December 2011 Archives

Once in a while, I like to look at something in a different way, and pull leadership lessons from unexpected sources. These are lighthearted views into leadership lessons, from places that are not your usual sources of leadership inspiration. But it's good fun, while being educational. I'd like to share just a few of my favorites from this year:

Kneel before Zod (Superman II)

1. Support your staff development. For example, when one of your senior leadership team develops the ability to set snakes on fire with her eyes, celebrate her achievement.
2. Delegate tasks effectively. Don't feel you must take down every helicopter on your own.
3. Communicate your vision in simple terms. And you have to admit "Vengeance on the son of Jor-El" is pretty straightforward.
4. Be careful of subordinates who try to undermine your authority. They may double-cross you when you least expect it.
5. Be clear in your desired results. "Kneel before Zod" sets a pretty clear expectation, and others will know when they have done it right.

Leading a small group discussion (Pulp Fiction)

1. Spend a few moments before entering the room to consider the discussion topics, and get into "character" for the meeting.
2. Position yourself to hear everything clearly. If you continue to interrupt by asking "What?", you will derail the conversation and annoy the speaker.
3. If you interrupt and break the other person's concentration, apologize. Then move on.
4. Use emotional intelligence to keep the discussion calm, or you'll find the meeting getting out of hand and people losing temper.
5. Never stop a discussion to quote Bible verses. It is considered rude.

Leadership lessons from.. (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)

1. Explaining your "end state" vision is an important start, but you must coordinate if your vision will be executed by several groups.
2. Use delegation wisely. Know when to get involved if things don't go well.
3. Take advantage of coaching opportunities to help others find their strengths.
4. Be mindful of lead-manage-do. A leader cannot be effective at the high level vision if she is too "hands on" (or "hoofs on", in this case.)
5. Identify "stretch" opportunities to develop new leaders.

Let's continue the list of blog posts that caught my attention in 2011. Here is the second half the list, in no particular order:

Too many silos on the IT farm

The ultimate goal for many higher ed institutions is to provide scalable resources on demand. But the greatest obstacle faced by most college and university IT departments during periods of growth is infrastructure sprawl. When IT infrastructure is deployed to meet growing administrative demands, the traditional approach has been to create distinct silos that support individual applications and services. Unfortunately, this results in an extremely slow, inefficient use of resources across the campus.

What to leave behind

Take a moment, and think back to what IT was like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Now shift your "lens" to look forward. What technologies will fall away? Global Knowledge provides their list of 10 tech skills that are heading the way of the dinosaur.

The consumerization of IT (also this related post)

"IT must become a successful steward, rather than owner, of technology" rings with me. It is a concise statement to where IT is headed today. IT will ignore the impact of BYOD at its peril. Look around campus, at our students. I haven't seen many with iPads or other tablets, but they are there, and their numbers are growing. Many students look to their smartphone to check email, not a laptop or a lab computer. The era of the BYOD is already here.

How technology has changed

Many of our students have never seen a floppy disk. Instead, they likely use USB flash drives to transport their data. But today, even a 16GB drive is almost obsolete, when you can put all your files "in the Cloud" and access them anywhere. What will be our storage options in another 5-10 years? Where will we keep our data? That's why we always need to look forward to what's next, to think about how to adapt new technology for the campus.

How students use technology

ECAR has just released The National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011. The 2011 study differs from past studies in that the questionnaire was reengineered and responses were gathered from a nationally representative sample of 3,000 students in 1,179 colleges and universities. The report provides their very interesting findings, and lots of other detail.

I've previously shared thoughts and news updates from OIT's weekly email, from Ann Duin (interim CIO.) OIT is transitioning away from the weekly email to a more timely and social news delivery system: the Inside IT blog will post IT news and updates from the University of Minnesota

There are several ways you can receive IT updates:

1. Visit the blog regularly.
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If you have submissions and news items that you would like to share with the IT community, please send them to oca@umn.edu, and they will see that they are added to the blog. In the future, OIT will identify more blog authors throughout IT that can contribute news stories directly to the blog.

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As we wind down the year, I'd like to reflect on a few of my favorite blog posts from this year. Looking through the archive, these items stood out for me, in no particular order:

The last 5 minutes of your day

The Harvard Business Review blog writes about The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day. The author,Peter Bregman, relates a time when he helped a fellow leader who was at risk. Bregman's recommendation is to take 5 minutes at the end of each day, and consider these points.

Always time for a first impression

With every new encounter, you are evaluated and yet another person's impression of you is formed. These first impression can be nearly impossible to reverse or undo, and they set the tone for the relationship that follows. MindTools has nine tips on making a great first impression.

The changing role of the IT manager

The IT manager in 2011 plays a much different role than the IT manager of several years ago. Technology has become a commodity, ubiquitous. IT no longer can survive in an "ivory tower". The role of local IT managers is rapidly changing from implementing stuff to negotiating and brokering stuff.

10 levels of intimacy in today's communication

Ji Lee posted a great infographic about this. The 10 levels of intimacy in today's communication concisely shows these different ways we communicate with each other, and ranks them. It should come as no surprise that meeting someone in person and talking with them is the most powerful communication method.

Doing more with less

At Morris, I've been consistent with my vision: "Buy rather than build, partner rather than buy." The concept of "buy" may seem opposite to "doing more with less", but when you consider the long tail of support, the costs are actually lower over the long term. n the coming year, it will be very important to continue this strategy, and look for more ways to leverage the "umbrella" of the central campus to support our projects.

Finals are done, and our students are heading home on break. Most of the campus will be quiet over the next few weeks, as folks take their own vacations. Taking a break away from work allows our minds to relax, so we can be at our best when we return to the office. Without that opportunity to unwind, it can become harder and harder to think clearly and with perspective. Vacations are important, and that's why I often remark why we must "unplug" during a break.

This holiday season, I'll be away from the office starting December 23 until early January, but I've scheduled a few blog item while I am out. So while you'll see new posts on this blog, I really am exercising my work-life balance.

This year, I decided to take an extra step towards work-life balance. These days, we all have connected personal devices or smartphones, like an iPad or an Android. I have one of each. They're great devices to have, to stay connected with what's going on around me. At a click, I can check email or my calendar.

But that constant connectedness is also a detraction from good work-life balance. Speaking for myself, I don't know that I can resist the temptation to click into my email from my smartphone, even while I'm away on vacation. So during this holiday break, I intend to remove my account details from my Android phone and my iPad. I won't be connected to my work email at all.

I challenge you to find your own way to completely relax while on holiday break. If you're on-call, that's one thing to stay connected. But when you aren't on-call, you should do your best to maintain that work-life balance.

"BYOT, or Bring Your Own Technology, is more than code for 'my CEO bought an iPad.' BYOT refers to a strategy for letting employees choose and purchase the devices they want to use to do their jobs - everything from PCs and laptops, to smartphones and tablets. The machines belong to the employees, who take them along with them if they leave the company."

Kim Nash at CIO Magazine writes about the "BYOT Buzz": 9 Things IT Needs To Know. We've talked about this trend before, sometimes under the title "BYOD" or "Bring Your Own Device". It's all about adopting the mode of "consumerization of IT". Here's a quick wrap-up from the article:

1. Don't balk for security's sake.
2. Webify, virtualize and mobilize first.
3. Get infrastructure in top shape.
4. Decide who does what.
5. Say no sometimes.
6. Indoctrinate - politely, of course.
7. Decide who pays and how much.
8. Know that you may or may not save money...
9. ...but you will change company culture.

You've seen these recommendations before. It comes to understanding the risks, communication, and setting expectations & boundaries. And when you look at it that way, those are the foundations of "managing change".

BYOT or BYOD is another change in how IT operates. We've been through these cycles before: from mainframes to minicomputers, to PCs, to networks, to laptops, ... and now, mobile devices and BYOT.

As the IT Strategy Working Group continues its work, I thought I'd share some insights from IT strategic planning efforts at other universities. This one comes from a friend who served as CIO at a large, multi-campus university. I won't share details; those would be too specific to their particular circumstances. But it's interesting to look at an overview of their IT strategic plan, to see how we might define our own IT strategy here.

Two things stand out from this IT strategic plan:

1. IT is vital to the University's successful achievement of its mission;
2. IT infrastructure and services are delivered in a distributed, but increasingly coordinated, manner.

While this IT strategic plan will guide the efforts of their University for the next 5 years, their central IT and division IT action plans provide an opportunity for them to annually revisit their success in meeting goals, and to adjust their actions as needed to improve. IT is constantly changing; to provide value, we must continually adapt to these changes to meet the needs of our constituents.

Like Morris, their IT planning process builds on the collaborative nature of their University, providing additional opportunities to share plans, success stories and lessons learned. This strategy document is reviewed annually, to look ahead, and to modify the plan to adjust to changing needs.

Let's look at the themes of this IT strategic plan:

Guiding principles

• Technology decisions should include broad input from those most impacted.
• "Integration" and "ease of use" should be expected features of all new systems or technologies.
• Infrastructure planning needs to be carefully designed and executed so as to retain and improve as appropriate the following attributes.
• The University should examine opportunities for business process improvements in conjunction with the adoption of software before reengineering administrative IT systems.
• Open standards and interoperability are important and highly valued characteristics.
• Applications will be adopted when available and built or integrated when necessary.
• Security and privacy of electronic information will be highly valued and all systems and infrastructure will meet required levels of security and privacy.

Goals

1. Secure our electronic information and IT systems.
2. Increase the utilization and effectiveness of IT.
3. Provide IT services that meet the campus needs in a coordinated and efficient manner.
4. Support the evolving research needs of the campus.
5. Enhance University's web environment to improve communication and provide easy access to public and personalized information and services regardless of time and place.
6. Ensure student technology laboratories and resources support instructional and research objectives and meet the changing needs of all University undergraduate and graduate students.
7. Design, build, maintain, and continually enhance the University's technology infrastructure to enable world-class teaching, learning, research, and scholarship. Plan for and provide sufficient bandwidth, cabling, electronics, and service quality for network connectivity in all classrooms, laboratories, workspaces and University living environments.
8. Offer 24 x 7 availability of data and telecommunications networks and provide a secure environment for access to information and collaboration among members of the University community.
9. Enforce a secure network and computing environment for all members of the University community.
10. Provide robust interconnection among University locations and external networks, including Internet2 and other significant partner institutions.
11. Establish systematic practices for recapitalizing equipment in central facilities, classrooms, labs, and offices.
12. Fully integrate information technology's role in the capital planning and funding processes.

(Each goal was supported by 4 or 5 actionable strategies.)

Indicators of success

• Indicators Related to Specific Actions or Initiatives
• IT Strategic Plan Progress

If you follow IT in higher education, you probably noticed that the University of California- Berkeley recently experienced an outage of its main campus email system, which lasted a little over a week. These kinds of outages highlight two reasons why I have focused on moving critical processing systems to OIT at the Twin Cities campus:

1. OIT has more resources ($$) to spend on redundancy and failover systems than we can afford at Morris. Our server room in Morris has a single power feed, a single room chiller, and a single UPS. If we experience an outage on any of those systems, our server room shuts down - not good if you are running critical processing systems.
   
   
2. OIT has multiple levels of IT staffing, so an absence of a few IT staff is not a major problem; there are others who can fill in. In Computing Services, we have 6 IT staff. During an emergency, if only 2 are away from the office (vacation, sick, etc.) or unable to make it into the office, we have lost 33% of our capacity. That's also why cross-training is so important here, but with the complexity of IT job duties, it is difficult for everyone to be an expert on everyone else's job.

Of course, Berkeley's email systems have lots of redundancy, and they have a large pool of dedicated IT staff, and email was still down for a week. I understand it was a combination of just the right circumstances, which caused their email to be down for such a long time. But as IT leaders, we work on Disaster Recovery planning to bring our systems back to service as quickly as possible during a crisis.

The Berkeley outage also underscores the importance of our migration to Gmail. The University of Minnesota is in the process of moving all University email accounts to Google Apps for Education, providing Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and other productivity services to the campus. As of Fall 2011, all active students were migrated to Gmail. By the end of this calendar year, all active students, faculty, and staff (except HCC users) should be on Gmail. Planning for alumni and retirees begins in January.

Google recently published a whitepaper about Deploying Google Apps for Education to Faculty and Staff. It's an interesting read. Here are the highlights:

• Reduction in IT costs
• Reduction in IT complexity
• Improved learning opportunities and outcomes
• Better functionality with more features

As always, the University retains control over our email; it just happens to be hosted by Google's servers.

You may often hear me remark that IT must deliver value to the campus. Where we identify services that are truly commodity, we should find other ways to provide those services at the lowest cost - including sourcing those services from outside the University. Email is a perfect example of a commodity; we can't provide additional value to email. It's a great service for Google to host for us.

Here's a scenario that should seem familiar, even in a different context:

The CEO has fallen head over heels for his iPad. The marketing team has set up shop on every social media site known to man. The sales group has secretly purchased its own software-as-a-service subscriptions. Meanwhile, the VP of operations is wondering whether there isn't something better out in the cloud that the company could use to run its supply chain. The whole world, it seems, is going rogue.

Stephanie Overby at CIO Magazine suggests that rather than fighting "rogue IT", we should embrace it. Her article has several themes:

1. The new mantra: "Yes, we can"

In previous IT generations, users would steer away from IT folks, because the central IT mode was too conservative. Users want to embrace new technology where it suits their needs. IT needs to find every way to say "yes" while considering cost, security, and requirements. Take the initiative, work with your users, and build partnerships.

2. Help end users help themselves

IT departments need to stop doing what they have been doing for years: "Here's our standard, take it or leave it." Instead, IT is going to have to let the end user decide where they want to go, what are they willing to accept for service levels and risk. This also means adopting a "managed diversity". Find your middle ground.

3. Technology risk for Dummies

In the new IT, one of IT's contributions to the business should be it's assessment of, and position on, risk management. That means getting a seat at the table, so build your relationships. Shared understanding of the risks to which new technology exposes the organization is a must-have.

4. Never say "no"

The game has changed; looking ahead, IT will no longer be able to dictate the terms of technology. Users have control over their own IT destiny. When IT departments say "This is our standard", the users' reply will be "I don't care". That's not a criticism of our users, it's simply the reality of the new IT. Keep working with the business to make sure your partners understand risks and trade-offs. The modern CIO should never say "no".

Along the same lines, Khalid Kark in the same issue of CIO Magazine, identifies these steps in making IT decisions with empowered users:

1. Invest in business outcomes, not just business requirements.
2. Focus on empowerment and innovation, not just execution.
3. Be a service orchestrator, not just a technology supplier.

Like Overby, Kark concludes if IT asserts too much control, empowered users will simply bypass the IT organization. You don't want to end up out of the loop. But if you let the business drive technology decisions, there will be integration, ownership, and scalability issues. Again, the key is to find a balance.

CIO Magazine's "Sounding Board" recently gave their collective advice on building technology literacy. We've been discussing "digital literacy" in the IT Working Group, so I thought it would be good to mention here.

Building a partnership between IT and the campus sometimes means helping others to develop a comfort level with technology. But how do you go about doing just that? Here's the advice from the CIO peer council:

1. Understand the effects on the individual

From Wayne Shurts, CIO, Supervalu: "Recently, we gave all our store managers iPads and told them, essentially, to have fun: no usage restrictions. We paired them up with someone in IT to help them get comfortable with the hardware and later to catalog how the technology was being used. Our decision to start with store managers--as opposed to some back-office function--was a deliberate one. How these folks work and interact with our customers is critical to the success of each store. The lessons learned and the value these devices provide have a direct link to the company's bottom line, which creates buy-in for future IT investment. ... Understanding the extent and degree of change for each employee and tailoring our rollout plans accordingly is the whole ball game."

2. Sell information as a problem solver

Twila Day, CIO, SYSCO writes: "In other words, what is the business problem worth solving and what information do we need to solve it? The role of IT in this case is one of analytics evangelist. We hear a lot of analytics success stories from external sources, and we vet these ideas for business impact and technology feasibility."