The Importance of Sharing
The last three days I've listened to a number of institutions talk about the difficulty of creating IT policies and of having those policies adopted and followed. There seem to be three main problems that cause this:
- difficulty in thinking broadly.
- difficulty in thinking long term.
- the ambiguity of many words and phrases.
The schools with the most success have developed a collaborative approach to discussing and resolving questions, and from that approach a sense of trust has developed among the people who must approve and follow policy. This often requires more time than some desire for any one policy but over time provides for a better and more efficient policy process.
The basis of this approach is a willingness to share, to communicate openly, honestly and responsibily with each other. That same sense of sharing can be applied to our daily work environemnt. ITS is working on methods to make it easier for each of us in the organization to share and to discover what others have written. Kevin has encouraged each of us to do so.
Try it - talk about what works, what doesn't, what can make us a better organization, and be willing to read and respond to others. All of us have a voice, and all of us should use that voice appropriately without any fear of embarrassment or reproachment.
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You say:
Avoiding problem one is very important at Penn State. We need to think about the implications of everything we do to the broader Penn State. We need to make an effort to include representatives from those IT groups and administrative units not just as a matter of politics, but to endeavor to represent IT needs and requirements across Penn State.
By being wary of problem two, we avoid "one-offs" and think about interfaces, APIs, and systems that will exist to satisfy more than one problem.
Dealing with problem three speaks to the heart of some of the work we are doing with workflow. We need to set controlled vocabularies. We need to be consistent across systems with these vocabularies and nomenclature to encourage reusability and foster unexpected "mash-ups" of information.