Introduction
Jun. 5, 2006 by ravishan
I began my role as the Associate VP for Information Technology last week, on June 1. As you can imagine, I am excited and am ready to work with the ITS staff to move forward. We have a group of dedicated, bright and hard working individuals at ITS and as I look everything that has been accomplished in the past several years, it is truly amazing and I am sure that we will continue to operate at these high levels.
Whenever an organization goes through a management change, anxiety is inevitable. What I plan to do is take the necessary steps to reduce the level of anxiety amongst the staff. The key to this is to keep the lines of communications open. I will outline below some of the steps we plan to take during the next couple of weeks.
The very first thing that I wanted to do was to look at how best to reorganize Technology Support Services Group that I have been managing for the past several years. I really liked the way the senior management team at ITS was structured by John and saw how well it worked, so I basically wanted a very similar structure. This meant that TSS needed a reorganization and a single person from TSS to represent that group.
On Thursday, June 1, Joanne, Mike, Steve and I met to talk about this. As soon as I expressed my interest in the Associate VP job to John I began thinking about this issue a lot, so I had a pretty good idea on what I wanted to do. Because TSS has been primarily supporting the activities of other groups in ITS, it was relatively easy to see how best to do this reorganization. This is exactly what happened when we met. We reached consensus fairly quickly. Here is the plan that I have already discussed with the TSS staff members and have asked for their comments. I have also submitted the plan to John for his review.
- James will become the Assistant Director of TSS and in addition to his current reports, he will take on additional responsibilities by managing Henk Meij, Ken Taillon and David Warner. He will begin attending the Director’s meeting starting from this week and will report to me.
- We have already been talking about restructuring the Digitization facility by adding another 0.5 FTE and a few students and expanding the scope of this facility and calling it Media Development Lab. Allynn Wilkinson and the new 0.5 FTE will move to Academic Computing Services. Mike Roy will initially manage this group.
- Mary Glynn and Pat Leone will move to Administrative Computing Services and will report to Steve Machuga. Mary will continue to do what she has been doing in TSS, in terms of offering programming support for Academic Computing and TSS as well as be a resource for the Administrative Computing group and participate in programming there as needed. In addition, she is responsible for researching new technologies.
- Pat will reduce the direct departmental website management support and concentrate more on supporting various Web services we have developed – for eg. Classifieds, Bulk Email, Events Calendar, Channels, E-Portfolio – in addition to overseeing the basic web services such as the WWW servers and the personal webspace. One of the new initiatives that we plan to announce in the months to come is Web 2.0 and Pat will play an important role in implementing it.
In addition, in the next few weeks, I will, with the help of the other Directors, form a group of 4-5 staff members whose mission it will be to keep an eye on any new developments in technology and recommend it for further exploration by ITS staff. The exact details of this group and how it will operate and what are its missions etc. will emerge as we proceed further.
Whereas I will not be as deeply involved in as many projects as before, I plan to continue my participation in a few that I feel are important enough until they are completed. In the future, I will look for opportunities to be involved in certain key projects.
As I mentioned to you all, I will soon begin working with the appropriate staff members to develop a plan to transfer operational responsibilities for systems where that responsibility sits with me today. My plan is to get this done asap. However, I am not going anywhere and am here… and this needs to fit with the plans of those staff members to whom this will be transferred.