free for all.
Then you have cases like a poorly designed Windows operating system that gave rise to a multibillion dollar ecosystem for protecting the operating system – virus protection and malware to name a few. And because these systems were originally not designed for the well connected environment we live in, new vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. So, there is a whole ecosystem to protect essentially poorly designed systems!
Reporting and Business Intelligence ecosystems are mixed. The original ERP systems developers designed these systems to be handling large amounts of transactions. As a result these were data black holes and getting the data out from these systems required a complete new way of thinking. So, a badly designed system gave birth to data warehouses that are optimal for reporting. Then the limitations of reporting was realized and this gave birth to a whole new ecosystem called Business Intelligence that allows one to probe the data in real time without having to learn to write code!
The challenge we face is how best to support our community when easy access to several choices exist.
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Arbitrary boundaries, whether geographical or timewise, have existed for a long time and on the one hand, it is understandable that they serve a purpose, but in some cases they seem silly. I understand how we all are energized as we approach Fridays, looking forward to the weekend. In reality why does it because weekends are another couple of days. However, if I took a day off on Wednesday, it just doesn’t feel the same as a Saturday and Sunday, though it really shouldn’t. The same way, Jan 1 of every year is just like every other day. But we all think of it very differently and act that way.
Most of us set up new plans, predominant number of which fail within a few days. Why would we not do it on Feb 1? Or on one’s birthday? It is not the same. In that vein, I would like to look at what is in store for us in 2017, yet another new beginning!
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I just got back from a couple of days in Baton Rouge, LA, attending a meeting regarding Workday Student. I will be honest and say that I did not like the location, the food and the weather (it was rainy and cloudy and in the 50’s)! Since we were constantly reminded of Safe Harbor statements, I would rather not delve into the details of what we saw and heard. But, in general terms, the student module of Workday is shaping up nicely. Some areas of it are really well developed and well thought of, but the others are “in the works”. I was pretty impressed with the progress that has been made, so I am feeling confident that we will have some of the crucial things ready for us when we plan our implementation next Fall.
During these meetings you find out a great deal. I attended a presentation on transfer articulation, close to my heart, because I wrote what we currently use at Wellesley. I feel that our process for granting transfer credits is pretty convoluted and complicated. But, after listening to the complexities of transfer articulation from some of the community colleges and state universities, I was thanking how relatively simple ours is. And even more impressive was that the presenters from Workday understood all of this and have been accommodating their needs. Since it is all configurable, we are covered! I can see how ours can be vastly simplified in Workday. (more…)
I am sure I have written about this before, so forgive me for the repetition. I landed in this country in September 1978 to do my PhD. Unlike others, I knew exactly what I wanted to work on for my thesis, so I wrote to Prof. David Beveridge at Hunter College, CUNY and he enthusiastically accepted me into his group. So, the day I arrived at Hunter, I had a desk in his lab! I was terribly homesick, hated all the smell and the strange food and despite my fellow Indian grad students trying to cheer me up with things like “How many from India get to walk on the streets on NY and look at the beautiful Empire State Building everyday?”, all I wanted to do was to finish my PhD as fast as I could and get back home.
Then, we were invited to join Prof Beveridge and family for Thanksgiving in their home in Westport, CT. I had no clue about what this was for, but the car ride was an interesting one. It was cold and all the food and drinks looked so alien to me that I hardly touched anything. I remember eating an apple and that’s about it. Regardless, I have a lot to thank for. First and foremost, I want to thank Prof Beveridge, whose support and generosity over the years is clearly a major reason for my professional success. (more…)
I, like many around the country, have been in sheer shock and confusion about the results of the election and pretty depressed about the various things happening around the country in its aftermath. It is pretty scary that things can change so drastically, bringing some of the hidden ugliness out of the woodwork just in matter of a few days. But, this is not what I want to write about!
Whenever new technologies come out, no matter how carefully thought out, they have unanticipated and unintended consequences. There is a long list of these. (more…)
Last week I attended the annual conference of EDUCAUSE, the organization of Higher Ed technology organizations. It was attended by some 8000 professionals and vendors. The meeting was held in Anaheim, CA. I am happy to say that I was pleased with the meeting this year. You can see my tweets during the conference here.
I joined a few colleagues for a dinner to celebrate the retirement of a long term CIO from a small liberal arts college. This colleague is a terrific individual and though I have seen him in the liberal arts college gatherings and EDUCAUSE over the years, I have gotten to know him only in the past 6 years or so. He is a true leader who is a champion for collaboration and has taught us many things about how to be successful in collaborations. We will miss him very much. The dinner conversation was terrific and many attendees reminisced about the good old times (as in the ’80s and ’90s). (more…)
It is pretty clear that technology has played an important part in elections in this country, ranging from the first JFK-Nixon debate and how a televised debate led the viewers to a different conclusion than those who listened to it on radio. Dial forward and we all witnessed the power of the social media and data analytics starting from the 2008 election.
In this election technology has been a huge influencer on how things are beginning to unravel. The Trump videos from 2005 (Warning: Graphic Language!) show the dangers of digital media. Once recorded, digital content generally has a long shelf life. Especially if the content is about celebrities or of historic significance etc. Increasingly, thanks to free or cheap storage from cloud service providers such as Google, Microsoft and Dropbox, even we all tend to save everything at our disposal. Many do not understand the long term implication of all of this – their safety, who has access to them, how deleting them in one place doesn’t really delete them everywhere etc.
Then you have WikiLeaks releasing alleged emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as her speeches to wall street companies. Whereas leaking documents and letters applies equally to paper as it does to born digital content in that someone with access can leak it to other parties easily or they can be both be stolen. However, we can all agree that it is easier to “steal” them in the electronic realm because one doesn’t have to be physically present to commit such an act. (more…)
It is fair to say that very few in Higher Ed have been fortunate to be working in an institution where priority has been given to maintaining the facilities at the level that they should have been. Sightlines, a company that provides guidance to higher ed institutions on facilities management, publishes an annual report titled “State of Facilities in Higher Education”. You can download and read the 2015 report here (note that you have to provide personal information to download and you may be contacted by Sightlines). This report is very detailed and you will notice that many of the institutions have deferred facilities maintenance by underinvesting over a long period. This underinvestment reached a new low as a result of the financial meltdown of 2008 and many haven’t caught up.
Given the scarce financial resources many institutions work with, prioritizing facilities expenditure is hard. In a widely quoted research, it has been shown that it takes roughly $4 for every $1 in deferred maintenance. Basically, postponing maintenance turns out to be far costlier than preventive maintenance, which requires commitment to spend on a regular basis. You can see how continually avoiding preventive maintenance compounds this problem several fold.
I believe that there is a lesson to learn from this when it comes to expenditures in Library and Technology. These are two important areas that connect strongly to the core mission of the higher ed institutions. We can no longer argue that technology is a “nice to have” in that it is here to stay and is integral to teaching, learning and research as well as business operations! How do we prioritize the investments in these areas so that the “deferred maintenance” problem does not catch up with us? It is an extremely difficult question to answer.
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