kaiyen: pepper

Tag Archive: educause

my own fail: EDUCAUSE Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force

I have had a strange experience as part of the EDUCAUSE Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Task Force over the past 6 or so months. I was honored to be a part of this group and to be working on this important topic. The group was convened by John O’Brien, EDUCAUSE President, to tackle the issues of increasing DEI in higher education IT in general and at EDUCAUSE specifically. How do we make our work force more diverse, our leadership more representative of at least industry norms (higher ed IT lags behind even corporate IT in diversity, on several dimensions, much less against the population at large), and be more inclusive once we develop greater diversity? Wow, such an important topic.

For some reason, though…I found myself paralyzed as I tried to contribute. It wasn’t the people – many were friends of mine, and all were very accessible and engaged. I didn’t feel intimidated by them. It wasn’t the leadership – John and Joanne Dehoney (also from EDUCAUSE) were great, too, and both asked engaging questions as well as gladly accepted feedback. I just couldn’t…find a nook or cranny from which I felt comfortable contributing. For some reason I just couldn’t contribute! I was holding back on ideas and thoughts, for instance, or drawing a blank when I should have been inspired to new ideas.

It was all very surreal. And infuriating because the topic is so important.

So. The real question is what have I learned from this?

First, I need to critically evaluate how I can contribute before I agree to participate. I was so excited to be invited and included that I jumped in before I put in thought as to what I could offer. It’s not that I would have said “no” – it’s that I needed a game plan, from my perspective and of my opinions, of how I would take part. If I’m going to be part of something this important, I have to know that I will pull my weight.

Second, I need to be willing to be bold. There were times when I found that I didn’t speak up when I should have for some reason. There were even a couple of times that I didn’t say something that, later on, someone else did to much appreciation. I have no idea why I froze like that. But I did. I need to be willing to just say it and see what happens.

Finally, I think I need to accept that I have good ideas. This is related to item 2 but deserves it’s own spotlight. I might not have great ideas and I might have a dud now and then, but I cannot let the concern (fear?) of a dud prevent me from saying what might be a good suggestion. We all have both good and bad ideas. We’re allowed to have them if the point is brainstorming and sharing.

September 3, 2018 Can't be Contained, 0 Read more >

Thoughts from the Educause Institute Leadership Program, volume 2

I’m a day late on this one, and I will in fat roll the last two days into just this one post.  Some of my thoughts have been formulating over a while anyway.  Plus, due to some technical issues, I am having trouble effectively composing posts from anywhere but our meeting room.  So it just hasn’t been easy.

One thing that has really impressed me, as my team has been working on our presentation to the “executive council” (played by our faculty) and while talking to other attendees, is that so many of the attendees have made these kinds of presentations already.  They have already been on the radar of their upper tiers of their organizations.  In a way, this means that this really isn’t all that hard of a task and that arguably attendees are far closer to being high-level leadership positions than perhaps I had anticipated.  I figured everyone would be high level directors, but the director of, say, all customer or systems support for some major state university is pretty high up there.  Even in terms of scope of work, what I do as CIO at Menlo College is not that far off from their work.  The only difference I’ve generally felt about my role has been its scope.  Not so much even by now, before the workshop has even ended.  It’s really impressive.

As far as the workshop itself, a few things have jumped out at me.  The first is that, while we did spend time talking to our executives as prep work so that we understood that level of leadership.  So that we could separate really high level strategy from the “tactical” work we do.  This was very useful, but we haven’t really returned to the strategic during the presentations as I would have expected.  We’ve talked a lot about regulations, about what we need to worry about as leaders, and even how to manage relationships, but that’s really it.

Without an explicit, ongoing emphasis on strategy, it’s really easy for us to all get “into the weeds” and talk tactics and specific solutions during our conversations. We get out of the strategic.  There are some important points here and there.  Looking at governance from a high level (see my note below about emphasis on size of institution making these solutions less relevant to me, however).  Examining IT security as part of a general campus risk security model is a powerful one.  But those were not really the core emphasis of some of these presentations.

Also, and I’m borrowing from another attendee here, there hasn’t been a lot of talk about how to maintain innovation while handling all these other issues.  Yes, we need to care about compliance and cyber-security, but what about our responsibility to foster creativity and the ability for faculty to be free to be innovative?

Finally, there is the empahsis on large institutions.  The faculty are all from fairly large ones, and I can understand a bias.  But while it’s always diffficult for me to take ideas and apply them to an institution of our size, all the talk about deputy CIOs, relying on large staff with multiple layers, etc makes it tougher than I had thought.  I’m getting stuff out but, in the case of governance, for instance, I was generally taking information from about 1/3 of any other institution’s solutions, with full knowledge that I hav no capacity to dfo the other 2/3s.  That is truly frustrating, and more of an effort than I had anticipated.

On a more…personal interaction note, I really need to learn to shut up more.  We all have great ideas, and they will conflict at times.  It’s not quite an issue of “put 7 leaders together on a team and it’s chaos,” but if some don’t step back, it is a lot of discussing and less productivity at times.  And I personally feel that I’ve been contributing less valuable content than others.  In no way has my group made me feel like an outsider or have they ostracized me in any way.  I do feel that my opinions are contrary to the general flow perhaps more often than not, but that itself doesn’t mean I should step back.  But for the sake of getting things done, I need to sit back more and just listen.  Of course, this is a lot easier when the overall work of the team is really excellent.

The jury is still out on whether this will be a good educational experience.  I’m learning more through direct conversations with the faculty than the curriculum, it seems,  We’ll see.

July 25, 2013 Conferences, IT Leadership, Professional Development, , 0 Read more >

thoughts on the Educause Institute Leadership Program, volume 1

A while back, I did a series of relatively short posts on a leadership program I attended.  The Learning Technologies Leadership workshop offered by the Educause Institute.  Many may wonder why I am now reviewing this program again.  In fact, this is a different one.  One month later, I find myself back at the Hilton Orrington in Evanston, IL.  This time, it’s a general leadership program, with a very different crow.

Yesterday was just a half day so my observations are more about the differences in the crowd.  I don’t think I know enough to make comments on the curriculum.  I can certainly talk about my trepidation prior to the start of the session.

Before things commenced I was very concerned about how I’d fit in.  Would everyone be from really big universities?  Even against a director, my experience at such a small college might not translate.  I might be this useless appendage.  I’d still learn just from hearing everyone’s experience but I want to contribute.

Fortunately,  my fears did not come true.  While I am a bit surprised by the number of folks that work in administrative systems (rather than customer-facing programs), but overall there is a lot of diversity, in jobs, age, years in job, and institution (or department).  I think things will work out.  More on that as the week goes by.

The team project, which was a linchpin of the LTL program, is handled a bit differently. I ‘m sure the actual presentation will be similar an the team dynamics will still be key.  But we heard about the team topics last night – we had to pick two, and therefore had no idea what we’d get.  And for me, this is especially harrowing because I don’t know if I’d end up doing a potentially big topic – but one that interests me – with really big institutions that just won’t speak on the same terms as me.

Because this is a group that are aspiring CIOs, we did spend a big section yesterday talking about the changing role.  On the one hand, this is a critically important topic and discussion (one might think differently based on my recent post about an article in Educauseu Review, but that’s because I felt that was intended for other CIOs, not aspiring ones).  On the other, I felt that we jumped a bit too far into the changing role.  We discussed the changed role – what it is now, under the presumption that we had preconceived notions.  Maybe we did.  Just an observation.

Overall, while I had a pretty full afternoon, it was not as intense as the first day of the LTL.  But I am perhaps more excited overall, and look forward to the week.

July 23, 2013 Conferences, IT Leadership, , , 0 Read more >

reflections on the Educause Institute Learning Technology Leadership program

The last week of June, I attended the Educause Institue Learning Technology Leadership program.  This is an intensive, week-long workshop (that’s the best term I can think of it – it’s not a conference, it’s not training, and I don’t really think it’s a workshop, per se, either)  on how to be an effective leader at one’s institution.  It is aimed at those working in educational technology (instructional technology, teaching and learning, lots of other names), but it goes way out to how one might do presentations for new programs to executive officers, handling 6 or 7 figure budgets, and a number of other high level topics.

Overall, it was a very positive experience.  But the real “meat” of this post is a bit more nuanced than simply whether I learned a lot or not.  For instance, in terms of just leadership skills ranging from one’s team to one’s institution, there was lots to learn.  But that’s not entirely why I attended.

As a CIO, I must admit I felt a bit out of place.  But we don’t have an educational technology program so it’s not like there was someone else to send.  And we want to start one up, so we did want to send someone.  But, while I did have these very relevant reasons for being there, I definitely had a different perspective than most.  To be honest, I think this caused a bit of…disconnection and possibly abrasion with my teammates.  I am sure they are all gracious enough to disagree with me, but if I’m being truthful, I think at times my tendency to think about issues such as liability and institutional fit instead of creativity and pedagogical impact was a hindrance to overall productivity.  I apologize to a great overall team for that.

When I signed up for the workshop, though, my key question was “is there something about leadership in learning/educational/instructional technology that is different than leadership in general?” (more…)

July 15, 2013 Conferences, IT Leadership, Professional Development, Work-related, , , 0 Read more >

Educause Review Review – “A Transformative Period: Is Higher Education IT Having an Identity Crisis?”

Disclaimer:  I realize my comments might be taken as criticism of other CIOs or of the intent of the writers of Educause Review. First, that’s not at all my goal.  My goal is to say that perhaps the time for us to discuss the “still changing” role of the CIO is past.  And should be past.  But saying this doesn’t mean that I necessarily think that I don’t fall victim to some of these thoughts and even practices now and then.  In other words, I’m saying that my house might be made of glass…but I don’t think I’m throwing stones.  At the very least, in terms of career accomplishments, I have no right to make these comments.  But if I always thought that way I would rarely write anything.  This is a general commentary, and is not about myself at any rate. 

Also, note that while I am highlighting an Educause Review article in this particular post, it’s mostly because it’s the most recent one on this topic.  I’m certainly not criticizing the publication nor its various editors and staff (many of whom I know personally).  If this is still an important question, then ER should be covering it.  However, I am not sure it is an important question.

In early June, Educause Review posted an article titled A Transformative Period: Is Higher Education IT Having an Identity Crisis?   The question being posed is whether, in light of all the changes in higher ed in general, IT is facing a set of changes so dramatic that the entire role of an IT organization must be reconsidered?  It asserts that “the IT organization must be prepared to engage with its institution in a number of ways in a fast-paced environment” and that this is an “issue of transformation.”

Several interviewees give a variety of answers, but I must admit that I am having trouble with the question, and the premise itself.  I don’t think there should be any transformation going on at all, at least not now.  More broadly, I don’t see why we are still having this conversation.  Shouldn’t we already be what this article is asserting we should be…changing into?  If we aren’t already there, then the problem isn’t about adjusting to change tomorrow, but about whether we can be effective leaders today.  So why the ongoing discussion?

On the one hand, if one looks at the field of IT unto itself, without the context of managers and leaders, then yes, there is a major shift occurring.  One can either acknowledge this change and take advantage of it to grow an organization, or ignore it and become irrelevant.  Essentially, in a time when many IT services are becoming commodities and students (and faculty and staff) are bringing in personal devices that are sometimes far more powerful and certainly more mobile than what departments have been able to offer in the past (BYOD), if an IT organization doesn’t think about change, then its role as a vital part of the institution will be greatly jeopardized.  But I think looking at just the entity, the set of services that make up IT, is a completely useless perspective.  What matters are the people and the leaders that are in place.

Any and all leaders in IT today must be looking at the landscape far beyond the technology.  Business processes, enabling innovation, supporting mobility, accepting BYOD, and pushing forward new and creative initiatives.  If a CIO isn’t already instinctively thinking about these matters, about the role of IT as part of a key, strategic and programmatic component of a rapidly changing landscape, rather than just a service provider, then there is a serious issue.  Again, the true, underlying question for me is why are we still discussing this?  Maybe we need a note on the side saying “hey!  make sure you’re thinking this way!” with each issue but surely Educause Review with all its great content can devote some pages to other topics.

The identity crisis is not about IT from the perspective of the IT leadership.  It’s one created entirely by the institution itself, if and only if it is not putting enough thought into the role of IT or ignoring the hopefully-forward thinking minds that lead such organization. Of course, this is in fact often the case – the institution is lagging behind the existing change in leadership styles in IT.  Even if there is a really creative IT leader that understands these dynamics, it’s certainly possible that other executives at the institution will disagree.  They will be the ones that relegate IT to simply a service provider, rather than an enabler or a creative entity that adds value.  This is certainly a big challenge.

But the article implies that the identity crisis is located in the IT organization, or is at least partly so.  This discussion therefore still doesn’t make sense to me.  A leader in IT, today, should be considering the department’s role in the institution’s long-term strategic planning all the time. Let’s look a bit closer at some of the comments, and I will take another probably-too-bold step in offering my own thoughts and responses.
(more…)

July 3, 2013 Higher Education IT, IT Leadership, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, , 0 Read more >

thoughts from educause LTL volume 3

So..I’m really tired, and this is going to be short, to be honest.

Last night my team worked on finishing the presentation we will make today to the “senior administrative leaders” that the LTL faculty will be “playing.”  We are to pitch a specific idea, with implementation, budget, etc., that will address a strategic concern of a college.

Until last night, I have to admit that I haven’t felt completely at ease with our group.  This is not a statement about the people, much less about any one person in particular.  It’s about trying to form a team made up of people that have all come to a workshop designed to build leadership.  This is a group here to become better leaders.  Putting us in groups is going to cause some unease.

But there is nothing like a project, trying to make something concrete, to bring people together.  As we worked together, our skills and strengths emerged naturally.  Even more impressively, the way we offered to help just flowed.  Someone would ask for help (I know I did several times) and others would start working on solutions.  One person made headway, and ideas were thrown about, and we ended up with a great product.  When we did a run-through, we all gave feedback equitably and fairly, and we have, I think, a solid product.

I don’t know what today’s reflection piece will be, but I know that last night’s collaborative experience will be the sticking point for me for the day.

June 27, 2013 Conferences, Higher Education IT, IT Leadership, Professional Development, , , 0 Read more >

thoughts from the EDUCAUSE LTL, volume 2

I a still at the Learning Technology Leadership program from the Educause Institute, and the latest reflection piece we’ve had is on leadership.  Unlike the first assignment, this one was done in the morning, before getting on with the day.  So it’s shorter.

We were asked to discuss how the first day’s discussion may have changed our views on leadership.  My response follows, and additional commentary past the jump.

—

While the concept of leading from within a group (rather than at the forefront) is nothing new, the discussion that stemmed from the governance committee model at Northwestern still struck a chord. Even at a small institution such as mine, where working with anyone means working with everyone, maintaining a steady focus on communications and sharing the ownership of knowledge and understanding is a powerful tool.

Unfortunately, this also takes a lot of energy. I am inspired by the prospects of what such shared communication can provide. Yet I am also concerned about the sheer amount of effort required to sustain such a program.  At a larger institution, you not only have more resources in terms of number of people from your own organization to attend these meetings, but just more people in general.  At a small institution, at some point, these committees are all the same people, and you have to watch for burn-out, disillusionment, and perhaps even annoyance with the process.  That is completely counterproductive.

It will be a delicate balance and I will be adding “informal” to many of the names of these governance/communication groups, but it certainly has great impact, regardless of institution size. And that means it’s worth the effort, in almost any case.

(more…)

June 25, 2013 Conferences, Higher Education IT, IT Leadership, Professional Development, , , 0 Read more >

thoughts from the educause learning technologies leadership program volume 1

Day 1 of the Educause Institute for Learning Technology Leadership came to a close last night.  For just a half-day session, I am truly exhausted.  I am also excited that such a dynamic experience will span the next 3.5 days.  I’m sure I’ll get a lot out of it.

We are asked to reflect upon a specific topic each day.  Last night, we focused on the results of our StrengthsFinders surveys.  This tool, which I’ve used a few times now and find quite useful, tries to identify 5 strengths based on a big, long series of survey questions.  They are actually statements, and you have to choose which one better describes you.  For the most part, they are not opposed, which means it’s not easy to decide which one fits you best.  So you make a decision that is a combination of logic, thoughtfulness, and gut.

Below is a slightly-edited (just tightened up) version of what I wrote in our internal Yammer group.

(more…)

June 25, 2013 Conferences, Higher Education IT, IT Leadership, Professional Development, , , 0 Read more >

why not to cut your travel/conference budget

The subject line might make this seem like a really obvious post.  Of course, regardless of financial pressures, one should try to keep as many budget line items as possible and therefore not sacrifice the travel/conference budget.  We never want to cut anything right?

However, both after the dot com bubble burst and then the beginning of the Great Recession, I’ve seen departments slash these budgets first.  The very first thing to go is travel and suddenly no one goes anywhere.  It’s just accepted as a luxury that cannot be afforded anymore without much discussion.

I argue that this should be one of the last things you cut.  That you should fight for this vigorously in a budget defense and even to the point where you sacrifice other services in order to maintain that allocation.  Of course, what you really should do is energetically and critically analyze your overall service portfolio, find things that can be cut and/or increase efficiency and keep that travel budget.  I would never advocate for abolishing any existing service without careful thought just for the sake of being able to attend a conference.  But I am certain that there is something that can be cut if you look closely enough.  And make hard decisions.

At the least, cutting travel budgets should be just as hard a decision as eliminating an existing (core?) service.  It shouldn’t be an automatic decision when budgets get tight.

This isn’t really about the need to network, meet in person, etc.  Truth be told, while I value the opportunities to meet with people, I am fully aware that we can create and maintain very strong professional relationships – and exchanges of information – without meeting in person.  We can take it as far as the occasional video conference to really get things together and understood properly. You don’t have to meet in person.

This is about professional development, and connection to the community that helps foster that development.  And accomplishing the former via the latter is only viable if you maintain a presence and set of relationships that grow from consistent attendance at certain conferences.  You attend often enough to get invested, and you go again and again, and become more and more involved.  This becomes an investment from your department in you, and you in your development.

I put forth my “path” to core committee involvement for the 2012 SIGUCCS Conference.  This is held annually and brings about 300-325 (topped out at 450 but 2008 wiped the slate clean, almost) people in higher education IT together.  These attendees range from executive to line level, from CIO’s to Help Desk Managers and even a few software developers.  SIGUCCS is part of the Association of Computing Machines, the main benefits of which are the requirement to write a formal, standards-compliant paper on one’s presentation topic (if you want to present, you have to write a 4 page paper.  Now that will make people decide if they are really willing to get involved or not even at the speaker level) and the inclusion of that paper in the ACM Digital Library.  I’ve done only 3 papers and they’re fairly old, but I’ve been cited a few times and yes, it’s on my resume/CV. (I’d link to the papers but you have to be a SIGUCCS or ACM member to view them).

Every time I have attended SIGUCCS, I have increased my network through in-person meetings and chats.  But I’ve also become more and more invested in the organization, and I think I have developed as a professional as a result.

I look at my path to where I am today vis-a-vis SIGUCCS.

I realize that you can add from year to year.  But notice that except for a small gap in 2007-2008, when I went through a rather significant career change, I moved from attendee at the Technical Conference to attendee and then involvement in the program for the Spring Management Symposium (so this is more aspiring leaders than line staff) to actual conference core planning committee for 2012 (and invited to repeat role in 2013).

I’m not saying that people around the country are saying “oh, Allan Chen?  Yeah, he’s that guy from SIGUCCS!”  But I can tell you that if you said “Brad Wheeler” I’d say “that visionary CIO from Indiana University that I read about in Educause all the time.”  SIGUCCS is not Educause, but then again it would take me a lot longer to gain this level of involvement with Educause (especially because Educause is so big that organization of conferences is generally through its own existing mechanisms – not volunteers.  I’d have to be writing articles and whatnot to reach any level of notoriety).

I am invested in SIGUCCS.  The people whom I meet at SIGUCCS Conference – even those whose budgets have been slashed and only come every other year – are ones that I consider consulting when I run into various problems.  In the exact same way that I’d think about calling someone over at Central IT or perhaps up the road at Stanford.  And I have developed professionally, which is a benefit to the department and yes, to myself in the long term should I look to other professional opportunities.

And all of this is because I have fought for the travel budget.  Because we stopped offering staffed video recordings in non-automated rooms (something we’d been wanting to do for a long time anyway – we’re putting our energy towards lobbying to automate the rooms instead), because we cut back on a ambitious cloud-storage pilot (let’s find 50 committed users rather than 50+50 occasional users), and because we continue to look critically at our budget and service portfolio, we have maintained our travel budget.  And my web developer gets to go to the one conference per year that is the conference for people in his field.  My Systems Manager has been able to go to a couple of intensive virtualization briefings or trainings, and I can bring one of my Support Team folks to SIGUCCS as well.  In the past I’ve attended Educause, too (though now it conflicts too much with SIGUCCS).

So think twice before you cut that budget.  Or perhaps take another look.  It’s an investment in your team to be able to send them to conference.  It’s an investment for an attendee in the conference itself and the community thereof.  And it’s an investment for almost everyone professionally.  And if we don’t care about our level of investment in our jobs, our careers, and the quality of our work…are we in the right field?

May 29, 2012 IT Leadership, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, 0 Read more >

EDUCAUSE_HULK SMASHES twitter

A superhero touched down at the Educause Annual Conference last week in Anaheim.  Experiences were changed, Twitter was twisted, and everyone was asking…

“Who is Educause_Hulk????’

At this year’s Educause Annual Conference, held last week in Anaheim, I got to witness something that, realistically, doesn’t happen all that often anymore.  I got to see an existing social networking tool get twisted and used in a new way.  I got to witness the impact of Twitter, twisted.

It is true that a great many tools – social networking and media ones in particular – are used in new, creative ways every day.  Discovering new ways to use a tool such as Twitter is so common that calling it “reinvention” is almost inappropriate.  It’s almost commonplace.  So this isn’t new in the big sense, but within the particular context of the conference and how Twitter has been used therein, something quite remarkable happened.

Twitter has been used at conferences for quite some time, as both a great way to set up social activities (“hey!  I’m here, who wants to get some food?” or “Let’s have a tweet-up!”) and to share information (“in a great session about topic X where such and such is said”).  Of course, the use of a hash tag is required to organize all of this data, and an easy-to-read interface like that of Tweetdeck makes for a very powerful tool for communication.  If you take a look at the Educause 2010 stream, you see it is littered with all kinds of posts.  I think the first time Twitter was used so heavily at an Educause event was about 3 years ago at ELI, and it has just blossomed (exploded?) since then.

This past conference, however, saw a new twist.  An attendee created an “alter ego” – EDUCAUSE_HULK – and posted on a semi-regular basis as that persona throughout the conference.  This had a huge impact, at least for me, on the overall experience, and it raised a number of questions for the person behind the Hulk, too.

(more…)

October 26, 2010 Higher Education IT, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, , 0 Read more >