EDUCAUSE | IT Staffing

We Are Live in Spite of it All!

smiltenb — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:56:49 -0500

We technicaly began our Oracle/PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and Portal upgrades in May 2007 and, having made my way through countless upgrades/implementations over the past eight years, this project has been suprising uneventful. Just to shake things up a bit we threw in a few wrenches of our own -- deciding to implement the new versions on vmWare, deploying a new SSL switch/load balancer and using (the new for us) Oracle Application Server.

One of the attributes the really pride ourselves on here at MICA is the ability to be agile. When we have a change in plans or challenges that appear at the last minute, our team is not only great at adapting, they often use it as an opportunity to expand knowledge and learn from the experience.

After such an uneventful upgrade we finally got to put our agility to the test when Oracle told us they could not resolve the problems with Oracle Application Server to make it compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer -- one week prior to our go live. Fortunately MICAgility lept into action and, with assistance from vmWare, we rebuilt all of our 9.0 server environments using BEA Weblogic instead of the Oracle middleware.

While having a small staff and being agile can sometimes be a challenge, it really positioned us to deal with this last minute boulder in the road. And, in hindsight, I can't say that I'm too surprised -- Oracle let their early adopter school (Northeastern) go live without support for non-IE browsers and they have been working to fixing the problems with Firefox and Safari since July 2007. And it's been great to see technology (vmWare) and people (flexible and adaptable) coming together in a way that allows small colleges like us to manage bumps along the upgrade road.

Taking the Risk

smiltenb — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:17:05 -0500

As the technology department of a higher education institution, it is our responsibility to lead and set examples of how technology can help all areas of the college do business better. And this no longer is just about new hardware and software – it’s now about how we work together.

And sometimes this is about how we don't work together. We are constantly challenged to determine where the line is drawn regarding tools and policy. The email policy has changed: does Technology deliver the message or does Academics?

Our notion of training has changed (with help from our trainer who accepted a two year job with the Peace Corps in Africa --- go Rick!): do we fill jobs because they are vacant; or stop to determine if the jobs we define meet our needs?

Do we dare to take the time to discuss whether the needs are legitimate or hold-overs from a different point in time?

In short do the risks we take pay off? How do we help our community understand that change is a good thing? And how do we help our technology staff understand that being challenged is one of the most thrilling aspects of our job? I dare ya...

A Pattern Language for Technology

smiltenb — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:05:45 -0600

In 2007, I’m determined to put the finishing touches on the fixer upper house that I bought ten years ago. The good part about never actually finishing the work (like replacing the missing molding around a bathroom window) is that I have a more flexibility to make improvements that match my current needs. I’m no longer attached to my original notion of restoring the 1926 row home to as close-to-original as possible. Instead, I’m all about demolition – for starters breaking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room. Sure a 7x15 galley kitchen might have been all the rage in 1926; but once you add a fridge, sink and range to a space this size you’re virtually out of counter space…and I really like counter space.

This past Fall a friend lent me a copy of “A Pattern Language” (Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein) to help inspire my upcoming renovations. The book blew me away and as I continue to re-read it, I’ve been percolating on ideas about “a pattern language of technology”. Some really smart people have written about pattern languages in design and in software development and I did start reading “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” but didn’t get too far as it did not rank very high on my readability scale.

There is such a shift happening in technology right now – particularly how it weaves into our physical lives and intermingles with (and replaces) our social interactions; and this shift has inspired me to come up with a new language and new models for how we manage technology at MICA. I'm looking for new patterns for how we evaluate solutions and design our technology presence across the institution. Each day departments across campus (including mine) are finding that the old standards and methods that we used for providing services don’t work very well. A few years ago facing challenges like this would get lumped under the heading of “business process redesign” and we would try to bring in some talented experts who could help tell us about better business models.

But we need new patterns and new designs for facing these challenges today. Something that is not specific to coding but that takes on the whole big thing – staffing, systems management, procurement, services, training, etc. And a significant challenge beyond articulating this pattern language is making it timeless – particularly when it comes to technology. How do we construct a pattern language that embodies the interconnectedness of technology, society and business but that also recognizes the distinctions between good code and productive workspaces?

One of the less-abstract applications for Christopher Alexander’s work and projects at MICA is the issue of space design. As we rev up for 18 months of PeopleSoft/Oracle upgrades, we’ll be bringing on some project help and we have absolutely no space for them to work.

We had an epic meeting yesterday that started off with the review of our organizational chart. The entire time that I’ve been creating the org charts, I’ve been bumping up against the logical grouping of staff based on function vs. the hierarchical reporting structure. In thinking about ways to create space for staff and constantly improve services it is so obvious that we simply cannot move forward if we continue to hang on to our old notions about private offices for everyone and keeping separations between staff based on reporting structure. Ted “master of the whiteboard” Simpson drew a great diagram that has helped to open up the discussion to one where we’re now thinking about communities within our department based on functions and services. [An article on the pattern language website captures some of the concepts Ryan, Ted and I have been trying to shape into our staffing model.]

This new approach will certainly require plenty of demolition (not just the walls in our offices, but the old concepts about how we work together). Good thing I have a sledgehammer and safety glasses.

“The more living patterns there are in a place-a room, a building, or a town-the more it comes to life as an entity, the more it glows, the more it glows, the more it has that self maintaining fire which is the quality without a name." -- Christopher Alexander

E2005 Podcast: Staff Development Beyond Leaders

podcaster — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:44:35 -0600

This 43 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Concierges and Contractors, Shamans and Sergeants: Staff Development Beyond Leaders.

E2005 Podcast: Stretch Your Staff with a Departmental Liaison Program

podcaster — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:23:34 -0600

This 41 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Stretch Your Staff with a Departmental Liaison Program.