Agenda

  1.  Roll Call (by timezone - East to West)
  2.  Scribe Shout-out - It's easy to scribe: How To Scribe Itana Notes
  3.  Agenda Bash
  4.  Aligning Skills and Competencies for Itana - Jim
  5.  Itana Org Updates
    1.  Working Group Updates
    2. Steering Committee Update

Materials

Aligning Skills and Competencies with a Changing Tech Environment

Attendees

Presentation

Trend 1: Tech as a Service

  • "Maker Trend" – individuals that can easily build things (image of kid creating multimedia that can be deployed to the world instantly).

  • What's left for Higher Ed Central IT? What does central IT still need to do as it becomes easy for business units to easily acquire services and technology solutions they need?

Luke: Regarding the survey, when kids say they don't use technology (despite using smart phones), what do they think of as technology? Does this suggest that central IT needs to rethink what kind of technology they need to be involved in?

Trend 2: The Digital Enterprise

Jim: What does "digital" mean?

  • Iot. AI. Autonomous systems e.g. self-driving cars impacting traffic flow in cities ... all sitting on a pool of big data.
  • How can Higher Ed leverage these emerging digitization?
  • Consider Amazon Echo. IoT. Driven by AI (voice recognition). Autonomous. It integrates seamlessly into customer's world (and into Amazon's order fulfillment).

Survey: What will be IT's most important contribution to business over next 3 years? Drive business innovation through IT (vs. lead and implement).

Walter Green (UArkansas): Interesting how "technology" and/or "Digital Enterprise" is associated with the most recent consumer electronic devices which is driving IT today

CEB's 5 engagement activities for IT workers in the digital enterprise:

  1. Evangelizing
  2. Consulting
  3. Brokering
  4. Coaching
  5. Delivering

What is needed for IT to become a transformation partner?

  1. Adaptive Business Engagement
  2. Customer-Centric Design
  3. Adaptive Skills and Mindset
  4. Strategy over Governance
  5. Management over Operations
  6. Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery

Discussion: So, what skills are needed?

Jose: Collaboration.

Paul: Ability to speak both languages (tech and biz), and translate between.

Dana: Connecting the right people.

Walter: Enable people to experiment in safe and secure way with own devices, tools, etc. (rather than guide people to a single, central IT environment).

Piet: We have to make a shift from having a fixed portfolio and queueing requests for changes. In a few places, individual teams have made "agile" shifts to become more engaged with business units. But we haven't often figured out how to scale this.

Piet: If we are having existential crisis now, we have to recover the skills and perspectives that we had or should have had from the start. We need the ability to do information management or app portfolio management, things aren't going to be done by individual business units.

Luke: Need to be able to move an entire culture and need skills to support that.

Jose: Need information security skills. Also, persuasion – ability to guide groups and prevent poor decisions.

Ashish: Need integration skills.

Piet: We are going to navigate with a distributed decision making style. What skills support that?

Jim: What about the two trends? Do they make sense?

Luke: What do you need to behind-the-scenes to make it work? e.g. data retention, integration. Who asks the right questions?

People who want to plug something in don't always think about the concerns to do it safely and wisely.

Walter: When business units fail to get what they need from central IT, external providers are attractive.

Paul/Piet: Vendors often over-promise to close a deal; how can central IT help business units learn how to filter in the way that has been learned over time.

Chat Dialog

Jim Phelps: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1J3CPHOlRAzLKNs21ABybp4OnctXR8NG4NczXriaDBGs/edit?usp=sharing

Bob Dein (Miami OH): Very thought provoking presentation. We have been having the same conversation at Miami.

Bob Dein (Miami OH): Unfortunately, Dana and I have to leave to attend a staff meeting. Thanks Jim!

Walter Green (UArkansas): Interesting how "technology" and/or "Digital Enterprise" is associated with the most recent consumer electronic devices which is driving IT today

Beth Schaefer-UW Milwaukee: I need to drop off - I received an emergency call. Nothing life threatening :) Have a good weekend!

Announcements - Itana News, Working Group Report out

 

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