Some answers to questions from the Spring 2010 ITS All-staff meeting

With only a little time to address all of the questions that have come up for the spring 2010 ITS all-staff meeting, I thought I'd take a stab at answering some of the questions here.

Signs are currently positive for there being a general salary increase this year, but no guarantees can be made.  As soon as university leadership knows, we'll get the word out as we always have.

The long term future of health care costs - to Penn State and its employees - is very much up in the air.  In this regard, Penn State is no different than any other employer in any other state, in any other nation it would appear.

With respect to "skimming off the top to make everybody's raise smaller" - that's misinformed and I can help.  I hold back a small percentage of the general pool for the purposes of driving a larger differentiation among raises.  The goal is not to drive everyone's raise down, but rather to increase top performer's raises.

This all-staff, like the others, is being recorded.  There is value to getting communities of interest together, face to face.  We do it all of the time in settings like The Symposium, Security Day, the Web Conference, User Services Conference, TechPros, EDUCAUSE (all sorts of settings), I2, etc.  I think ITS deserves the same kind of moment that we try to be part of in other settings.  If you'd rather watch it at your leisure, that's fine.  But there is - all be it difficult to measure - value in face to face fellowship when developing relationships that will be relied upon mightily in the future.

I've had the fortune (or torture - depends on the conference) to serve on program committees for a variety of meetings and groups.  In every instance that I've been personally involved with, the feedback from those conferences has included commentary about needing more informal gathering time to allow for ad-hoc discoveries and conversations.  Half of our time for this all-staff (and the last one) is allotted to increasing the probability of fruitful

connections being made or advanced.  Again, hard to measure - but there's lots of evidence to suggest that lots of smart, dedicated people want that, in a variety of different contexts.

We're moving to an environment where there will be one unless a group has approval to do something different.  Even so, under the best of circumstances, needing something like integrated free-busy won't go away.  Even if there was one such system per institution, we still need to collaborate with people across institutions, organizations, etc.

We've retained the ability to fill the position, but with so much analysis underway it is premature to think we know what we need going forward.  I'd love for nothing more than to have Jeff be with us forever but that's not his future or ours.  Once ours becomes clearer, we'll make that decision. It will be hard to make due without him, but we'll have to figure it out.

We continue to invest in it because we continue to see a return on investing in Penn State IT leaders.  To those who want to assess based on buzz word increase or work place improvement, I'd say it's more complicated than that binary choice, just as it is with everything else we do.  Shared vocabulary, shared models are key for improvement in any realm (ask any sports team or orchestra).  One measure of improvement from my perspective is that there are increasingly more people that are turned to for leadership on a variety of projects and initiatives.  Everyone is a leader, not every does step up to it, not everyone wants to step up to it, some don't know how to step up to it.  ITLP has helped.

I love the question, probably because it gives me a chance to safely pitch what I think is the one initiative to rule them all.  I believe that if we could agree to developing an institutional tier one help desk and make it happen, that we'd develop lots of collaborative muscles that would help us tackle other issues.  Additionally, we'd reveal where it is there would be economies in normalization of services, and disaster if we did so.  To more directly answer the question - yes, I'm of the opinion that there should be such an ability.  Developing the will to pull it off is the trick and I  hope that the activities underway for the next 6-36 months will create the right moments.

The development of that site and the IT Connects programs are related to trying and develop a spirit of collaboration among 1,300 IT employees distributed over 100 organizations.  Interestingly, we're collaborating better in the IT domain off campus than we are on campus - and that has to change in order to react to the new times.  Additionally, the institutions that figure out how to collaborate within their distribution will be the ones that pull away from the pack that gets created in tough economic times.

What will be the most important opportunities for Penn State when the new state-wide network becomes operational?

I don't know.  I'm not sure anyone knows.  As I've considered this myself, I've compared to being able to ask myself the question in about 1992 as the Internet was being built and the campus backbone was being built. I'm not sure anyone could have predicted what's happened since then, both good and bad.  I don't think we can abdicate our responsibility to anticipate changes, but right now I don't feel like we have enough knowledge to speculate with accuracy.  I'm humbled by what I wasn't thinking way back when.

I do believe, however, that rational speculation is important because the speed with which we enable our faculty and students to leverage the new capabilities can be a separator for Penn State.  Reducing the gap to efficacy will be important.

PennREN is a big deal, there's no doubt about it.  It is poised to have the same kind of impact that we endured when going from no network to a network, that's the kind of game changer it is going to be.  Having said all this, here are some starter ways in which we might see it impact Penn State (but don't lose sight of the fact that all non-profits in the Commonwealth stand to go through similar, transformative experiences):

- The notion of "One university, geographically distributed" is profoundly advanced with PennREN

- more and higher fidelity collaboration between faculty and students at different campuses

- new learning opportunities created with the opportunity of changing the way shared classes are taught

- PSU researchers will become more competitive and better positioned to be part of large international collaborative projects, at all campuses

I don't have any information to be able to present anything close to an authoritative response.  But watching what is happening across higher education, the US and the world - employee benefits are changing and very likely will change.  The kind of change posed in this question seems unlikely, but it is hard to use the word guarantee with anything these days.

Very.  I think it's important to examine what aspects of all services lend themselves to increase value in a mobile context and attack those.

A reasonable question to ask is - how can longitude and latitude be used to enhance the experience?