rowe's blog

What do chief business officers think about in the financial crisis? CIOs looking for cuts may want to consider the perspectives shared by David Creamer, Vice President for Finance and Business Services and Treasurer at Miami University in Ohio. Mr. Creamer emphasized productivity in his talks with CIOs at the Midwest Educause Regional Conference.

This emphasis challenged me to think about ways that we can use our IT spend to improve productivity on our campuses. This is a particular challenge because for IT, productivity improvements that may reduce costs often come after a significant up-front investment in technology. But it does seem that we can communicate a stronger case to our Chief Business and Financial Officers by paying attention to productivity in our proposals.

Just sat through another painful sales webinar...  Why is looking at web-based software in a sales review so very, very painful?  It is like an unfamiliar roller-coaster ride.  Someone else is at the controls in a remote place.  They know where they want to go, but you don't know the path.  So the viewer is left to sit and watch as someone unknown points and clicks - and you never know when they are going to point and click and jump to something else.  You get focused on something on the screen, and you suddenly startled to someplace else.  All the while the vendor-speaker is coming across the speaker phone, and if they've gone to a cell phone, Skype or VOIP, the connection may echo or cut out.  We strain to listen to the vendor talk about the product, trying to get important details, and the vendor is talking about the product in a casual, unscripted way that just is intended to "walk you through" something that requires your attention.  At the end, I'm left with a series of disjointed perceptions about the product.  Many times my functional community is left with a bad product view, when I really think it was the bad

Things I want in e-mail that I don't have:
* A FedEx/UPS view on a message, so that I can do a real-time trace of a specific e-mail message, from the moment it is sent to the actual delivery, and watch it travel the delivery route.  I want to be able to answer "where did the e-mail message go?" or "why am I not getting this message?".

* The same ability for all members of a list, so I can track particular list messages.

* If at all possible, a test feature for data breach notification processes.  I'd like more testing options -- The ability to say "dry run" and test a notice without it actually landing in an inbox.  If you don't want replies to go to the list, test both reply and reply-all functions to make sure that replies do not go to the list, and be able to do all this without it being real.