AVP & CTO Update, May 7, 2018

Good morning everyone,

I am in sunny sunny San Diego (or as one of my USC colleagues calls it: Sandy Eggo). This is a city I love and have had the good fortune to visit on a number of vacations. Something for everyone – my favourite things are the ocean and fish tacos. I am here to co-lead a one day New IT Manager course offered by EDUCAUSE. This took place yesterday, Sunday, and was a great event with an energized group of individuals from across Higher Ed IT in the US, and one from South Africa (and one Canadian, me!). I spoke about Performance Management, and Project Management. It is always fun to share knowledge!

As a result of this trip, I won’t be providing my usual update on last week’s activities, sorry! I haven’t had time to aggregate everything.  There is a recap of my intended activities below. I will resume my usual updates next week. A reminder that these are also available on my website.

What I will offer is that we have updated my CTO site with an IT Strategic Plan update . We have another McMaster IT Strategic Planning Steering Committee meeting on May 18 to begin validating the vision and other strategic framework components  based on our first meeting.etc. Then, in June, I will be hosting some sessions for UTS and for the IT Community to provide engagement opportunities. These will be optional and we will give you plenty of notice in advance, so please stay tuned.

Book of the week

I did keep up with my reading, thanks to the plane ride: Malcolm Gladwell’s “What the Dog Saw” (2009), an anthology of his New Yorker articles. As he always does, Malcolm causes you to question what you know and what others know, too. Many of his articles are online in the New Yorker archives if you search them out and these were a few of my favourites with simplistic summaries (to say the least): ‘What the Dog Saw’  – how dogs understand humans; The Talent Myth (Are Smart People Overrated) we value certain ‘skills’; The New-Boy Network – first impressions, and how to hire good people; The Art of Failure (Why do some people choke and others panic) I think it’s better to choke; Something Borrowed (Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?) can we create unique and new if inspired by others’ work?; Late Bloomers – it gives me hope. 🙂

Have a great week everyone – I am back in the office on Thursday and will be back to regular blogging action next week.