In an email the day after the Core Services meeting, Tim McGovern asked Rob...Your mention of a -- dare I say canonical -- list of typical IT activities is interesting. Have you developed or discovered such a list that you might share?
Thanks,
-- Tim
I said I had made it up during the conversation. But here is what I think it consists of.
A Core Service or Product is one for which our IT organization has committed resources from three or more of this list of available resource pools:
- we do training on it
- we publish about it
- we procure software for it
- we help people use it
- we provide servers that enable it
- we develop software related to it
If it isn't three or more parts of IS&T working on it, then it's fringe.
It's okay to be fringe, but it might merit budgeted attention. Google was on the lips of many during the talk -- Google's approach is 80/20, 80 % of everyone's time is committed to the core business (promoting advertising revenue), while 20% can be fed into fringe work that might someday turn into something useful for Google (gmail, sketchup, etc).
CSS ought to be able to address the fringe by budgeting up to 20% of it's support resources to the fringe, as long as the core is being supported adequately.