I just attended my first Coffee with Cole jam session this morning. I, of course somehow managed to be fashionably late, but still had plenty of opportunity to sit in and listen to a great discussion.
Hearing first hand, the viewpoints and challenges, not from Cole (I’ve been fortunate enough to already listen in on and have some great conversations with him), but from the other attendee’s really drives home the need for all of us within IT at Stony Brook to make time to better communicate both within our teams and externally with our users.
It’s easy at times to feel both indispensable but invisible at Stony Brook — the work each of us does keeping the lights on in our respective organizations prevents us from spending the right amount of time reflecting on and broadcasting our achievements to the wider community.
The best conversations I’ve had about Stony Brook, that is those conversations that have inspired me or changed my perceptions occur in these types of informal gatherings; whether its over a cup of coffee, a pint of beer or a greasy cheeseburger while on a road trip to a conference; the relaxed setting removes the position of power that comes with a person’s title (CIO, Director, Manager), helps cover the lines in the sand that we draw against each other and instead welcomes everyone as a peer.
Expanding the reach of these conversations is imperative to “bending time”; enabling us to react faster and move our culture. Cole mentioned that he would love to record and share these conversations, which was the exact thought I had five minutes into the discussion, but also shared his fear that doing so would alter the types of conversations that he can have with the attendees.
The observer effect is quite substantial in those situations — recording and streaming these conversations would undermine the goal of getting “hard truth” out of these discussions.
But knowledge and opinion sharing is critical to overcoming the roadblocks that processes and people tend to throw in the way to delay and avoid change. One option could be for DoIT to host a different type of session perhaps called “On the Record” where a moderator could help facilitate a discussion of the issues facing IT on campus among different university stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, and administrators).
Platforms like Yammer and the various social media outlets can also play a critical role in engaging with the masses, disseminating information and collecting feedback in what is by its very nature a open and public channel.
The boxes that we put ourselves and (perhaps more importantly) that we put others in limit our ability to grow together, to accomplish more, to do it within our constraints and to do it faster. The more we take the time to invest in ourselves and in building relationships with each other the more we can accomplish.
In summary, if you haven’t signed up for Coffee With Cole, get on it. If you’re not a morning person or a coffee person, come join me and your IT friends for Beers with Rich, Thursday August 21st at 5pm — contact me for more details — better yet do both, I got science on my side.
Hi Rich … really a great reflection of our hour together this morning. Taking the time to do something like this is a critical step in altering the path of an organization … I appreciate you doing it. I used to do a Podcast at Penn State called, “ETS Talk” (iTunes link) that focused on what I was doing as director of Education Technology Services. It was a regular, weekly, podcast that featured some co workers and guests from across campus. It was a really fun thing to do and I think we churned out 60 episodes over a few years — at one point we were getting quite a few downloads per episode.
I’ve thought a lot about doing a new podcast similar to that here at DoIT and the conversation this morning — coupled with your thoughts — just sealed the deal. I am going to dust off my microphone and build a new show. And I love the “On the Record” name! Just promise me you’ll be a guest or even a regular contributor!
I think that’s great Cole, its certainly something that I’d be interested in listening to and participating in. Creating that culture within DoIT and the wider University will be tough, but I think if you become the trailblazer it others will follow, its hard to say “I don’t have time to do it” if people see you figuring out how to squeeze the time in between meetings and “real” work.
Graham Glynn had done a video series “Innovations in Education” where he interacted with faculty doing interesting things in the classroom. Unfortunately producing the video’s was very time and labor intensive (he used the TV Studio Dini can probably weigh in more as to how hard it actually was vs how hard it should have been) and I think he faced a lot of criticism for it being very Graham centric. His departure also made it weird to keep actively promoting the content, though they are still on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T670_aYj68Y)
These types of casts can do a great job at expelling vision and thoughts from the top down, but how can we do a better job at pulling ideas from the “bottom up” that is directly from our “doers” and end-users who may have a better appreciation or different perspective of certain situations?
I think that Tom Wilsons antidote about how his (former?) boss defined stakeholders and invited them into the processes made a lot of sense. Many times I feel like we are making decisions based on assumptions or presumptions of what our users want or how they’ll react rather than trying to include them and their opinions in the process.
I think the Google Apps Migration project owes at least part of its success to the various town hall meetings that were organized and promoted that gave our community an opportunity to have a voice in the conversation. Realistically I know that a lot of effort gets invested to put on a town hall like that but I think it could be great for us to do a DoIT Wide town hall at least once a year even.
On the smaller scale I think holding “All Hands Meetings” and IT Partners meetings is great, but we could also facilitate forums or conversations with a more narrowed and targeted focus (IT Security, Web Development, Academic Tech, Research Computing etc.)
Agreed on all fronts … one thing I’ve noticed is that it takes lots of voices from within the community to really tip the culture — and this post of yours is an example of that, so thank you! I would not dream of asking our staff to produce something like that for me … the ETS Talk podcasts happened in my office on Fridays from 2-3 and they were typically edited and posted during that same hour by me as the group sat around and debriefed the show. That’s how I’d love it to go down, but I would love even more if people from around DoIT would contribute short pieces that could be easily integrated … like This American Life style.
I like the idea of smaller town halls and ones with various topics. Lots of stuff to explore!
Love the idea of “On the Record” sessions! Catherine and I do a lot of these focus groups, primarily for educational assessment and evaluation, but we would be happy to lend our expertise to some of these sessions (did one this afternoon in fact for the Summer Institute facilitators). The feedback from these sessions will serve as excellent evidence that DoIT is fulfilling its mission, goals and core values. And while I imagine the data generated would be rather small from session to session, we are in the process of exploring qualitative data analysis software which would assist us in working with faculty to do more analysis of student reflections (journals, ePortfolios), discussion threads, etc.
There are many at the University who don’t believe that qualitative assessment (or God forbid, qualitative research) is a valid method of collecting and analyzing data–but of course, they’re seriously misinformed.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative = Fast, Useful, Subjective vs. Accurate and Time Intensive
The greatest value in most cases comes from the combination of quantitative data that is reasonably gathered with qualitative data.
Nice commentary, Rich. I enjoyed it. I think you hit it on the head with your comment regarding “indispensable but invisible.” That’s a feeling I’ve heard expressed more than once over the last year. I think the direction we are heading gives us an opportunity to counter the “invisible” part of that phrase. Hopefully, we will get to a point where the question ,”What do they even do?” is a distant echo.