Brown University switched students to Google Apps for education a little over a year a ago, and recently completed a similar transition for faculty and staff.  In the interviews with CIO Michael Pickett one primary reason for the switch is requests from staff for collaboration tools, and a common platform with students.  In traditional education structures there often are silos for student systems and business systems.  Why the artificial divide? And who made the initial decision?  According to Pickett student behavior led the charge.  The majority of students were already using Gmail – what better way to ‘listen’ to users than to observe their behavior and be guided by those choices.  Another shift from traditional IT top-down decision making.  And integrated video chat? No more schlepping cross-campus for F2F meetings?  Sign me up!

Read the rest of this entry »

Which trap do you fall into? 

• Action-orientated:  any action is better than no action
• Interest:  emotional, perceptual or attachment factors
• Pattern-mis-recognition:  I’ve seen this before (but you is wrong)
• Stability bias:  we’ve always done it this way in the past…
• Social bias:  keep everyone happy

Read the rest of this entry »

In the world of Higher-Education summer is a time of reflection on the past season, and planning for the new college year (all too rapidly approaching!)  My own reflections this year are getting some inspiration from a recent CIO Magazine editorial:  A Simple Scoring system for Complex Times.  How does your organization score accomplishments and initiatives?  In the article it is suggested that doing the expected – like maintaining system uptime or performing regular software upgrades – gets a 0.  That zero.  Why?  In part because users don’t give us much, if any, credit for doing these things.  And these items don’t actually add any value to the organization – we maintain existing value, but aren’t adding anything.  Clear wins – projects that are noticed by users as generating new value or improvements – get a +1.  And clear losers, where people notice and are unhappy, get a –1. 

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you take time in your busy day to just think and plan?  Especially with the constant stream of operational demands – the weeds – knocking on your door and appearing at the email in-box.  A recent article in CIO Magazine suggest tactics such as staying focused, setting aside scheduled non-operational time during the day, delegating to staff and outsourcing commodity work.  I find blogging is a really helpful exercise, allowing me to pull together ideas I’ve gathered from various sources and think through how they relate to my own experiences.  Conferences and workshops are always a great way to get out of the day-to-day and gain some perspective – particularly if you are also contributing through a presentation to your colleagues.   It is all too easy to allow time to get eaten up through many small needs and distractions.  We all owe it to ourselves to make a conscious decision to create time for planning, general information gathering, and strategic thinking. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Planning for a web site redesign involves a lot of components – and the real job is only just beginning when the design itself is done.  From Adaptive path comes this diagram of a typical site redesign process.   Take-aways:  Strategy & Design is approximately 1/6th of the total job – technology considerations don’t really enter until after strategy & design are done (it IS really all about the content and communication, isn’t it?)  And the content owner (also known as the client) has the lion’s share of the work.  No surprises here for those of us who’ve been through this a couple of times, but nice to see it all so well illustrated.  Bring this to your next site-design kick-off meeting!

Read the rest of this entry »

I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites.  It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer. 

Read the rest of this entry »