Confessions of a CIO
Dec. 13, 2006 by ravishan
After I was promoted in June ‘06 to lead ITS, I wrote:
“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.”
Whereas in several cases this has happened, I want to confess that I am still involved in certain programming projects.
As you can imagine, transition of a project fully from one person to the other is not straightforward for various reasons. primarily everyone is already busy with their own list of projects and this adds to their responsibility. So, I have been working primarily with Steve and James on identifying the most obvious ones and transferring them over. Only in few cases this has involved new development. In many cases, the objective here is for the staff member to familiarize himself/herself with the code and ask me questions if they have any. In few other cases, we try to find alternatives that are easier to maintain by the staff member taking on responsibility. For example, if the transfer happens to an administrative systems programmer who is not familiar with perl, it may be simpler for them to redo it in languages/systems that they are familiar with.
Of course, we are doing this carefully so that we are not spending a lot of time and effort in redoing systems. For example, during open enrollment this year, generation of a report was redone by Annette using PL/SQL instead of me coding it in perl and templates. However, we are modifying Vacation summary and attrack where Barbara and I have collaborated successfully over the past few years and redoing it completely or transferring the responsibility of the perl code to someone else at this point is probably not realistic. We rarely touch attrack during the year and it runs by itself. The changes that come along happen only during the end of the year.
It was also determined that a couple of other new projects can be cloned pretty easily from existing ones, where I got involved. Grants checklist is a very good example the core of which has a lot of resemblence to other existing EP apps, so I initiated this with a fair amount of information exchange with Doug, Pat and Jane and the expectation is that Doug will take on the continuing responsibility for it because he is familiar with perl.
So, in the interest of disclosure, I wanted to let everyone know that I am still involved in some programming and am actively working to transfer responsibility to others. It is also the case that I love programming and will continue to do so (I have many other opportunities to practice this outside of work here), but not necessarily in a way that I have done in the past, getting involved in major projects.
As much as I would like to get away from being involved projects, I am always haunted by the question “What exactly do you do besides attending meetings?”