I was at one of the best annual conferences – CLAC Annual Conference. This year it was held in Swarthmore College with a reception and a dinner being hosted by Haverford and Bryn Mawr College respectively. They belong to the Tri-College consortium, so it was natural that we were hosted in all three beautiful campuses. I love this conference for the networking opportunities it provides. We are very similar institutions in terms of the number of students, faculty and staff, the services we provide and the issues we face. But still there are considerable variations in what we do and how we are organized, so it is always interesting to exchange notes and learn from each other.
You can read my tweets from the conference here. (more…)
I read the piece in New Yorker titled “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers?” and enjoyed it very much. It is by Atul Gawande who is a surgeon and an author. It describes the issues we all face every day – technology is changing fast and we want our respective communities to adopt them, but it is a monumental challenge. I am of course simplifying it, but thats the crux of it. There is one thing in the article that stuck with me – “Mutation and Selection”.
Basically the author compares how the medical profession operated under a very different paradigm early on, where, every physician basically operated independently that suited their particular modes of operation. This is mutation part. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems tried to bring standardization, better sharing of information amongst the physicians and most importantly, gave access to information to the patients readily. This is the selection part. Obviously this is not a trivial adjustment for those who operated independently and the fact the EMR systems, which are in their infancy, are not optimal. At least not yet.
Higher Ed institutions face exactly the same issues. The whole issue of centralization of systems is the “selection” part and the proliferation of multiple systems (Best of Breed) is the mutation part. What is the right balance between the two is so complex and dependent on the institution. But, the article describes how a neurosurgeon and his team is trying to “mutate” the “selection” system (EMR) so that their needs can be accommodated. This is what we would call customization in the old ERP systems, which turned out to be a terrible idea for a variety of reasons. However, in the more modern systems, such as Workday or Salesforce, accommodations to mutations are much simpler to manage through “configurations” and “business processes”. This would be a “controlled mutation” of sorts.
But, whats the problem with supporting best of breed?
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Cambridge Analytica has become a household name in recent days as we learn how they had access to valuable data about 50 million Facebook users which may have played a role in influencing the US elections in 2016. There are a lot of loose ends to this story that are emerging as every day goes by. This brings to the fore an issue that has existed for a long time – based on enthusiasm and euphoria, new technologies are adopted by millions and millions of people all around the world without carefully thinking through important issues such as data security and privacy. Rules and regulations that can potentially help, take a long time to develop and they lag. The rapid pace of technology in the past three decades, fueled by the adoption of internet, has increased this gap tremendously. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Talking about rules and regulations, we are in the midst of implementing necessary protocols and controls as required by the European Union called General Data Protection Regulation. As the site reminds us, we all have 63 days to comply!
A disclaimer – this is a pretty complicated regulation, the details of which are still being vetted carefully and what you will read below is my interpretation based on internal discussions and consultations with other attorneys.
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