#SBUDoIT CIO Briefing 2: Did You Know

It is a little later than I had hoped to get it out, but here it is … the second CIO Briefing podcast. This five minute podcast will share some behind the scenes commentary on the production of the 2014 holiday greeting video as well as short updates on governance, SUNY 2020, a presentation I did for SteerCo called, “Beyond Gmail,” and a shout out for some great work being done at the new Stony Brook Arena. Enjoy and please leave comments, questions, and feedback — it is all very much appreciated!

Subscribing to my Podcasts

So while I didn’t post a new CIO Briefing last week like I wanted — the Thanksgiving holiday shortened week got in the way — I did want to point out that you can easily subscribe to the podcasts and have them delivered directly to iTunes. I assume this works with any podcast catching application … I will have to test it on my Android tablet when I get to it this week. All you have to do is copy the RSS feed, available from the “Meta” sidebar area on the right, jump over to iTunes and from the file menu, select “Subscribe to podcast,” and paste in the feed URL. It will then download the most recent episode and it should be set up to automatically receive new episodes as I release them.

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A hat tip to Mark Lang for asking the question.

#SBUDoIT CIO Briefing Podcasts

Last week while hosting one of my Coffee with Cole sessions I shared a few items that I am working on and I got a somewhat surprising reaction. One of the people there said something to the effective of, “wow, I had no idea we were doing all of that!” I know I shouldn’t be surprised by that because I have so little time or opportunity to share all of what we are working on … it did, however, strike me as an opportunity to go back to doing something I really love doing — making podcasts to share with my team.

I remember back in 2005 when I became the director of Education Technology Services at Penn State I was using podcasts internally to help share the work of our team with both the outside world and internally. There was a method to the madness — we were launching our institutional podcasting service so I was also trying to promote the use of the technology in an interesting way. I remember getting good feedback from members of my team — they said things like, “wow, I had no idea we were doing all of that!” Sounds pretty familiar. Podcasting some thoughts and updates served to bring my team into a larger conversation at the organizational level, while still letting them focus on their specific work. That was a good idea then and I hope it is a good idea now.

The notion of sharing information is a tricky one. Quite a bit of what I am doing isn’t really all that shareable … a lot of it is either in-process thinking or stuff still in the negotiation process. That shouldn’t stop me from trying to connect some dots across DoIT though and so with that in mind, I am going to work to release a short audio update on a regular basis. This past week I released the first one using our private Yammer space and got a decent reaction from members of the DoIT team. I did have a couple people say that there are folks outside DoIT who might be interested in listening and since this first one doesn’t have an super secret stuff in it, I am including it below.

If you listen and have any thoughts about this notion, please share them in the comments.