April 2007 Archives
Last week we held our 4th ITS Event and the first that combined this with the Expo. Typically we've held the Event every 18 months and the Expo every year. Both require a significant investment in time and the Event includes more than 100 of our staff. The Expo involves a number of our vendor partners who welcome the opportunity to meet and talk with faculty, staff and students.
We want to share information about ITS services and create an opportunity to allow easy sharing of knowledge and experience. Yet we don't want to tie up our staff for long periods of time which could be used in developing and delivering services.
So, what's the best way to move forward? Should we continue with what we did this year and hold another joint event/expo in 18 months? In 12 months? Should we try a slightly different approach and hold the Expo every year as we have traditionally done, but with a twist to it? The twist could be to provide a distinct focus theme to accompany the Expo. For example, identity mangement may be one, security another, or communications/collaboration yet a third.
If we took this approach, we could hold a full Event every two years and in between hold the focus theme approach. This might allow us to continue to have an event for the entire community but maximize the investment time and return.
What do you think?
How efficient are you throughout the day? Yeah, I know we all think we operate at 100% but that can't be the case. Certainly isn't for me. There is time spent reading about non-work items, talking with people about non-work subjects, letting brain idle or drift among a variety of topics with no particular focus. Sure, that's not all bad, but it does show that work efficiency is less than 100%.
So what? Well, think about the Penn State budget. At roughly $3.2B, it's big. If you strip out the sponsored research funds and Commonwealth funds, it's still in the $2B range, and that money comes mostly from student tuition.
So what if, as a whole, we operate at 90% efficiency? We're wasting $200M every year. That's $2400 per student, or nearly 21% of tuition.
Working more efficiently means looking for ways to work smarter, not harder. What are we doing that we can automate - making processess more accurate and allowing more time to devote to other activities. It means finding ways to work more collaboratively. ITS won't have all the good ideas and we can't develop or manage every service but collectively we can make the Univ. more efficient. It means spending time with students, faculty, researchers and administrative staff to understand their goals and how we can better aid in reaching them.
In short, it means taking the 4 themes for making ITS a better place and applying them persistently and consistently. Not sure of the 4 themes? Look here,
https://staff.its.psu.edu/themes.html
