Schools and Colleges of Engineering IT Leadership Constituent Group

Hi folks….I have a non IT related question for the group.

We are in the middle of evaluating the overall culture in engineering and one of the committees that was formed was professional development and mentoring for staff.  One thing that came up in our first meeting was the lack of a local HR representative in the school.  Historically, we have always had one but when the last person in this position left, they spread the responsibilities out across different individuals.  The overall feeling from the group is that this actually hurts the school since there isn’t a single resource with the expertise to coordinate and manage development and/or recognition programs at the school level.

So, my question to the group, do your schools have a dedicated, local HR representative or id the...

Directors:

Good morning.  Our Team here at Pittsburgh is embarking on a thorough testing & viability project related to introducing a VDI into our 18 computing classrooms.  Presently populated by high end workstations, and running apps to those similarly running in your environments like ANSYS, LabView, SolidWorks, Matlab, COMSOL, etc, we want to determine how well a VDI can perform and deliver in a production classroom compared to the dedicated environment in which they now operate.

I would love to get some feedback from those of you who have taken, or are considering taking, the plunge on this front and what your experience has been.

Best,

Brian

Directors:

Greetings.  For the past several months, our School has been examining the processes underlying our management of graduate program applications.  In the past, the School has followed a fractured process of part paper – part electronic that has resulted in frustrated departments, lost candidates, and missing information, amongst other issues.

We’re coming to a point where we need to begin considering what the market has to offer, and what other Engineering schools are doing/have done to make the application process simple for applicants, and the review-management-of-the-apps process simple and flexible for the departments who need to select their candidates. Our University has a contract with a vendor called Hobson’s, Inc and their tool “...

One of the many areas where “traditional thinking” has been evolving is with regard to allowing food and drink in computer labs.

Personally, I am comfortable with creating “lounge-like” spaces for students, with computers, where  refreshments are allowed.  However, I am not at all comfortable with taking a traditional, packed-with-computers lab space and allowing unlimited food and drink.

This subject is about to come up in my shop, so I am curious to hear from others about where you are…  Have you relaxed food and drink policies in your computer labs?  Or discussed it and decided not to relax your policies?  What were the key factors in your decision? 

If you have...

We are looking at how to tweak a model we have in place that has become burdensome for our staff.   Here is the background:

When we refresh labs and faculty/staff desktops systems we retire the systems and these  sit on an inventory of systems that are not quite as good as the new ones but may have some warranty time left on them (we get 5 year warranty). To be prudent with these state purchased systems we make them available as secondary systems to the faculty/staff who can request these to be allocated to departmental labs, research, grad student, projects.   We let them know that these are old systems and when they run out of warranty we will not be able to repair them.   The department who approved the allocation of these systems will have to pay for repairs.  As a side effect, the older systems (6-7 years old) can no longer run the...