DLT Direction Setting Feb 19 2007

I've been looking online for another New Yorker cartoon on blogs that I liked but haven't been able to find it so far. It shows a guy at his PC with the caption "And then I opened a can of vegetable soup for lunch."

An update on the progress we're making on the DLT Goals:

Goal #1: Develop a culture of collaboration and team-work by integrating more fully with ITS.

On Thursday, February 15th, Janis and Mairéad met with Jim Leous from Emerging Technologies, and Rhonda Brown and Kurt Baker from CSS IT Consultants group to talk about a meeting to start a discussion on possible collaborative opportunities within ITS. We had a good discussion and have scheduled a follow up meeting for Friday, March 2 from 8 - 10 am (this is one of our regular DLT all staff meeting slots). We anticipate areas of discussion will include repositories, data curation and preservation, Web 2.0 technologies, Web services, and Shibboleth. We quickly decided to include ITECH as much as possible in these activities. Agenda to follow.

Goal #2: Strengthen our partnership with the Library to better serve students, faculty and staff.

ITECH has nominated Sylvia MacKinnon and Jennifer McCauley to work with us on organizing a joint DLT/ITECH meeting. Peggy is going to be following up looking for DLT reps for this.

Goal #3: Look for operational efficiencies and invest in R&D for new technologies.

Enhancing Documentation: The team looking at linking to the ITS Knowledge Base with Libraries specific documentation and FAQs, as well as developing a home for in-house documentation met again last week. (Team is Justin (lead), Joni, John, Peggy, Lance and Tun.) They would like to follow up this week with a short survey of DLT folks to get feedback on what they'd like to see as part of the in-house documentation.

Progress has also been made setting up a Wiki to support our DLT Direction setting work and Lynn gave a short presentation this morning on the topic. Our DLT Wiki is now in place.

The snow day last Wednesday meant we've had to put the kick-off meeting for the UL IT Services Analysis project back another couple of weeks. However, Ann Snowman and I are looking at a couple of ways to get some prep work done offline in the meantime.

Goal #4: Commit to professional development, training and information sharing.

Maryam did an informal survey of folks to see how the group interpreted my suggestion of "creating a permanent DLT team to identify appropriate professional development and training opportunities, and to establish "career paths" of sorts." The results were interesting and a reminder to me to keep taking those Communication 101 classes: some thought the group would be about limiting the range of opportunities, or even having approval authority for training, as well as having the responsibility for ensuring that training opportunities were being pursued. That's a lot more work than I had in mind (why don't people read my mind??) and I think the Wiki and the SRDP process will both serve very well in keeping us focused on training.

Goal #5: Implement project management in collaboration with our Library partners.

Not sure if the Project Management 101 is scheduled yet; Tun was busy last week preparing for his presentation at the SIRSI conference being held in Colorado Springs this week. ITECH has also identified some local project management training that we need to explore. Good topic for our joint meeting. More to follow on the possibility of a dedicated project manager hire.

Goal #6: Make DLT a "preferred workplace".

I'm going to keep any follow ups from the Suggestion Box to our in-person meetings. The struggle to find a comfortable conference chair for Mairéad's office continues.

Meanwhile, the agenda for this Friday's meeting is resource management and our R&D agenda. We may also have a Wiki demo.