Notes


Contents: 
12 Commandents from Bill Graziadei:

    

  1. Lead by personal example.

  2. Share the wealth, enable your faculty/librarians/staff with computers.

  3. Get involved in technology committees that will implement policy.

  4. Invest in professional development for you and your staff.

  5. Give rewards for innovative use of technology.  Work to change the current faculty reward system.

  6. Reward the change agents in your area - even though not all their ideas succeed.

  7. Think strategically, and plan for the future.

  8. Build alliances with computing professionals and teaching faculty.

  9. Get wired, work to make campus networks happen.

  10. Celebrate the successes, showcase your accomplishments.

  11. Reach out to vendors.  They need us as much as we need them and they are often willing to develop prototype projects at educational institutions.

  12. Develop a permanent funding stream.  Technology is expensive and will always need to be upgraded and maintained.  One time purchases are not enough. 


13th Commandment:
Things to leave outside the door in order to work together...

    

  1. Ego - Power & Control

  2. Territory

  3. Personal Agenda

  4. Political Correctness







7 Information services from CAUSE (Prof. Papers#10, pg 23)

 to be used to energize Potsdam College:

  1. - teamwork systems
  2. - classroom/laboratory systems
  3. - student-centered systems
  4. - remote learning systems
  5. - school connections/partnership systems
  6. - faculty-empowerment systems
  7. - information access/research systems

Take into account our values and our relationship to broader community needs
and values.  It has the institutional health, betterment of lives, and a
greater function of society as its larger ends.

How can Potsdam College use information technologies to capture these
forces ("building communities" and the "quality imperative") and develop
an energized state characterized by effective teaching and learning?  
What are some of the possibilities? Are information technologies properly
positioned to contribute to the success of students in the coming decade?








Fundamental elements common to all quality management environments:
(CAUSE, Prof. Papers#10, pg. 23)
1.  A visionary, committed leadership and a team willing to lead the
    improvement effort.
2.  A redefinition of internal and external customers with the understanding
    of customer expectations and a commitment to satisfy them.
3.  Empowerment of all employees with a spirit of team-work, innovation, 
    risk-taking, and problem-solving.
4.  Use of measurement to assess progress toward meeting objectives.
5.  Open communiction channels and open corporate culture.
6.  Development of a quality education and training program.

"What gets measured, gets done." (Tom Peters, quoted in 
CAUSE Prof. Papers#10, pg 4)







Future thinking (pg. 129, Flight of the Buffalo)

Strategic questions:
    - what is the future event that will have the greatest impact on our
      business?
    - what will happen when that event happens?
    - what can we do now to prepare for that event?

Focus on *great* performance for your customers (pg.136-137, Buffalo)
    - what do we *really* want to create for our customers?
    - what will it take to create what we want?








Satisfied customer:
- gets what they want, more than not

Potentially satisfied customer:
    (currently providing service to our customer, and it is still
      possible to make a satisfied customer)

How do establish a customer relationship?  
     We need to simplify, but track the success of, our customer 
     relationships, starting from any initial forms they fill out 
     to describe their needs.
  
Maybe the Dept. Technology Coordinator should be the one we contract w/ and they submit the  form describing what is needed.

How about electronic forms via Gopher?

Maintain a 24-hour HELPDESK which allows one to call in with a question or 
request an immediate service







"Credibility with users grows out of candor, responsiveness, 
and competence."
     --  (Jim Symour, "Blunting Microsoft's Trojan horse assault",
          pg 37, PC Magazine, 5/1/95)

"Gates implying Win95 is a bit of a kludge... 12Mb RAM needed for good
performance for Win95 and Win3.1...  Windows NT is the more appropriate
operating system for the corporate desktop."
     -- (Jim Louderback, "Windows 95 or NT decision clear as mud",
         pg. 118,  PC Magazine, 5/1/95)






INTERNAL PLUMBING AT IBM


Mr. Gerstner will not respond to inquiries from the press about recent IBM
personnel changes, referring to it as "internal plumbing."  Gerstner says: 

"This is a company that was very successful for several decades, but the
curse of success is that people try to codify it.  My view is you perpetuate
success by continuing to run scared, not by looking back at what made you 
great, but looking forward at what is going to make you ungreat so that you 
are constantly focusing on the challenges that keep you humble, hungry and 
nimble." 

(Financial Times 4/22/95 p.10)






THE FUTURE IS NOT PREDICTABLE

Futurist James Ogilvy thinks that excessive planning is hazardous to your
creativity:  "Just look at the administration of big science -- planned
creativity -- and then look at its track record for innovation.  On a
dollar-per-patient basis, big science doesn't do as well as the
less-bureaucratized passion of garage inventors."   Insisting that artistic
creativity is not related to goals in the way that engineering is, he says
that we need to put the political/industrial modern era behind us, make the
transition from the "realm of necessity" to the "realm of freedom," and
begin making up life as we go along as artistically as possible, so that we
can be transformed from "goal-driven functionaries" to free-spirited artists
of human life.  "The tools that we futurists use in our work -- multiple
scenarios, different views of different futures -- are very much in tune
with this idea of Goallessness.  The old kind of strategic planning -- which
tries to predict the future, lay down a forecast, and the build a plan to
reach that goal -- is a lot of bunk.  The future is not predictable."   The
idea is not to predict it but to know how to respond to it artfully.  (The
Futurist, May/June '95, p.11)






QUESTIONING ASSUMPTIONS
One way to spur your creativity is to systematically examine every
assumption you've made about some product or service, listing all of its facts,
elements or features, and then negating them, changing them, inverting
them, and questioning them.  For example, does a car really need wheels? 
seats? an ignition key?  Does a chair really need to be something you sit
in, or could you use a chair for standing?  And so forth.  The trick is to
consider every alternative seriously ... and you might invent a lift-out
chair that can help elderly or arthritic people by pushing them from a
sitting to a standing position.  (The Futurist, Mar./Apr.'95 p.34)






Overcoming resistance to change
Michael Hammer and Steven A. Stanton (1995) provide practical advice 
about achieving the first key--overcoming resistance to change. They 
stress that resistance to change is natural, that the reengineer should 
expect it, indeed should seek it out and try to understand the 
motivations that underlie it. They suggest five "I" words for overcoming 
resistance: incentives, information, intervention, indoctrination, and 
involvement. Their sage advice is of course not new to any student of 
organizational development, but it is refreshing to see it being 
advocated by hard-headed management types.  
(Over The Horizon, digest 263 1/2)