My role (still evolving) is to develop and implement strategies to improve communication between and among central IT and decentralized IT folks, decision-makers and everyone else who cares about and depends on technology.
So what do I actually do?
I continually try to improve the IT website. I provide support to IT governance committees. I'm jumping into the role of online community organizer.
Mostly I think I should ask questions and listen.
I have been at UM a long time. Two stints as a student (Journalism and Political Science undergraduate degrees and a Masters of Public Administration). I worked in Admissions for 11 years, writing and designing marketing and recruitment publications and eventually the first web pages. From day one, I thought the web had some potential. I also thought it might provide a career path.
In 1999, I became web coordinator for the Division of Student Affairs. A year later, I moved to central IT. For the past seven years, I’ve managed teams and technology projects related to digital media and web applications.
One of my greatest character-building experiences was my involvement in UM’s portal project (check out OneStop). Building a portal is a gut-wrenching experience. As a colleague from another institution pointed out, a portal project “shines an extremely bright light in a lot of dark corners and challenges your technical infrastructure in new ways.”
The organizational challenges are far more daunting than the technical ones.
To be fair, the portal project provided many more rewards than frustrations. I worked with some incredibly smart and creative programmers who also happened to be genuinely nice people. I gained new understanding and empathy for the work and challenges faced by others in the IT world. And I made valuable connections to colleagues around the world through our involvement in the CampusEAI consortium (note that UM's logo is the first one to show up on the page). I learned (and hopefully helped demonstrate), that UM can be a leader in technology innovation. Last spring the world came to UM to learn from our programmers how to do portals.
Here are some of my interests that you can expect me to write about in the IT Community blog:
- Communication
- Innovation
- Collaboration
- Community-building
- Web (design, development, content, content management, security, social networking, 2.0, media, you name it)
- Marketing
- Organizational behavior
- Leadership and management
- Strategic planning
- Group decision-making processes
- Governance
- Policy development
- Media
- Customer service
- Training and support
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