As much by writing

This month we will be discussing the SUNY New York Alert system. The New York Alert system was created in light of recent campus incidents. Students, staff and faculty are informed about emergencies occurring on or around their college campus. The system notifies their members of Bomb treats, Hazardous materials, Personal safety, Severe weather and Utility failure. I’m already signed up with the system and it comes in handy with notifying about severe snow storms. Delhi is known for having big snow storms and dangerous driving conditions. I know the next question that pops into your head is, how do you sign up or become apart of the New York Alert system? It is very easy to sign up to the system; it takes less than five minutes to complete it.
Type in this link, https://ssb.delhi.edu/pls/prod/BWCKYSWPS.py_CreateSurvey?app_in=NY_ALERT. This link will send you to the Bronco Webpage to register for the SUNY New York Alert System. If you still have questions about the New York Alert system you can go on campus life and click on SUNY NY Alert. When you sign up there are many ways that the system can contact you. You can get text, phone and email messages sent to you. I personally selected text messaging as an alert option. It’s better for me because I am always on my phone. After reading this blog would you sign up for the system? If you already signed up, tell me how the NY Alert system helped you? How do you feel about the system?

Mockup of website with RSS feeds, latest changes

Ok, clearly I’m a wiki-head. Most certainly annoyingly so. I personally subscribe to a couple instances of Confluence and have about 15 wikis I own or use on sites.google.com and pbwiki.com. But why? How did I get this way? To me, our Confluence wiki is as important if not more important than e-mail, and is open all day right next to it, refreshing regularly. Why is this? And why would I post information to Confluence vs. the web site? Here are some reasons:

1) Clicks.
In Confluence: find page, click edit, make changes, click save.
In OmniUpdate: find page, click to enter site, login, click edit, make changes, click save, click Publish, click Publish.
Attaching files is also quick and simple.

2) What’s important in other departments?
Sometimes what is going on in other departments has nothing to do with me or my business unit, and I can just ignore it. But many times what we are working on affects others in other departments. It’s the web effect – although we may operate as separate entities in separate departments, clearly at least a portion of what we do affects each other. Continue Reading »

Kudos to the CIS Staff in developing a great library of interesting articles. Located in Confluence, these articles might focus on technical topics, but they actually address many of the day-to-day issues SUNY Delhi faculty, staff and students are encountering.

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SUNY Delhi CIS Department is extending their blogging website. Bits & Bytes is a new online forum that everyone can access, discuss and post their opinions. This blog is created to be an avenue for student, faculty, and staff to post their comments and opinions on different events that will be happening on SUNY Delhi campus. The CIS Department created Bits & Bytes to deliver information from new technology to alerts and announcements from the Help Desk. Other post will consist of how to tips, making it easier for users to navigate throughout SUNY Delhi website and other software. This forum is a place for users to voice their thoughts about technical issues with the school email, updates with SUNY NY Alert System, to technology in the classrooms, where technology is needed most on Delhi campus and issues with ResNet in the Dorms. The goal for Bits & Bytes is to have an open forum to improve communication between the CIS Department and the SUNY Delhi populace. Bits & Bytes is authored by a SUNY Delhi student. I hope this blog will be informative and educational for all who visit Bits & Bytes.

Question of the Day:
What do you think about the new blog idea of Bits & Bytes?

I just read an interesting post from Carl Pritchard of the Cutter Consortium, entitled “Making Business Decisions: The Voices We Value.” Within the article, Mr. Pritchard notes the conclusions of a recent Cutter Benchmark Review that highlights “the value of trusting those we have chosen to trust historically and the limited amount of sway that most outside forces should have (and do have) on our business decisions.” Essentially organizations find the ideas, issues, solutions, etc. of their organization’s team members more valuable than “outsiders” such as consultants, vendors or academics. Pritchard states, “Familiarity does not, in this case, seem to breed contempt. Instead, it seems to breed ongoing application,” and “Organizations should take note. Their best resources for identifying good practice are their team members.”

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Four student productions are winners of the second annual Sparky Awards, a contest organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and adopted by campuses nationwide that calls on entrants to creatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas.

Selected by a distinguished panel of media scholars, educators, librarians, students, and others, the winning videos offer potent and colorful glimpses of how students see sharing of knowledge spurring innovation, solving problems, and improving lives. The winners were announced on January 24 at a public screening held in connection with the American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Denver. The videos will also be screened at the Campus MovieFest Southern Regional Grand Finale in Atlanta March 28 and 29, 2009.

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Thanks to podcasts, I have finally become a listener of “This American Life”. I heard this episode the other day that made me think of my teamwork and how I participate in working with my colleagues. It made me think – what type of team member am I? How can I be a better team member?

This one is worth a listen! http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1275

A request recently came into CIS that I think can serve as a model for how our IT development process should operate. While the issue, from initial request to final solution, was handled completely through various one-on-one discussions (which is not how I’d like to see our development cycle run), the discussions and topics mirrored that which we have been trying to implement.

I find it very reassuring (even exciting) that the staff, intuitively and professionally, moved through all of the right steps (storytelling, use cases to define functional requirements) and collaborated openly regarding technical issues until a solution could be found. And most importantly came to a solution that provided only for those requirements: an incremental extension of existing services.

It is clear to me that we can implement an Agile Project Management approach, but our challenge is to formalize it. I would like to outline the specific example referred to above, try to highlight the activities that took place, how they correspond to Agile methods, and how they can be formalized through the Development Cycle…

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First I would like to make some overall observations: I was totally unprepared for this to be a conference of nearly 1600 attendees from around the world. I thought Agile was a small niche. The 29 vendors clearly think they have a serious market. Another 19 were listed as sponsors even though they didn’t exhibit.  The conference drew attendees from 39 countries. I talked with Agilistas from as far away as New Zealand. Found similarities with Swedes and Netherlanders. Talked environmental issues with Norwegians. The sharing was invaluable.

“Expanding Agile Horizons” might have been an apt title, but I found most of the interest in software development. Few attendees were reflecting our use of Agile in the enterprise. The conference had 400 speakers and up to 39 simultaneous sessions organized into stages. The stages were wrapped around common issues: Tools for Agility, Distributed Agile, Research, Questioning Agile, etc.. Many sessions were divided into three 30 minute blocks and I found myself suffering from Chinese Menu Syndrome. I wanted to pick from within each of the blocks, but it just wasn’t practical to try to switch sessions mid-way through. The times weren’t synchronized and the movement distractive to other attendees and speakers.  I focused primarily on the “Agile and Organizational Culture Stage,” the “Customer and Business Value Stage” and the “Leadership and Teams Stage.”

Read about the individual sessions . . . 

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I am spending the week at Campus Technology Magazine’s Next-Gen Conference. Over the week I thought it would be interesting to post the sessions I have attended in order to not only share some of the ideas presented, but hopefully foster a little discussion. I will be adding to this post, rather than adding multiple posts, so check back here to this post to see the updates.

You can find out more about the conference at the Campus Technology 2008 site, as well as an attendee generated site that includes other blog posts, twitter comments, etc. at http://sites.google.com/site/camptech08/

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