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.
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