September 2011 Archives

Fun Fact: In 1837, President Andrew Jackson's supporters gifted him with a wheel of cheese weighing 1,400 lbs. Jackson put this cheese in the Entrance Hall of the White House and invited the people of the United States to eat it - and thereby meet the people who represented them in government. According to White House history, the cheese was consumed in two hours, and the White House smelled of cheese for weeks!

I mirrored something like that today. I provided a big wheel of cheddar-chive cheese, and invited the campus community to the Student Center to eat it - and thereby meet the Director of Information Technology. It was an excellent opportunity to ask questions, and learn about our campus IT plan. As an added "draw", and because of my Scottish ancestry, I wore my kilt!

In just over 2 hours, the campus helped to finish off our big block of cheese. Very little was left! By one estimate, over 200 people (students, faculty, staff) stopped by, so this was very successful. Popular topics of conversation included: (handouts)

• The network upgrade, which should start in January-March 2012
• Gmail, and Google Apps
• Zimride

We just launched an IT Masterplan project, involving different groups from across the campus: faculty, students, and staff. This team has been charged with identifying an IT strategy for the campus, positioning us for the future, in support of our academic mission. We'll have our kick-off meeting very soon, and expect to present preliminary findings to the chancellor and vice-chancellors in December, with a final report due in March.

Mary Elizabeth happened to share an article with me just the other day, on a very similar topic: Integrated systems, from Inside Higher Ed.

The article plays both sides of whether to incorporate Library IT into the central IT administration. A few highlights from the article:

1. Information technology services on many college and university campuses are decentralized, a function of the different roles such technologies play: teaching, research, student services, and administration.
2. Institutions have made various attempts to consolidate disparate IT offices, though most did not include libraries.
3. In the early 2000s, about a dozen liberal arts colleges began folding libraries and IT into one office. Since then, about 50 or 60 more institutions have adopted a unified structure.
4. Most have maintained it, while some adopted the model and then abandoned it.
5. It may soon be hard to think of libraries and IT as separate entities, so some suggest the university structure should reflect that.
6. But others argue that just because technology is playing a larger role in research does not necessarily mean it makes sense to have them administered jointly.
7. In merged offices, many roles have remained the same, but there are areas of overlap between the two divisions that may be combined, such as the front lines of student and faculty support.
8. Administrators at institutions that have consolidated said they have derived significant savings, but warn that budgetary concerns should not be the main factor behind restructuring.
9. The unified model might not be appropriate for every institution.
10. In the coming years, colleges will see greater integration and collaboration between library and IT functions, regardless of what structure it takes.

I'd like to share this updated version of an earlier post about Simplify, Standardize, Automate.

I've spoken with many of you about particular projects that we are working on. But I believe all our projects are consistent with the general direction of:

• Simplify
• Standardize
• Automate

We are all aware that the University faces some important challenges this year, and as a result all areas are being asked to do "more with less." I believe the effective way to do "more with less" is to focus on what we do best, and strive to do those things in the most efficient way possible.

To do that, we need to simplify how we deliver those services. By simplifying a thing, we make it easier to support, even as it grows. As we prepare to migrate the www web server to a new server, supported by OIT, Matt and Matt have been working to "prune" old content from our web site, to simplify the content hosted there. We've removed a lot of old content, web sites for groups that no longer exist, pages that were out-of-date years ago. This simplification will make it easier to transition to the new server. And going forward, allow us to implement a new content-management system across the campus.

Keeping things simple also lets us standardize our services, making them easier to support with our limited staff time. For example: this summer, we consolidated personal web site hosting at UMM, from 5 web servers, to 1 server. This reduces the effort necessary to support personal web sites. It may not seem like much at first, supporting personal web site hosting may not take that much time, it's just "one more thing" in the day. But consider all the other things we are asked to do, and "one more thing" may seem pretty big.

Of the three, I believe most strongly to automate the tasks that we perform every day, every week, every month. If you need a report from the Data Warehouse every month, documenting the steps is certainly a good first step. But it's much better to create a script to generate it for you automatically. The file "just appears" when you need it, without having to repeat the steps to create it manually. That's less time to manage an individual thing - leaving you more time to work on other tasks.

My vision with simplify, standardize, automate is to allow us all to build bigger systems, and support more of them. And that is what will allow UMM to do "more with less."

In his essay, Mitch Maidique of the Harvard Business School asks "Are You a Level-Six Leader?" The central, most telling question to ask a leader is, whom do you serve? Maidique classifies "leaders" and "managers" into 6 categories:

1. Sociopath. Serves no one, exhibits abnormally low empathy and destroys value, himself, and, ultimately, those who surround him as well.
2. Opportunist. Serves only himself or herself, often at the expense of others, often ask, "What's in it for me?"
3. Chameleon. Often unable to achieve great things, because they bend with the wind and strive to please as many people as possible at all times.
4. Achiever. They drive toward a goal without giving much consideration to the broader mission. Achievers pursue goals established by their bosses or by themselves, in a single-minded manner.
5. Builder. Strives not to reach a goal but to build an institution. These people serve their institutions by managing for the long term and not allowing themselves to be seduced by short-term gains.
6. Transcendent. Level-six leaders transcend their political party, their ethnic or racial group, and even their institutions. They focus on how to benefit all of society.

Take some i-time to take an honest reflection of your leadership style. Where do you find yourself on this ladder? There is a natural cleavage between the model's first three levels and the last three levels. There is not much to celebrate about the first three, although certainly levels two and three are easy to find in many organizations. But there's much more to admire in levels four, five, and six.

Fun Fact: In 1837, President Andrew Jackson's supporters gifted him with a wheel of cheese weighing 1,400 lbs. Jackson put this cheese in the Entrance Hall of the White House and invited the people of the United States to eat it - and thereby meet the people who represented them in government. According to White House history, the cheese was consumed in two hours, and the White House smelled of cheese for weeks.

I mirrored something like that last year. I provided a big wheel of cheddar cheese, and invited students to the Student Center to eat it - and thereby meet the person (me) who represents them in Technology. It was an excellent opportunity to ask questions, and learn about our campus IT plan. As an added "draw", and because of my Scottish ancestry, I wore my kilt!

I'm planning the next "Big Block of Cheese Day" for this year: Wednesday, September 28, 10:00-noon in the Student Center.

I'd like to share this update from OIT about the ServiceNow project. This is a University-wide initiative to implement common tools for managing IT support, and part of the University's goal to use ITIL methods. Note that we do not expect to see this at UMM until after January 2012. Consider this an "FYI" for our campus, we'll come back to this at a later time:

On Friday, August 12, Office of Information Technology (OIT) Technology Help (Service Desk) began using ServiceNow to record and categorize all incidents reported to the Technology Help service. Since that time, 3,203 incidents have been recorded.

In the coming weeks, additional groups within OIT will be trained in ServiceNow and its associated new processes.

Over the coming months OIT will continue to fine tune the IT Service Management processes, and test the strengths of this new system. It is our intention that ServiceNow will be implemented by service groups according the following schedule:

• August 12: Group A - Technology Help, TAC, Application Support, Data Center, Field Services Repair, and the ServiceNow Tiger team.
• August 29: Group B - Application Change, Cable Infrastructure Support, Computer Lab Support, Desktop Support, Network and Telecom Infrastructure Support, Business Solutions, Package Solutions, Performance Testing, Production Services, Software Administration and Licensing.
• Early September: Group C - Active Directory Services, Business Intelligence, Change Approval Board Members, Data Protection, Data Security, Data Storage, Identity Access Management, Linux Support, Solaris Support, System Monitoring, System DBA, Video Solutions, Voice and Data Requests Support, and Windows/ESX Support.
• Mid September: Begin training on OIT Change Management in ServiceNow
• Late September and October: Remaining relevant OIT groups for Incident Management
• November and December: Current HP Service Center users (non-OIT)
• January 2012: Broader IT Service areas at the University of Minnesota