July 2009 Archives
Burger King let's you have it your way. TiVo allows you to watch your favorite TV programs whenever you wish. You can read almost any newspaper article written in the whole world. You can tune into audio and video podcasts covering a dizzying array of topics. We have choice and we love it.
I can't stand that my cable company won't let me pick and choose what channels I want to pay for and watch. I can't stand restaurants that have "no exceptions" on sandwiches - it's a sandwich for heaven's sake. I have no patience for online ads that won't let me skip them if I choose. I get agitated when I don't have choice.
We want what we want, when we want it, how we want it. We're addicted to customization and freedom. The internet has amplified freedom of choice (of distribution channel at least) and customization to a scale that can feed our seemingly insatiable addiction.
When I think about myself and others as contributors via these channels, I get to enjoy the downside of all of this freedom of choice. In order for me to stay in touch with or communicate with colleagues, friends, and family I have to be plugged into The Matrix multiple ways. As I sat down to type this, I am running a client or web pages that do instant messaging, twitter, gather my RSS feeds, e-mail, several favorite blogs, several more favorite web pages, facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and ning. For me to reach or be reached - oops, hang on...my daughter just sent me a txt msg - I have to consume and contribute via multiple channels. If I ignore a channel, say twitter, I do so at my own peril. I'll miss out on all sorts of fascinating (yes, fascinating) chatter about information/happenings relevant to my job and tweets that make me laugh if I walk away from twitter (or other channels of distribution).
To be effective, I have to be able to express ideas and thoughts to many people. To be effective, I have to be able to ingest ideas and thoughts from many people. Because there are many channels, I have to tune into many of them to be effective. I have no choice.
I'm not complaining at all about the multiple channels even though it might sound like it. I did for a little while, but then I boiled it down to a value judgement about striving to be effective or not. I've chosen to plug in and listen, plug in and share. So I do have a choice, but it isn't the one I first thought it was.
Bad communication comes in many forms. It can be no communication, it can be poorly formed communication. Now, it can be a mismatch in how you are choosing to contribute and I am choosing to consume. If our choices don't line up, we're back to no communication.
If only there were something like a wave of communications :-) . Until I can surf those kinds of waves, I'll continue to choose to plug in and reach out.
Technorati Tags: communication, psuit, psuits
Burger King let's you have it your way. TiVo allows you to watch your favorite TV programs whenever you wish. You can read almost any newspaper article written in the whole world. You can tune into audio and video podcasts covering a dizzying array of topics. We have choice and we love it.
I can't stand that my cable company won't let me pick and choose what channels I want to pay for and watch. I can't stand restaurants that have "no exceptions" on sandwiches - it's a sandwich for heaven's sake. I have no patience for online ads that won't let me skip them if I choose. I get agitated when I don't have choice.
We want what we want, when we want it, how we want it. We're addicted to customization and freedom. The internet has amplified freedom of choice (of distribution channel at least) and customization to a scale that can feed our seemingly insatiable addiction.
When I think about myself and others as contributors via these channels, I get to enjoy the downside of all of this freedom of choice. In order for me to stay in touch with or communicate with colleagues, friends, and family I have to be plugged into The Matrix multiple ways. As I sat down to type this, I am running a client or web pages that do instant messaging, twitter, gather my RSS feeds, e-mail, several favorite blogs, several more favorite web pages, facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and ning. For me to reach or be reached - oops, hang on...my daughter just sent me a txt msg - I have to consume and contribute via multiple channels. If I ignore a channel, say twitter, I do so at my own peril. I'll miss out on all sorts of fascinating (yes, fascinating) chatter about information/happenings relevant to my job and tweets that make me laugh if I walk away from twitter (or other channels of distribution).
To be effective, I have to be able to express ideas and thoughts to many people. To be effective, I have to be able to ingest ideas and thoughts from many people. Because there are many channels, I have to tune into many of them to be effective. I have no choice.
I'm not complaining at all about the multiple channels even though it might sound like it. I did for a little while, but then I boiled it down to a value judgement about striving to be effective or not. I've chosen to plug in and listen, plug in and share. So I do have a choice, but it isn't the one I first thought it was.
Bad communication comes in many forms. It can be no communication, it can be poorly formed communication. Now, it can be a mismatch in how you are choosing to contribute and I am choosing to consume. If our choices don't line up, we're back to no communication.
If only there were something like a wave of communications :-) . Until I can surf those kinds of waves, I'll continue to choose to plug in and reach out.
Technorati Tags: psuit, psuits, communication
I'm at that age that I'm regularly bumping into old friends, school mates and the like that I haven't seen for many years. That first encounter is always a bit awkward when it's been a long time. So it is with getting back to blogging. I've set a goal of one per week (I know, weak in the eyes of the daily writer) but I think it's a goal I can manage.
And - to answer the question, "Why have I/we waited so long to chat when it is so easy?" - I truly haven't seen my lack of blogging as an abandonment, just that I filled up that time with other kinds of communication. It is most definitely time to get back to this platform, stick to it for awhile, and see what happens.
There is much to write about. There are many conversations that have been started around the university's strategic plan and those goals which information technology figures prominently. Now that the plan is official, I suspect and expect activity to pick up and formalize. The conversations to date, and even some of the real work to date on the plan, will serve the Penn State IT community well. Not a moment of it will be wasted.
As someone who likes to digest bad news before good, I'll serve it up the same way.
I've been unpleasantly surprised that coming out of almost every conversation, I hear a reflected wave - to varying degrees - that the plan and my reaction or ITS' reaction to it is some sort of "grab." I know how I'm thinking about it, I know how people in ITS are thinking about it and I'm also intensely aware of how I've been talking about it. If anyone thinks or talks about the plan as some sort of grab, it is on the way they are listening, not in the way anyone is thinking or talking. Please help us all get this reflected wave on top of the table so it can be talked about openly, or we'll have to wrestle this silent killer in our attempt to plot an improved course for IT planning every inch of the journey. The complexity of doing this is sufficiently difficult in its own right, the fiscal times make it even more so.
I've also been pleasantly encouraged that there seem to be a lot of us who are genuinely starting to think about what we do as information technology for Penn State, and that we do this as partners as opposed to competitors. We're all dealing with innovation spaces in our viewfinders and in those spaces there should be a friendly sense of competitive spirit. Being a good forecaster of technology and picking winners is a part of our ethos and skill set. Most of our portfolio, however, is in working together to solve the problems of all academic, administrative units regardless of longitude and latitude. When I encounter that sense of partnership, it is really energizing. It is in this collaborative space that we'll be working dominantly in the coming years - so getting past this stage of conversation in as healthy a manner as possible is important, really important.
Now on to something that I think will be more typical as I get back into the swing of blogging.
Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Hershey campus again. I've been there many times over the last 18 months to talk about a wide variety of issues. This most recent visit was representative of the many dimensions in which the two campuses (Hershey and UP) are rapidly getting closer together. There were conversations around the support of different kinds of research, managing identity in the ridiculously complex world of a teaching hospital, improving the boarding process for new medical and nursing students, being more hospitable to our students who receive prestigious fellowships off campus, and a very long conversation about almost everything you can think of in the technical layers of information technology.
I was very fortunate to receive a back stage tour of the Cancer Institute, only 6 days before they moved patients into the new facilities. The space was visually appealing and the instrumentation mind boggling. Most memorable, however, was the enthusiasm our tour guides (Joni PItcher, Rich Rauscher) had for the value that the new building will have in the lives of cancer patients and their families. It was really inspiring and one of those moments that had me remembering why it is I love working at a research university like Penn State. It is easy to get disconnected from how Penn State makes a difference when you're working at the information technology layers but when you get reminded, it is both liberating and energizing.
