Area 51 Notes, Dec 16, 2011

Senior Leadership Team Notes
December 16,  2011

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

We discussed two change management proposals.  Web server maintenance is scheduled for Sunday morning, Dec. 18th and the following systems will be affected.

  • LIS digital archives
  • Primary MySQL Database server for Middlebury and MIIS web sites
  • File Server for Computer Science
  • Web application services for Middlebury and MIIS primary web sites.

These systems will not go down, but editing and changes will not be saved during this time frame.  An email to the community will be sent out in advance.

The 2nd change proposal involves VMWare clients/labs.  This is a software upgrade that will only affect thin lab computers and 4 stand-alone computers and will take place on Dec.19-20. This was also approved.

We continued our discussion about LIS Values (https://sites.google.com/a/middlebury.edu/lis-strategic-planning/mission-values ) from several meetings ago.  Each area director was asked to discuss these with their workgroup leaders: are they relevant?  Are they useful?  If so, how do people use them?  We decided to bring the topic to a managers meeting (i.e., rather than discussing during an all-LIS gathering) in order to continue the conversation and hear more feedbacks. The values are a way to ensure that we pay attention to not only what we do, but how we do the work. We want to find ways to acknowledge work that is done acccording to these values, and to work with individuals whose interpersonal style may not be consistent with our shared understanding of how we should approach work.

We then discussed the idea of holding open meetings on Friday mornings to discuss various topics, projects or policies of current interest.  These would be “optional” meetings for interested staff, and might involve topics such as:

  • Disaster recovery
  • Monitoring metrics and analytics
  • Google evaluation
  • Mobile tools
  • Digital scholarship
  • Service level agreements
  • Video recording workflow

The remainder of the retreat was devoted to discussion around area budgets.

Upcoming agenda items:

  • sophos anti-virus deployment plan
  • google apps/mslive evaluation plan
  • network monitoring policy development

Thanks for reading,
Terry and Doreen

One thought on “Area 51 Notes, Dec 16, 2011”

  1. Mike Roy

    Two extra items to add (Carol beat me to publishing these before I had written everything I had intended to write!)

    1. We will be looking to all of LIS both for ideas for topics of interest for our Friday morning series.
    2. We’ll also be discussing the plans to bring Fred Schmitt to campus to do additional work with our teams to train new team members, to assess how well the teams are doing, and to re-examine team charges.

    — mike

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