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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Chris Thorn from the School of Education shared this with me this weekend.

 

It is worthwhile to spend some time looking at these and working to bring our resources up to the level displayed at these resource sites.

 

***********

 

Interesting that scholars of networks and complex systems are already blogging about the response to swine flu. This short summary of the CDC's board approach to modern communication technologies displays an amazing ranges of responses for a government organization:

 

http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/2009/05/cdc_is_fighting_the_spread_of.html

 

The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/ is using several different social media channels http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/?s_cid=tw_eh_28 to inform about the swine flu besides the traditional (Web 1.0) channels, such as frequent press briefings http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/press/, general information in audio and video, etc.:

 

 

  1. Updates from the H1N1 page haven an RSS feed

     http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/rss/

 

  2. Frequent updates are spread using Twitter

     http://twitter.com/cdcemergency

 

  3. Video updates are posted using podcasts

     http://www2a.cdc.gov/podcasts/browse.asp?topic=swine%20flu

 

  4. Image sharing on the CDCs Flickr site

     http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdc_e-health/sets/72157617255862135/

 

  5. Buttons

     http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/h1n1/buttons.html?s_cid=tw_eh_29

     for your website.

 

  6. Information sharing on MySpace's e-health page and daily

     strength group http://www.dailystrength.org/groups/cdc

 

  7. Updates can be shared http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/# using several

     different services (Google Reader, Bookmarks, Delicious, Facebook,

     Digg, etc.).

 

  8. e-Cards http://www2a.cdc.gov/eCards/index.asp to send by email

     to family members and friends to remind people to wash their hands.