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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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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