DLT Direction Setting Feb 9 2007

Whenever I blog, I can't help thinking about this New Yorker cartoon:

In case you can't read the microscopic font, it says:

I had my own blog for awhile, but I decided to go back to pointless, incessant barking.

We had a productive meeting Friday to review progress on our six goals. A lot of our discussion focused on communication tools and how we can collaborate, interact, and track our progress on the goals. We decided that a Wiki rather than a blog (especially this blog!) would serve that purpose best. Justin took the action item of following up with the Emerging Technologies group to get access to their Wiki software. Hopefully, we should have the Wiki up and running in a week or so; we decided to stick to one Wiki rather than multiple ones.

Robin Anderson joined us and talked about blogs, wikis and RSS feeds, showed us what her group and TLT were using to create a communication hub of sorts for their work. Very much appreciate her doing this with absolutely no notice.

A quick report on the progress we're making on our goals:

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

Janis followed up by organizing a meeting with ET folks this Thursday to talk how we might plan a retreat/meeting together. In the meantime, Janis is going to be collecting ideas for that agenda and we'll continue that discussion in the Wiki as soon as it's available.

Maryam is following up with Kurt Baker, our IT Consultant, to review the idea of a developers' list and/or forum.

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

Mairéad and Peggy sent an email invitation to Dace Freivalds proposing a meeting with I-TECH. Dace is going to review with her folks and select a couple of people to work with a couple of DLT staff on planning.

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

The UL IT Services Analysis will have their kick-off meeting the week of February 12. (Mairéad distributed the charter for this project Friday morning.)

Justin took the lead on this and reported back for the team investigating the Knowledge Base idea: Review the possibility of providing a link to the ITS knowledge base with the possibility of creating library specific FAQ's. Here is Justin's report. Justin will keep the momentum going on this one and, once again, a great use for the Wiki. (Life will be close to perfect once we have that Wiki. That's what I said about this blog before I started it.)

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

Again, the Wiki was suggested as the locus for developing ideas and following up on them for this goal. (Always with the Wiki ..... )

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

Tun has started working on the Project Management 101 and this is a topic we'd definitely like to have on the agenda for our meeting with I-TECH. Tun has also applied project management to a SIRSI Steering Committee project and created two docs for that group; one on Project Management Steps and one applying those steps to one of their projects.

Mairéad has been looking into the possibility of a project management hire and discussing that with folks in ITS and the UL.

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

Suggestion box is in place, as well as a process for dealing with the suggestions and reporting back on them. We narrowly escaped putting into place a complicated and burdensome process for dealing with the suggestions but we managed to keep it simple in the end.

Mairéad has been making inquiries about some additional space for the summer equipmenet deliveries. Deb has ordered cubicle screens. More to follow here.

We did spend a lot of the meeting talking about how we can communicate about this work and keep the momentum going. There are also other communication issues that we need to explore - some operational (how does the Help Desk know when a new technology has been introduced into the UL, for example) and some organizational (does staff feel they hear enough from management in the group, for example). A topic for a future meeting ........ We also didn't get time to discuss measuing outcomes, and also didn't touch on the resources issues we have; that's pretty much the agenda for this week's meeting.