AVP & CTO Update July 30, 2018
Good morning
There was an unusually large full moon (blood moon) over the weekend, and in many places around the world a lunar eclipse. It rained in Guelph so no sightings for me – hoping some of you caught a glimpse.
What I have been up to since my last update
- Strategic Planning activities:
- I provided an update on the IT Strategic Planning process for the IT Executive. My intent was to provide an outline of where we are at in the process, and to learn if there are any other constituents or stakeholder engagement activities for gathering input to the strategic plan that the committee could recommend.
- We held a ‘digital moments’ exercise with Roger’s Administration leadership team – great input from the participants, mirroring the great input from all of our Digital Moment activities to date.
- We had the final IT Community engagement workshop on Friday, with almost 20 additional people participating in the activities on IT Culture and Digital moments.
- The IT Executive meeting on Wednesday included a proposal for a McMaster Experts Enhancement, presented by Ranil Sonnadara on behalf of the Research Technology Committee. This is essentially a next phase for McMaster Experts which will provide development for providing additional tools and usability elements for the system to improve automation and ease of use. The IT Executive provided its support and a funding request will now go to the Budget Committee.
- Debra Christmas, Executive Partner from Gartner, joined us onsite to lead a group of about 20 IT Managers in a Leading Through Change workshop. It was an excellent session with a lot of good material that we will be able to revisit.
- A small group of UTS and Campus IT folk participated in a morning session at the Microsoft Technical Centre (MTC). This was a good opportunity to learn more about free services that Microsoft offers its clients to help us roll out new Microsoft solutions and features. We had some very interesting preliminary discussions about Office 365, CRMs, data governance, Identity Management and more. I will be following up with Microsoft to set up sessions to tackle some of the above topics more deeply and will be looking to cast a wider net for discussion and participation so please stay tuned.
- Friday was System Administrators Day! You may not have known this was a thing – but in fact it was the 19th year! I want to share my thanks with all of our System Administrators for the great work they do supporting IT on campus every day. I also want to thank a group of individuals who took it upon themselves to recognize the day and the people we call Sys Admins on campus – there was a lot of planning and fun that went into a thank you effort on Friday with trivia, contests and treats being shared across McMaster’s IT community. Thank you to Greg Atkinson (Science), John Bell (Humanities), Katrina Spotts (Communication & Public Affairs), Seanna-Lin Brodie-Keys (Science) and Amanda Baldwin (UTS). Creating a positive IT culture and bringing smiles to people’s faces is really a community effort.
My books from last week
- I finished an audio book called Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman. It was a mystery thriller (brain candy) and I thoroughly enjoyed it! Great summer fodder. The best part of the experience was the author reading her own book – she has a lovely English accent and, since she wrote it, I would venture to say she read it as well as it could possibly be read. You will learn some good tips on things like how to dig a grave, use a Glock, set up a numbered Swiss bank account and … well that is all I can say without fully spoiling the fun.
- I also finished a young adult audio book called Chasing Secrets by Gennifer Choldenko – I was trying out the Public Library CloudLibrary app and it was the first audio book download without a hold on it that sounded interesting, so I used it to test the app – and it was a fast listen. Good historical novel about the bubonic plague in San Franscisco in early 1900. You are never too old for good books, no matter the intended audience!
What I am up to this week:
- The IT Strategic Planning Steering Committee meet this morning, Monday, at 8:30 AM to move us another step forward on the planning journey.
- I am off to OJN this afternoon for meetings with CCE and with members of the Finance team.
- UTS is holding a learning and development day tomorrow which will include a morning training session, with Meghan Kirwin facilitating, along with myself, and a fun event in the afternoon: a boat ride on the Hamilton Harbour! I will be in attendance throughout.
- I have a regular meeting with Andrea Farquhar
- I am meeting Susan Giroux to discuss the outcomes from the undergraduate teaching focus groups with campus faculty.
- I have a lot of time blocked to work on budget and strategic planning activities.
- And the August long weekend is next weekend! This week and next are pretty typical weeks for people taking vacation time so please keep that in mind as I suspect the campus will feel much less populated than usual.
Have a great week everyone!
gg
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