Tag: technology

Categories
Technology

The EDUCAUSE 2017 Top 10 IT Issues

Presenters

  • Rebecca Davis, Director of Instructional and Emerging Technology, St. Edward’s University
  • Susan Grajek, VP of Data, Research, and Analytics, EDUCAUSE
  • Marden Paul, Director, Planning, Governance, Assessment & Comms, University of Toronto
  • Gerard Au, AVP, IT Services, CSU San Bernardino
  • John Landers, PMO Leader, Case Western Reserve University
  • Michele Norin, SVP and CIO, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Top 10 IT issues

We have a large slate of professionals who weigh in on these issues each year. They come from pretty much every role in higher education IT. They meet four times a year, and we ask “what is the most important IT issue facing your institution?” We do this each quarter, and then again in the Summer before the annual conference…and that’s the list we’re presenting today.

  1. Information Security
  2. Student Success & completion
  3. Data-informed decision making
  4. Strategic leadership
  5. Sustainable funding
  6. Data mgmt and governance
  7. Higher ed affordability
  8. Sustainable staffing
  9. Next-gen enterprise IT
  10. Digital transformation of learning

* Bold items are new to the list this year.

Discussion of the Issues

  • Next Generation Enterprise IT: developing and implementing enterprise IT applications, architectures, and sourcing strategies to achieve agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and effective analytics.
  • Digital Transformation of Learning: collaborating with faculty and academic leadership to apply technology to teaching and learning in ways that reflect innovations in pedagogy and the institutional mission. Do you limit what tech people can use or do you have a limited set of tools you offer (limited set won the day). What’s the most misunderstood aspect of this issue? X solution = the panacea for digital learning. New networks are horizontal and personalized, not just content delivery online. It’s bigger than the implementation of a tech stack. Roles for people in this ecosystem will be different.
  • Strategic Uses of Data
    • Student Success and completion – effectively applying data and predictive analytics to improve student success and completion. What are the implications? The tech implementation does NOT necessarily solve the problem. Changing the culture is the hard part, especially when the technology adds another burden, i.e. just another chore. Aggregation of data from systems of record continues to be troublesome.
    • Data-informed decision making – ensuring that BI, reporting and analytics are relevant, convenient, and used by administrators, faculty and students. Engaging with all stakeholders is important to ensure we have the right data to make decisions…we all need to refer to the same dataset. IT needs to be the glue that holds all these folks together. Consider hiring a Chief Data Officer, to ask all these questions. Some faculty are getting student involvement by giving FitBits and recording what they eat as a means of educating them about owning their own data.
    • Data management and governance – improving the management of institutional data through data standards, integration, protection, and governance. How many people think that their data is always accurate? << laughter >> Are there outsized expectations of Big Data? Yes! It’s not about the tools, it’s about how people use the tools and how that affects the data downstream (which can be very bad). Use the data for what it is supposed to do…don’t adapt it for your own immediate purposes; rely on authoritative sources. Data is not a project, it’s a process.

 

Questions

How does this list make you feel? Do you feel hopeful? Cautious? Something else?

  • I think we’re collecting more data right now than we’re able to use effectively. Eventually, our ability to manage and process this data will become doable.
  • Cautiously optimistic.
  • As a PM, I’m nervous! What gives me hope is the fact that we’re not alone…we have this organization and our colleagues on other campuses.
  • IT is more relevant than ever…everybody is now a part of IT!

What was issue 11?

  • Building a sustainable workforce (but next-gen IT workforce was)

Did we slice the data by different university types?

  • Yes! It will be in the January issue.

Where can you get a copy of these slides?

  • Somewhere on the EDUCAUSE web site 🙂

What skills are necessary for next-gen IT?

  • How to read contracts << laughter >>
  • Click-throughs are not a good idea. Legal counsel will have a problem with 60 page documents with embedded links to other documents.
  • Business Analyst mentality will become more important.
  • You don’t know how much you know until you know how much you care.
  • Soft skills are really important – distributed leadership and the support to do that.

 

Categories
Technology

Your Legacy: An Organization That Delivers Strategic Value, Again and Again

Presenters

  • Dean Meyer, President, NDMA
  • Julie Little, VP, EDUCAUSE

There’s lots going on in education technology right now! Tons of enabling tech that changes business, education, and business models. Make learning engaging, contextual and visual.

Types of Strategic Value

Growing human intellect is absolutely strategic!

  1. Keep business running (deliver existing services)
  2. Reduce costs of IT
  3. Reduce costs of business (productivity)
  4. Improve human effectiveness (thinking, collaboration)
  5. Improve customer relationships, loyalty (engagement)
  6. Enhance product value

As a senior leader, what can you do to drive your organization up this ladder?

The Classic Definition of the Role of a CIO portrays us superman / superwoman, but the reality is that the CIO becomes a cog in the machine…often a bottleneck. Wouldn’t it be better to be the driver of the machine. To get there, you need to first be the designer of the machine. Our systems send signals that guide people. For CIOs, these signals are often about building an empire.

How you define leadership changes as you advance in your career, describable through different lenses.

  1. Project management
  2. Supervision
  3. Business strategies
  4. Organizational designer

Leaving the legacy of an organization that can prosper, with or without you. Program the organizational system.

The Machine

“The programming language of leadership”

  1. Structure
  2. Metrics & rewards
  3. Internal Economy
  4. Culture
  5. Methods and Tools

Culture

The easiest thing to change. Mixture of values and behaviors. You critique the behavior, not the people.

Structure

  • Org chart
  • Workflows

Internal Economy

  • Planning
  • Dynamic governance

Methods & Tools

  • Individual competencies of individual groups
  • Fine tuning

Metrics & Rewards

  • Dashboards, consequences
  • Fine tuning

Value Chain

  • Expertise in linkage: business-IT. This is a kind of “bridging knowledge.” [Structure: “sales”]
  • Collaborative discovery: help others find the things they need. [Methods: discovery]
  • Broad, innovative catalog. You need a quiver full of different arrows to apply to any given problem. [Internal Economy: business planning]
  • Time to develop proposals. [Internal Economy: unbillable time]
  • Project funding. [Internal Economy: demand management]
  • Delivery: capability, teamwork. Deliver on-time and on-budget. [Structure: walk-throughs]
  • Benefits realization. Make sure things get used! [Culture: business within a business; Methods: benefits measurement]

3 Parallel Leadership Strategies

  • Business Value
  • Capabilities: tech, operations
  • Organization (often neglected by leadership because it’s so foundational to the success of the first two strategies)

Big three are Culture, Structure, and Internal Economy. After this, methods & tools, metrics & rewards.

Exercise

  • What does world class IT team mean to you?
  • Measure the gaps. These are the symptoms of something deeper in your organization. Keep asking WHY until you get to one of the fundamentals.
  • Sequence the Root Causes into your strategy.
  • Publicize your strategy among your staff and the peers in your institution.

Free yourself from the tyranny of urgency.

Categories
Education Technology

The 2016 MMWCon Mega Post

Hey friends,

Once again, it’s time for another one of my conference “mega posts,” this time from the 2016 UCLA Mobile & Modern Web Conference. This mega post links to the notes I took from almost every session I attended, and proves that I was here and learned something. Some of this will be more useful than others…I drifted at times. There was some great work on display at this conference; I always meet awesome people and take away at least a couple gems that I didn’t know going in. As always, any mistakes, omissions or just plain crappy coverage are totally mine. Who knows, I may have even gotten something right 😉 Enjoy!

Wednesday, October 14

Thursday, October 15

Friday, October 16

 

Categories
Accessibility Technology

Making Peoplesoft Accessible at the University of Minnesota

Presenter: Hendrix Bodden from GreyHeller

Project Overview

  • Campus views Disability as Diversity
  • Large Peoplesoft installation
  • Self-service was not accessible, but required high customization
  • Upgrade: new version splitting CS/HR databases; accessibility came in at the end; modifying PS pages in-house to make accessible too expensive!
  • Deque provided accessibility assessments
  • Intrasee provided UX

Access & Accessibility: Details

  • Use cases (there were TONS on student and HR)
  • Test User accounts
  • Environments
  • Test data
  • Collaboration tools

Platform-wide accessibility

  • Interaction: all functionality available from keyboard
  • Optimized UX: easy to use
  • Full-featured: parity with desktop use.

Product Demonstration

  • Transformation of the HTML provided by the out of the box Peoplesoft pages (it looks sooo much nicer).
  • Ran the page on an iPad with VoiceOver – this was a powerful demonstration of the proper use of markup.

PeopleMobile

  • Plug-in to PeopleSoft environment (on the PS web server)
  • Inherits from deployed PeopleSoft system: security rules, all business rules & audits, all calculations, all customizations and bolt-ons made by a customer, all database updates and access
  • Starting point is the PeopleSoft page
  • All back-end logic is the same

Semantic HTML

  • Ensures proper HTML structure: sequence, hierarchy, eliminates extraneous content, proper relationships & roles
  • Eliminates dependency on CSS for proper display
  • Showed a slide of audit of the enrollment shopping cart

Common PeopleSoft HTML Issues

  • Lightboxes
  • Prompt Dialogs
  • Set appropriate values for heading, subheadings, grids
  • Sets presentation mode attributes on read-only tables
  • Associates labels with form fields

Improves Navigation & Taxonomy

  • Sets Aria roles
  • Sets navigation role
  • Adds skip links
  • Tabs & tab structure
  • Links & buttons
  • Navigation menus and submenus

Improving End-User Interaction

  • Highlight content in focus
  • Remember scroll position on reloads, AJAX updates, and other processing

Lessons Learned: Challenges

  • High-level commitment to accessibility
  • Accessibility integrated from day one
  • Changing FTE commitments at U
  • Understanding of fuller picture
  • Immature U processes

 

Categories
Student Affairs Technology Uncategorized

Student Affairs and Social Media

Warning:  I’m about to sound like a curmudgeon.  I’ve held my tongue (so to speak) on this topic for several years now, but Eric Stoller’s post today in Inside Higher Ed was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  And to be clear, this has nothing to do with this specific post, or with Eric personally.  I’ve never met Eric, and I find many of his posts thought-provoking and entertaining.  I just had to put what I’ve been thinking about into words.

Maybe I need to broaden my online reading horizons, but whenever I see posts about technology in student affairs, nine times out of ten it’s about social media.  Social media and leadership.  Social media and identity.  Social media and the admissions process.  Social media and emergency notification systems.  Social media and campus climate.  Social media and why you’re missing the boat if you’re not on the latest platform.  Enough already!  Without a doubt, social media is important, and there are interesting ramifications for students with this new “permanent record” that we older folks haven’t come to grips with yet.

Many rising stars in the student affairs profession are brilliant at using social media as a platform for self-promotion.  An irrepressibly upbeat attitude coupled with a positive message goes a long way in this field.  If you have an EdD, you’re probably also an unstoppable force of nature and you don’t give a damn what I think.  Popularity contests don’t bother me.  What bothers me is the implicit connection being made that somehow social media IS technology.

That’s wrong, and it really grinds my gears.  Mastery of social media is not the same thing as mastery of technology.

Legions of IT pros in student affairs support an incredibly diverse range of systems, services and infrastructure.  Most of them work behind the scenes and don’t draw any attention to themselves.  It just so happens that the things they work on aren’t perceived as being as sexy as “SoMe.”  But the systems they manage are an integral part of what makes a university run.  And if any of those systems fail, boy howdy.

What makes social media interesting as a technology (at least to me) is that they’re platforms designed from the ground up AS PLATFORMS.  They’re easy to integrate with and can “talk to” virtually any system you can shake a stick at.  But this isn’t what student affairs social media evangelists talk about.  They instead use it as a fulcrum to leverage against current hot topics in the field.

I usually don’t complain without bringing some sort of solution to the table, but in this case I’m annoyed and need to vent a bit.  Maybe the quiet techies need to speak up more and participate in standards-making bodies.  Maybe they should be more active in (gasp) social media.  The only thing I can say for sure is that I’d really like to see the student affairs social media evangelists slow their roll a smidge.

Frankly, I doubt this post will resonate with anyone.  Hardly a surprise, given my massive double-digit readership.  Maybe I should take the hint and use social media more effectively << sighs >>