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.

Continue reading →

Present:  Mike Roy, Carol Peddie, Mary Backus, Terry Simpkins, Chris Norris, Doreen Bernier
Guest: Joe Antonioli

Joe Antonioli presented the Curricular Technology Team report on the decommissioning of Segue which proposed a timeline for shutdown and migration of current faculty sites. Continue reading →

Present: Mike Roy, Terry Simpkins, Carol Peddie, Mary Backus, Chris Norris, Shel Sax
Guests: Ian Burke, Jim Stuart
Absent: Doreen

Jim and Ian joined us to discuss the proposal to migrate our anti-virus solution to Sophos.  The project team working on this consists of Brian Foley, Chris Tangora, Petar Mitrevski, Rick James, Jim, and Ian.  We reviewed the draft change management form, and the SLT requested 1) more detail specifying where the responsibility lies for each step in the process and b) .  Ultimately, most of the work involves testing and deployment; the impact on end-users should be minimal.  We also discussed how the timing of the project might be impacted by other major projects such as the Banner migration and the roll-out of the new Network Access Control system.  We agreed that testing should be done in January, and, assuming the testing goes smoothly, roll-out should occur in February.

Mike presented an idea for an upcoming decisions list.  The idea is to provide transparency regarding proposed ideas and projects, and to give a sense of the direction in which LIS is moving.  After some discussion, we agreed that this might be best tied into the our goals page on the strategic planning site and, like the goals, updated on a quarterly basis.

Next up, we talked about the LIS values statements we created roughly 3 years ago, and how these relate to some of the feedback we heard from the staff survey.  We agreed that we should revisit our values, focusing on whether or not we have articulated the “right” set for LIS, as well as whether or not we live up to them as an organization.  We have also had enough staff turnover in recent years to warrant a re-examination of these values statements.  We agreed that each director will have discussions with their managers about ways to solicit input for refining or revising our values statements, and that we’ll continue the discussion once those discussions have occurred.

We began a discussion about the defining the parameters of the Google/MSLive evaluation that Shel will be leading.  We ran out of time for this piece, and will continue on 11/18 at our monthly retreat.

Thanks for reading,
Terry