Back in the beginning of time, when the internet was first being born, very few people had an email account, and if you did, its use was very limited.   I still remember Netnorth being established (google it) and the excitement it brought.   It was about connecting disparate universities in Canada and allowing us to set standards and protocols to begin using things like e-mail.  That was a time when fname@domain worked because there weren’t 5 million John Does and I ended up with bo@uoguelph.ca.  It was all very informal.

In those early days there were not many people to talk to so your inbox was never overflowing.  Communications were predominately work based.   As the commercial internet evolved, we began to see more email accounts and people began to use their University email account for personal use.   The line was blurred, it was familiar and it just grew that way.  Nobody was really thinking long term and there really wasn’t a pressing problem for getting yet another email account.

Probably about 7 or 8 years ago I actively began using an external email account and separating my personal correspondence from work correspondence.  The transition is not an easy undertaking and there is an investment needed.  To me, this seemed prudent, as I did not want people to assign my personal views to the University and I didn’t want my personal correspondence accessible on the University systems.   Many of my peers did the same thing, but there are still many people in higher education who do not make that separation.

The interesting question is whether this is a problem or not.  In the last few months I have been made aware of a few instances where people expressed strong personal opinions on issues outside of the University, using their University email accounts.  People external to the University felt  these views were associated with the University, because it came from a University email account.  In one of the instances the individual signed the email with their personal address.  I assume this was intended as a signal that it was, in their view, not representative of the institution.  There was likely a big disconnect happening here.

Is this one of those problems unique to universities.  I suspect not, but I also suspect it is more prevalent in higher educations.   How do we resolve this?  Given that we have ‘tolerated’ this until now, I suspect it needs to be an education of the community around best practices and talking about why it is a better option for them personally.

At Queen’s we have a series of Email and FIPPA Best Practices.   Right in the opening paragraph it is noted that: “Email is increasingly used for conducting University business and is viewed as a University record”.  I think this is consistent with a trend towards separating out your personal email and it is interesting to note that an email is a University record.  It also goes on to state: “Whenever possible don’t use email to communicate confidential or sensitive information or personal information” and “Email bears University identifying marks. Use the same care with it as you would with University letterhead”.   I think these can be interpreted in different ways, but there is clearly a delineation being made.

These are  good practices that we should all follow and I think the last point is particularly relevant.  Whether or not you believe there can be a separation between business and personal on the same email account, people external to the community may see it the same way as issuing something on letterhead.  It is simply in your best interest to avoid confusion by separating out your personal emails.   Accounts are freely available and can be easily linked, so the barriers are small.

In addition to these best practices, the University has also has been updating a series of policies around Information Security.  The latest iteration of the Acceptable Use Policy states, in Seciton 5.1: You will use Queen’s IT resources for the academic and administrative purposes for which they are intended.   This is very clear, and although this notion has been around for a long time it has never been enforced.  It would be challenging to change that position now.

The easier course is for us to  build awareness around the pitfalls of using your University email for personal use, and the advantages from separating it out to an external account.   A lot of my private sector colleagues have disclaimers at the end of their emails.  In addition to the legal issue it addresses I think it also builds awareness around the institutional  record

So at the end of the day, is there a problem?   I think there is, but the community practice is moving us away from the problem. I think that building a little more awareness on the issue will allow people to make their own informed decision and we will see less use of the institutional account for personal correspondence.

This morning a friend of mine tweeted an article on The 5 types of Leadership Canada Needs Right  Now. (Thanks Mike!)   I must admit that I usually don’t follow the National Post (Financial Post), but I might have to re-consider, especially if they include content like this.  The fact that the on-line Globe wants to charge me after 10 reads a month may also influence that decision.

There is a lot of good insight in this post and it covers a lot of ground.  Brett Wilson covers leadership perspectives from the way we run our business, to our personal lives, to how we look at the environment. I think this is the value of the article.  It can be many things to many people. You don’t have to buy into it all, but even one or two takeaways are worth the read.

He starts out by talking about the US election and the desire for leadership (from our elected officials).  He goes on to say: “… voters are an inconsistent bunch. We expect a lot of our elected officials, but we don’t always hold ourselves to the same standard.”  I think this transcends to any type of leadership and any organization.   Sometimes we forget our own role in a change process.  He even goes on to quote Ghandi: ” it’s time for us to be the change we want to see in the world. ”

I especially like the section on Personal Leadership.  This is something we are working on in our organization and something I am passionate about.  I think it is foundational to any organization that is driving cultural change.  In the article, Brett Wilson says personal leadership “… requires self-discipline and commitment to positive self-belief, such as: having confidence you can succeed; staying true to your ethics; remaining optimistic even when the odds aren’t great; not letting fear of failure get you down; believing the brightest days are ahead; inspiring and being inspired; believing you can keep improving (even in small ways)….”

I will leave it there and encourage you to take read – it is short and and beefy and to the point.

p.s. I always thought he was the most interesting Dragon.

Yesterday the Educause IT Issues Panel met.  The group meets a few times a year and this was our yearly f2f meeting at the Annual Educause Conference.  Unfortunately I couldn’t make the trip this year and had to participate on-line.   That being said, the bulk of our work (facilitation) is done with back channel discussions and polls on Adobe Connect.  It is a format that I think works very well.  I did not feel I was hampered at all by being one of the three people at a distance.

At the moment I am the only Canadian on the panel, and that in itself is at times interesting, but mostly inconsequential.   There are some differences around structure, such as public vs. private and the state/province and federal split, regulatory requirements and acronyms, but at the end of the day we all face very similar issues and approach things the same way.   One of our threads this meeting, led to a point about what the European’s and Asian were doing in terms of service levels.   That usually does not happen, and I hope we do this more.

As usual we had a great discussion, this time focusing on 3 ‘questions’:

1.  What is the single biggest IT-related issue currently facing your institution?
2. What are the most Strategic Technologies for Higher Education over the next 3 years? (seeded by some definitions from the recent Gartner Symposium).
3. What is the most appropriate role of the CIO in Higher Ed, for the rest of the decade and why?

We still need to flesh out the ideas in this discussion and will do that at our next meeting, so I don’t want to pre-empt that.   I do however want to talk a bit about the role of the CIO and some things that came out there.

It seems that Universities are still trying to figure out how to integrate IT funding and decision making into the enterprise of the organization.   Does the CIO report through the admin side and/or the academic side of the house?   Is IT a cost centre or a strategic investment for the institution?  Does the CIO run the enterprise IT shop or does the CIO have a visionary role for integrating all of IT into teaching, learning and research enterprise.  Does the CIO do both?

There was a interesting post today in the Technology and Learning Blog at Inside Higher Ed by Joshua Kim, where there was a discussion of highlights from this years Educause Confernce.  One post talked about the gap between Presidents/Provosts and the CIO on the effectiveness of IT investments.  The presentation was based on the Campus Computing Project.   The takeaway was that “Presidents and provosts are generally less sanguine about the effectiveness of IT investments than their IT officers.”   The author goes on to say: “We should all pay attention to this discrepancy in perceptions of the efficacy of IT investments between our academic and IT leadership” and shares some thoughts on why this discrepancy exists.  To me, the statement itself identifies the problem when it talks about the academic and IT Leadership not being aligned.  I think this clearly shows that the CIO needs to be integrated into the academic leadership of the organization – they need to be one and the same – there – I played my cards.   There are no IT investments, there are only “business” investments  that use IT as an enabler, so the CIO needs to be embedded in the academic and research enterprise.

The other thing we talked about was the role of Chief Digital Officer.   I am still processing this, but very interesting.   If you have a Gatner subscription there is a paper by Dave Aron on Does your business need a CDO?.  There is also a provocative piece on Why every budget is an IT budget, that includes a discussion of this role….. but these are for a future post(s)

I recently saw an interesting lunchtime keynote at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando.   Kenneth Daly of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) spoke on such things as what is important to your board and how to help your board.  NACD is an interesting organization that certainly has some valuable material and  even though the focus may be on corporate America I saw a lot of value for Public Sector Higher Ed.

The top three items that concern boards (I believe this was form a survey) were:

1. Strategic Planning and Oversight
2. Corporate Performance
3. Risk Oversight

There was some discussion around the relationship/overlap between 1 and 3, but I do think these are the relevant points.   I ponder how we measure Corporate Performance in Higher Education.  More so whether we have the proper metrics in place, rather than what success is.

The piece I found most interesting in his talk was around the question:  “How can I help the board?”.  Remember that this talk was given to a roomful of CIO’s and VP of Technology.   Probably most are private sector, but there was a big public sector presence.   The following  are also my interpretation of what was said – there were no slides.

1. Really understand their challenges – these aren’t your challenges, they are the board specific challenges.
2. Meet with the committee chairs about what they want and need.  Include the CFO in that discussion.   If you do a better job supporting them they do a better job.
3. Oversight of risk is a team sport.   It is not just for the board audit committee.
4.  Assist in agenda setting.    50-60% of the agenda should be about having a dialogue.    (I really like the part on dialogue here).
5. Help them understand how to identify and find the anomalies.
6. Remember that there is asymmetric information.   We have the details and they need to identify where the risks are too high and identify what to do.
7. Do something about IT.  Sometimes the board struggles to ask the right questions.   Make sure IT has an impact on strategy.

Daly also mentioned that NACD has been working with Gartner on 6-7 modules to educate directors and these should be available in the 2^nd Q of 2013.   I look forward to reviewing these as I suspect it will be helpful for the C level executives as well.

Last week the ITS management team got to hear presentation from the MBA840 class.  Earlier in the term they had been divided into teams and given two questions to consider.  One around enhancing the student experience and one on nurturing a culture of assessment in ITS.

Topic One

How can Queen’s  “enhance the student experience using technology”? This topic encourages teams to think about how graduate and undergraduate students are interacting with universities today and how they may interact differently in the future.  The challenge is to describe one or two ideas or innovations that Queen’s University should consider implementing that would make it easier for prospective students, current students, and alumni to know about and interact with Queen’s

Topic 2

Given the push for more accountability in public sector institutions and Queen’s move to an activity based budget model (http://www.queensu.ca/news/articles/provost-presents-new-budget-model), we need to nurture a culture of assessment in IT Services. Your project would require you to propose a small number of measurable indicators (3-5) that will best represent the performance of IT Services in its mission for the University

These were very different questions, the first being open to creativity and exploration, while the second, although requiring some creativity had a more particle outcome.   The students were challenged to clearly identify their ideas and how they could be implemented.   I saw the presentations as a pitch to ITS and we were looking for doable ideas.

Needless to say we were not disappointed with the breadth of ideas that came out.   On the student experience side there was a lot of discussion on SSO and creating a “portal-type” experience.   I think we were a bit surprised about this.  The issues haven’t changed much from those we first heard almost 10 years ago.  What was different was the understanding of SSO and the influence of “apps”.    The students really want a simple point of entry to everything they do.   They find the current disjointed approach frustrating.  Whether it is disjointed apps, with various authentication schemes, or simply disjointed ownership and support.

The problem here seems so easy to define and the solution so simple to undertake, but we still struggle with challenges, particularly those of disjointed ownership of applications.

Other interesting ideas included distributing tablets, with the university negotiating licences for e-books.   The distribution of tablets is a case of déjà vu.   We went through this with laptops and too many times the technology was put in place looking for a solution.  I really like the negotiating e-book licences, which has the potential to be a game changer.

Another group delivered  a pitch around something called “classroom connect” .   It is an attempt to integrate the back channel into a classroom discussion.  It works very similar to something like Adobe Connect, except the piece were comments come up is vetted through synchronous peer review and only appears on the professors screen if it has been determined to be ‘worthwhile’ by a students peers.

Creating community was also discussed.  One group talked about linking with existing communities, but connecting the dots between potential students, current students and alumni.  I really see potential in creating this and the business students are probably the ones who would see the most value and be the best place to pilot something.  It likely all comes down to identity and how we provision and retain peoples identity so that they can generate their own trusted communities around Queen’s.

This post doesn’t do justice to all of the ideas.  I haven’t even touched on the analytics, but will leave that for another day.  This was very helpful for ITS and I hope the students got something out of it as well.

The following post is an opportunity for me to think out loud about a process that our ITS organization is going through.

A couple of weeks ago we held two sessions with staff in ITS to give them the results of a Cultural Review.   Meghan Kirwin, of the Kirwin Group conducted a series of one on one, and focus group meetings with staff in ITS.   The interviews were designed to cover various key areas related to cultural within ITS.  It did not ask broader questions about Queen’s and distributed IT.  That is being left to a ITS Peer Review, currently under way.

It began late last year when we established a small working group, of staff and managers, to look at Talent Management within the organization.  The groups mandate somewhat broadened, and they decided to undertake this cultural review.  In my mind, I view this as an exercise to test the strength of our foundation.  Where is the organization at; what are the big issues for staff; what things do we need to resolve before we start building a new culture in ITS and moving the organization forward.

The results of the Review were extensive and not everything is discussed here.    As is the case with many of these things, consistent themes quickly surfaced.   If we were to summarize into two high level themes, in terms of opportunities for change/improvement, they would be around Career Development and Leadership.

In terms of organizational strengths, ITS is built on Talented People and organized into Strong Working Teams.   People are considered technically strong, believe in the higher education mission, and work collaboratively in a friendly and respectful environment.  Flexibility in terms of work hours and work/life balance, also surfaced.  I think this is common within Higher Ed., and is an important factor in terms of total rewards for people.  This is not always the easiest thing to describe during the recruitment process, but is critical in influencing retention.

Training also surfaced as a strength, although it doesn’t seem to be consistently delivered across the organization.  Possibly surprising, was the fact that organizational communication was identified as a strength.   This is not normally the case, but if accurately observed, sets us up with a strong foundational piece.   That being said, comments coming from staff also indicated a lack of time and/or desire to access the information for some individuals.   This is certainly, something worth exploring.

In terms of Organizational Opportunities, the staff identified significant resource constraints.   Firefighting feels like the norm, leading to less flexibility and little time for innovation or focus on strategic ideas.  A key observation by staff was that key strategic roles were missing.   This is something that can be addressed and we need to explore this further.  A key recommendation was the development of an HR planning process that focuses on the needs of the whole organization.

Performance Development was also identified as an opportunity.  Currently, the staff feel that the process is inconsistent across the organization and performance gaps are not managed effectively.  Career Development and Compensation were also identified.     Employees felt a sense of inequality, and that there were not appropriate incentives to grow.   Much of this can tie back to establishing a strong talent development process, looking at career paths, succession planning and aligning with our performance development process.   In terms of compensation more work needs to be done on aligning what employees value in the work place to total compensation, and being sure that we monitor this going forward.

There was a great deal of discussion around leadership in the organization.  Structure was identified as a weakness and clarity around roles needed to be better identified and communicated.  There was a general feeling that we needed to define a philosophy around leadership and set clear expectations for the team.  One of the first things we are going to look at is 360’s for the management team, followed by 360’s for the coordinators.   This should be a good growth opportunity for the team and the organization.

When it came to my role, as CIO , and leading through change there was a lot of cynicism.  The review heard on a number of occasions “been there, done that, why is this different?” .  Personally, this is challenging, and requires patience, but I can’t say it was unexpected.   We need to stay the course, act on the recommendations, build trust and hope that people see the change.

This is simply a summary of some of the points that came out in the review.    Next steps are for the Culture Working Group (CWG) to take the feedback and recommendations and put a plan in place to address them.  The CWG is also looking on creating a summarized version of the results that can be posted on the web.  There is some low-hanging fruit, but developing a culture of engagement where people really like coming to work is going to take time.   I look forward to the next steps.

Today I am going to cheat a bit and highlight a post from Mark Roman’s blog.  http://markroman.blogspot.ca/2012/07/what-is-difference-between-cio-and-it.html?spref=tw   I really enjoy reading his blog because it always seems to highlight something I am thinking about or struggling with.

In this post Mark gives a concise perspective on the difference between a CIO and an IT Director.   As I continue to adjust to my new role here at Queen’s I sometimes find myself clarifying that difference.   I point out that ITS is one component in the CIO portfolio. Having to explain this is not a bad thing.  I think a good leader continually provides clarity on their role and the role of others in the organization.   I have a MT retreat coming up in a couple of weeks and I hope we get to spend some time on defining roles and compentencies that reflect our roles.

Further to this distinction Queen’s has also recently re-branded the CIO role to include the title Associate Vice Principal Information Technology.   That is something I frequently find myself explaining , especially beyond ITS.   To me, it is just a further deepening of the engagement in the teaching and research enterprise at the institution.   It takes us further along the road to embedding IT decision making into the everyday decisions of the institution, rather than making these decisions on there own and on the side.

Finally I managed to squeeze in a trip to Saskatoon to attend the spring meetings of CUCCIO, The Digital Infrastructure Summit 2012 and the CANHEIT conference.      During CANHEIT, I went for a tour of the Canadian Light Source.   This is an example of  really big Science and they have an impressive tour to go along with it.  Great job by the student tour guides    In lay-person terms (from a lay-person perspective), they spin electrons around a circle, about the size of a hockey arena, using magnets to propell and bend the light.  The electrons get close to the speed of light and at specific points in time they send the light ray down a “beamline”.  It travels through, or around the object (I wasn’t sure at this point) and then they analyze the light spectrum to study the objects at the atomic level.   In a sense, it is just a giant telescope where they can put in tiny pin sized objects, or objects as large as a cow.  Interestingly they do not damage the objects.  The important thing from my perspective is how accessible and understandable the outcomes are. It was fascinating to see the real and important questions being answered by researchers here.  Whether it was checking where diamonds come from, or looking at the structure of wetlands, or solving public health issues it was all accessible.

CANHEIT had many good presentations this year.   I thought Jim Carse, from Queen’s, gave a good presentation about our ERP  project  -   QUASR .  He shared a lot about what worked and didn’t work and the lessons learned.   The openness to share the good and the bad is what makes higher ed, such a rewarding place to work.

I also really enjoyed the Roadmap presentation by Microsoft.   It was very informative and timely for us.   Both these presentations can be found on the program site.

The Digital Infrastrcture Summit was  an attempt to “to sow the seeds for a comprehensive, integrated and sustainable digital infrastructure across Canada, making it easier for researchers to research and effectively compete on the international stage”.   It brought together represetatives from government, granting agencies, the research community, universities and organizations responsible for various components of digital infrastructure for research, education and innovation in Canada.  In a sense it was another kick at the can, trying to generate some momentum by painting a vision and principals across all the pillars (Network, Storage, Analytics , Currtion and Preservation).  It was an attempt to put researchers at the forefront and drive action.  Undoubtedly Canada is slipping behind in this area.

There was a lot of good passionate debate on where we are at, what the roadblocks are and where we could/should be going.    At the end of the day, a small leadership council was established, with broad representation to push the agenda forward over the next year.   I look forward to seeing the progress of this group.

So – that was the end of the Spring Conference season for me – next stop was a family move….

Later in the spring I also attended the 39^th meeting of IASSIST in Washington.  IASSIST stands for the International Associaion for Social Science Information Services and Technology.   This is always a mouthful when you cross a border and try to explain where you are going and what you are doing.  This was my first trip to Washington, and although there was no time for sightseeing, I did get a sense of a very beautiful and historic city.    A return trip will be made.

The best part about IASSIST is the opportunity to network with an incredibly experienced and passionate group of data librarians and data professionals from around the world.  This is the one conferences I attend where I am guaranteed to come back inspired with new ideas.

This year I had the privilege of chairing a session on Planning for Preservation: TDR/OAIS in data archives.  In this session we had speakers from Finland, Netherlands, USA and Canada.    All were excellent and reflect the breadth of activities happening around the world   I was particularly interested with where Scholar’s Portal was taking things.  The team there is doing some amazing things with projects like ODESI and the Geospatial Portal, that are transforming the way we access and manage information for teaching and research. Scholar’s Portal clearly shows that by combing resources across institutions we can accomplish way more than acting as independent agents.

The most transformative presentation I saw was by Stuart Macdonald of EDINA.  In this talk he discussed crowd sourcing of the Scottish Post Office Directories and Census records in the 18th and 19th century and linking these to contemporaneous maps.  On top of this they were working on an augmented reality app to be used in the city of Endinburgh.   Imagine walking through town, pointing your camera at a building and looking at all sorts of crowd sourced information about individuals who lived there in the past.  Absolutely fascinating.

The final take away for me was that IT has a big role to play in supporting the research mission through high performance computing, large data and analytics (see the Educause Top Ten IT Isssues, 2012)   Something that the IASSIT memebers have been doing for a long time.

So much for keeping things ‘fresh’.   Now that we are making this live and I have made it through the spring, I hope a little more discipline will keep this going.   I have a few notes written that I will begin to publish.

Each spring is always a challenge as it generally lines up with several conferences, just as people on campus are ramping up with a non-teaching term.  This year I also added a personal distraction, as my family finally joined me in Kingston.   Moving was much more eventful than I had imagined, but the end result is fantastic.

This spring I did attend OUCC at the University of Toronto – Mississauga.   I had never been to this campus before and it was in a very beautiful setting.   It was not at all what I had expected,  being in the heart of a major Canadian urban setting.    I really enjoyed the keynote by Corinne Charette who is the Chief Information Officer for the Government of Canada.  An interesting discussion was had on Shared Services Canada ,  and the notion of Standardize, Integrate and Re-engineer.   There is a lot to be learned from that simple statement and things that can be applied in higher ed.   It certainly sounded like some of the same distributed issues we face daily.

I enjoyed a presentation from Richard Dumala, at the University of Windsor on a Cloud-based Survey Tool.  He talked about their implementation of Fluid Surveys, a Canadian cloud solution provider.   I think there would be a real benefit to our community if these types of cloud services made use of the Canadian Access Federation.  We need to acknowledge that our communities span multiple institution’s and managing multiple accounts shouldn’t be an issue.   Getting a campus solution for a survey tools is something we are looking at for Queen’s.  We are interested in a tool that can handle our administrative needs as well as the needs of our researchers in a secure, cost effective and easy to use environment.

I also managed to squeeze in IASSIST and CANHEIT this spring and will add more in another blog post.