The latest from the CIO blog
Friday, June 12, 2009
by Ron Kraemer
I talked with several people over the last few days that have expressed concerns (in a positive way) that there is complexity and some divergence in the IT Strategic Planning process. Too many things going on; maybe not enough coordination.
My view of the IT Strategic Planning process is that we are continuing on the course we set as a campus many months ago. The phase we are now entering takes the 40+ strategic priority goals and organizes them into 9 or 10 groups for additional work. No new goals have been created.
The work teams we are assembling resulted from a "call to participate" over the past two months. I attempted to reach out widely to campus (MTAG, VC Admin Group, Provost's Executive Group, the AC, ITC, APR, ComETS, CTIG, research advisory groups, DoIT, and many others) to seek participation. The team leads are people that volunteered through that process.
The work we will now undertake simply takes the priority goals the campus has established and begins to put more detail to them. Essentially, the goals state "what we wanted to do" and now we need to begin to describe "how we might do that."
The work many groups are doing are an important part of that and any group that wants to reconnect with the IT Strategic Planning process to ensure that the work you are doing aligns with the the IT Strategic Plan, I am open to work with you to accomplish that.
Please let me know your thoughts. If there are anxieties about how I am proceeding, I am also open to meeting with you to discuss them.
Read or post comments.»Thursday, May 28, 2009
by Ron Kraemer
I read this fascinating article last night by Malcolm Gladwell "When Underdogs Break the Rules."
In the article, Gladwell describes situations in which unconventional strategies are used and the results are positive. He uses basketball, war gaming, and business situations to make his point. Two quotes really struck me - 1) "The world runs in real time, but the government runs in batch" and 2) "But let's remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let's remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath's terms, Goliath wins".
This all got me thinking about the value of how we approach service; who is Goliath in our world of public higher education; who makes the rules; and how we can influence the rule-making process to better serve our students, faculty, and staff.
If you get a chance, read the article. It will challenge you to think about things a little differently.
Read or post comments.»Wednesday, May 13, 2009
by Ron Kraemer
I am at Indiana University today and tomorrow with the CSG, a group of 27 Research1 university CIOs.
Today we worked on prospective shared service offerings. This is very relevant to what we are trying to do on our Madison campus. In each case we have at least one institution willing to offer a service and multiple institutions considering outsourcing that same service.
The goal in each working group was to roll up our sleeves and determine whether there is a candidate shared service offering and on what terms, i.e., basic service definition/SLA, candidate provider(s) and subscriber(s), and assessment of readiness to contract for services within 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, etc.
The services we worked on include:
i. Microsoft Exchange environment (Dennis Cromwell, Indiana)
ii. Mobile App (Ann Duin, Minnesota)
iii. Calendar and/or Event Calendar (Chuck Powell, Yale)
iv. Shared data center/hosting/storage (Ron Kraemer, Wisconsin)
v. Emergency/Continuity services -- emergency website, DNS services, email backup (Shel Waggener, Berkeley)
Suffice it to say that this was an interesting day.
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