My mother, Doris Mae Staton Sweeney, passed way early in the morning on Saturday, May 21st, 2016. She died in her sleep after having a nice dinner with her husband and friends at a local restaurant. She had been working in the garden on Friday pulling weeds. Her Easter lilies had started to bloom and…
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…
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…
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…
This was a recent 20 mile hike with some of my senior scouts to complete their hiking merit badge. We had just crossed a dam through shallow water and they were taking a breather. Allyson was with us, but not in the picture. She vowed to never hike that far again. I’ll convince her otherwise.
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….
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…