Tags » Area Directors Notes

Special quadruple-size bonus issue to catch up, since I’ve again gotten behind with these… Most recent notes at the top.  TS

————–
Sept. 27, 2012
Present: Mike Roy, Carol Peddie, Mary Backus, Terry Simpkins, Chris Norris, Shel Sax and Doreen Bernier

We talked about the membership of the Education and Training Team.  Terry will consult with the possible new members.

Mary led a discussion about the SLA response time recommendations.  After reviewing these recommendations with workgroup leaders, we will extend the recommended response times so that they are consistent across LIS.

Mike shared a list of potential topics for the optional all-LIS meetings.  We will share LIS staff for suggestions.

Shel gave an informative but bleak presentation on the Future of Higher Education.

Thanks for reading,
Terry & Doreen

————–
Sept. 20, 2012
Present: Mary, Carol, Terry, Mike, Chris
Absent: Doreen

We agreed to have a semester start-up debriefing at the October managers meeting.

We will have a DiSC conversation in October for all-staff.  The assessments will go out in advance and the meeting will focus on results; no one will need to retake the assessment who has already taken it recently (e.g., for management training)

In looking more at the 306 goals that departments across campus have compiled, we reviewed those which might have a large impact on LIS and assigned each area director to follow-up with certain College offices where we need more information.  The point is to obtain more information on these goals and work to provide feedback on the goal viability from our point of view. This could involve stopping projects already in motion to work on new ones, or delaying new ones until we have capacity.

Thanks for reading,
Terry

————–
Sept. 13, 2012
Present: Mike, Terry, Carol, Chris, Tim
Absent: Mary, Doreen

Tim Spears joined us as we reviewed a tentative (and incomplete) list of goals from other departments with potential impact on LIS.  We also spent time talking about MIIS, BL, and LS, etc. (not yet in the list of dept. goals) and their potential impact on LIS and how we will get more information about these projects.  We will need to review the goal list to identify projects for which we need more information, projects to dismiss, or projects which we think we can handle with the available resources.  This needs to happen within 3 weeks.

Other points of discussion with Tim:

• staffing issues, especially in light of how some of the new initiatives under consideration will impact technology and LIS;
• innovation TF recommendations will go to EAC for approval of “low-hanging fruit”
• how does the Middlebury community engage the ongoing questions about college costs vs. relevance?  These conversations could also generate more goals and projects involving technology;
• how do we (LIS/The College/everyone) foster innovation and creativity? LIS often seems to be a combination of utility company and experimentation zone

Following Tim’s departure, we had a brief discussion of the Security Team membership. Chris as sponsor will follow-up.

————–
Sept. 6, 2012
Present: Mary, Carol, Terry, Mike, Chris
Absent: Doreen

Reviewed the directors’ updates and calendar.

Discussed SLA response times

Chris reported a flaw in Java runtime v6 and the recommended path for security reasons is to upgrade to v7. Some of our critical systems do not support the upgrade.  Carol and Chris will investigate more.

The About LIS page needs some updating (MR will do)

Joy & Kellam have sent out a request for information regarding this year’s debriefing on Language School support, still to be scheduled.

Facilities Services has put out their annual call for project requests.  Some that come immediately to mind:

• data center refurbishing;
• info desk refurbishing;

We will check with Joseph Watson about any projects remaining from last year.

We began talking about budget requirements for next year and new projects/requests LIS might be looking at.  We should be discussing needs and preliminary thinking with managers, especially viz-a-viz projects/requests involving capital costs that will subsequently roll over into operational costs.  More discussions in early October.

Reviewed topics for various upcoming meetings: managers, directors, open meetings, and all staff meetings:

• Communications Task Force;
• Curricular Technology support;
• Staffing plan;
• Innovation task forces (James Davis);
• DiSC workshop (October);
• Policy summit;
• Amy McGill from MIIS could talk about current activities on the Left Coast;
• Review goals from other areas of the College that will or might impact LIS (once shared with us)

We also talked about pulling conversations about our shared values into specific topic discussions, as this may inform why and how we do some of the things we do.  Directors should also talk with managers about what we are doing to incorporate the values into the worklife/workday.

Talked about team assessments: what issues are out there that we need to work on?  What do we expect when we begin inviting teams to Friday directors meetings?

• Each team needs a clear, agreed upon charge;
• Membership issues – are the right people on the right teams?  Are there people who want to rotate off?  Should we have terms?
• Communications/updates;
• Do we have the right teams? What work wouldn’t happen if a particular team didn’t exist? Can we afford to lose it or not?
• Should teams be ongoing or project based?

Reviewed the recommendation of the incident tracking (HEAT) system replacement committee.  Carol stressed the need for an application administrator to oversee patches, work with central networking, etc., regardless of the system we choose, whether hosted or not.  We agreed that we need an implementation plan for Web Help Desk, especially looking at what it will take to host locally.  What will that take time away from?  We still have concerns over the matter of hosting/not hosting.  If we can’t support implementing Web Help Desk, we agreed we may need to go back to the drawing board and look for a new system.  We may also need to consider other models for providing support, but that may not work within our culture and expectations of support levels.  This will be considered a critical system, and taking on the hosting locally will involve considerable overhead to support this, overhead which we have not planned the staffing resources for.

Thanks for reading,
Terry

Present:  Mike Roy, Shel Sax, Terry Simpkins, Chris Norris, Mary Backus, Carol Peddie and Doreen Bernier

The President’s Office has begun efforts to gather information about internal compliance requirements (“things which we require or request of ourselves, office-to-office, in order to get our work done.  Things that used to be able to get done with a single phone call that now requires several forms, paperwork, and follow up”).  Discussed their request for a list from each department of processes that might have the effect of making it more difficult to get work done.

We deferred discussion of  the Curricular Technology Team’s charge until the September AD’s retreat.  A future All-LIS staff open meeting will also be dedicated to how the teams vs. workgroups are working.

We talked about the academic software request process.  Terry will convene a small group (Lisa Terrier, Carrie Macfarlane, Carol, Terry, Mary).

Mike requested agenda suggestions for future LIS meetings (managers, directors retreats, all staff meetings and optional all staff meetings).  Mike will create a draft list and distribute to the ADs for comments.

Thanks for reading,
Terry & Doreen