End of the year lists

From: "Mark Berman" <mberman@SIENA.EDU>
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Sent: Wednesday, December 5, 2012 6:44:38 AM
Subject: Re: [CIO] End of the year lists

We are also getting rid of departmental phone billing. I guess that's a popular one. Although the hangup right now is our finance folks who still want to charge departments so they can distribute the expense. I've been arguing to average the last three year's charges, charge the average to the department, and increase it by COLA each year.

We will also have retired our Exchange system by summer. Migration to Google is going really well. An upgrade is retiring FoxPro as a production database (believe it or not).

Have a great holiday!!

 - MarkMark Berman, Chief Information Officer
Siena College
515 Loudon Road
Loudonville, NY  12211
(518)782-6957,  Fax: (518)783-2590
Siena College is a learning community advancing the ideals of a liberal arts education, rooted in its identity as a Franciscan and Catholic institution.

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-------- You wrote:
The stopping of something - a system, a service - is a challenge.  But this little sentence notes how it contributes to the simplicity of our environments, and simplicity can improve client experience, reduce costs, and reduce management overhead.  Another thing it does is create capacity for innovation and space to do new things.

How are you creating space to do new things in your department?  Any plans for the coming year to stop doing something?

We stopped doing departmental phone billing this year.  I recently found out how much time and energy we were using to maintain an old PDF format phone directory and I'm trying to end that.  For example, we have web sites for departments, and the departments can put public contact information on their web sites.  But some want the old PDF directory accessible from some central web site, under the theory that a user would go to the (let's say for example) Veteran's Office page, then jump to another page of phone numbers to find the number, which cannot be pointed to on a smart phone triggger a dial for call.  The entire thing needs to updated to mobile frameworks.

Any ideas for things to stop doing or to create capacity?
--
Theresa Rowe
Chief Information Officer
Oakland University
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I'm half-time faculty myself, and nobody ever called my English department phone, so I had no objections when the Chair of English proposed ripping them all out and transferring the funds to the travel account. Office phones are so 20th Century!