Director's Blog
administrative

At this week’s UCCSC conference, I spoke about a report that I’d helped write, on providing “less seamful services,” and better collaboration between distributed and centralized IT units. I spend a lot of time thinking about that issue, because LSCR is positioned right in the middle of it; to IST, LSCR looks like a department, but to our departments, LSCR tends to look like centralized IT.

(Aside: I would prefer that our customers view us as peers and partners. We do make an effort to behave that way: for example, we locate our folks in departmental space rather than moving off-campus to an office where we could all sit together. We’d rather be closer to the users. But looking at the survey and interview results so far, it seems we have a ways to go to really be seen as integral by most of our customers.)

The report was done as part of ITLP, which is a leadership program for IT folks in higher ed. The program included folks from Berkeley, UDub, Minnesota, and Penn State, and the report we did surveyed people in distributed and centralized IT at all four of those universities. Because they’re all large public research institutions, the issues tend to be pretty similar.

My presentation (.ppt) focused on the communication and collaboration challenges. We have a ton of meetings, but we spend too much time presenting to each other and not enough time talking to each other. Our communications tend to be along accepted and formalized lines, and we often gloss over or ignore the underlying issues which keep us from moving forward. And yes, there is an irony that I was making this point via a PowerPoint presentation; however, the most important part of my presentation was a break-out session where I got the folks from each campus to talk to each other about the pressures or barriers they are facing in their local organization. I think it went well; the room got noisy enough that it was hard to hear, which I took as a good sign.

The report (.doc) addresses the above issue of communication and collaboration, and also has a number of recommendations to make the user experience better in specific technical areas (desktop support, email, and information systems).

One of the things we’ve been hearing from folks in L&S is that LSCR doesn’t communicate enough; that we’re quick to respond when they call us, but we don’t do enough to tell people about what’s going on in technology in the industry and on campus. Part of the reason for that is that to communicate via our web site or email is fairly time-consuming for us. Before we’ll put up a post on our web site, we want to be sure it’s correct and complete, which requires us to spend time developing the content, and then going through an editorial process before a page can go live. For a lot of our content, that process is important; for example, our Thunderbird pages couldn’t be published until we were sure Thunderbird was going to be our email client recommendation, and we’d developed enough content to be worth making an announcement. (And really, we still haven’t made a formal announcement about Thunderbird, because as soon as we do that, people will want to know when we’ll be migrating them, and we’re still working on our schedule for that. The short answer is: within the next six months).

We need a communication mechanism that has a better signal-to-noise ratio than email (what percentage of your incoming email did you actually read today?), but less formality than our web site. Fortunately, technology has already helped us out with this one; blog software is easy to install and use (we’re using WordPress), and it’s easier to be informal in a blog context. Plus, the ability for readers to add comments can create an open dialog that saves everyone from having to ask the same questions over and over.

I’ll be posting news, announcements, and random thoughts about computing in L&S on a regular basis. Pretty soon (once it goes through our editorial process!) we’ll have an advice article on how to subscribe to blogs using RSS, which can keep you updated without the notices getting lost in your email.

We’re also planning to offer blog space to any departments who use our server for their web site; if the department chair or IT manager wants a blog, it’s easy for us to add a new blog to fit into your existing web site.

LSCR has been involved in a strategic planning process for over a year now. We’ve done a lot of work on developing a clear mission and vision for the organization and for computing in L&S in general. We got good information from the L&S computing survey which many of you answered earlier this year, and we have been conducting follow-up interviews with individuals. The CIO’s office is also helping out by conducting an external consulting review of our current operations.

On Wednesday, 7/18, LSCR will be participating in an off-site retreat (at the Headlands Institute in Marin) to synthesize some of the information we have gathered. Our focus will be to come up with some specific action plans and strategic goals which will guide the next phases of the process. We expect that in calendar 2008, we will have some concrete proposals to improve computing in L&S.

The retreat will require the participation of our entire staff, so we will be operating with a skeleton crew on 7/18. We will have someone watching our queues and able to contact us by cell phone if necessary, but we’d like to ask you to limit your requests on Wednesday to obviously urgent calls, or indicate whether the call can be deferred until we’re back at full staff on Thursday.

Thank you for your patience as we try to find ways to better meet the needs of our customers and the college.