For several years, I’ve been hearing about low-code platforms. These are usually web-based tools such as QuickBase, Appian, and others that focus mainly on the professional developer market and promise to speed up the development process. The disruption created by this model of Software Defined Everything (SDX) has become increasingly evident. But up to now,…
Category: Higher Ed
DevOps and Higher Ed
A colleague of mine, who is another division-level IT manager, and I are teaching a course in the fall. The course is a senior level elective that focuses on special topics in technology management. Cool – right up our alley. We were given freedom to pick the topic, and of course we chose DevOps. You…
Grow Your Own
The speed of change in IT is dizzying. Exciting, but dizzying. Sometimes it feels that we move so fast, we can’t even get introduced to a new process or service before it changes. Other IT shops seem to be feeling the pressure as well. Here’s an example: an article titled Are 18-month org charts and constant…
Purpose, Principles and Systems
I just saw a new webinar from the Lean IT Association called Lean IT in Action -A Tale of Two IT Transformations. Very interesting. The basic premise of the webinar is that organizational transformation takes time and commitment at all levels. It takes holding employees responsible for carrying out the commitment. It means doing the hard work first, even…
Technology Implementation in Student Affairs
Congrats to the newly hooded Dr. Ed Cabellon for recently completing his PhD. His dissertation topic caught my eye: Redefining student affairs through digital technology: a ten-year historiography of digital technology use by student affairs administrators. On his site, he has a new post on a technology implementation model for student affairs (SA), which is…
Feeding the Beast
What is the nature of IT Governance (ITG) in Higher Ed? This is a question I, and most of the TAMU IT community, have been wrestling with for a long time. As a Tier One, TAMU has such a distributed model of power (read: budget and decision-making), that common methods of governance don’t really apply….
Between the Cracks…
I recently got together with a few of my colleagues from around the country that work in Student Affairs IT (SAIT), like me. We talked about some of the conferences we had been to recently. The two most common were EDUCAUSE and NASPA. We all lamented the fact that, while each of these organizations have…