The conference kicked off with a great opening keynote by Jim Collins talking about Leadership in High Ed IT. Here were my based on his research in comparing the Good to the Great. Here are my take aways from the keynote:
- Signature of a level 5 (best) leader is humility and ambition for the cause of the company
- Great CIO are effective leaders who have IT backgrounds
- Jim described tenured faculty as 1,000 points of "No", CIO of university does not have executive power, instead they have legislative power which is much harder to use.
- True leadership is if people follow when they have the power to not follow.
- 1st get the right people on the bus, then get them in the right seats, then figure out where to take the bus.
- Confront the ugly facts.
- In the social sector (include higher ed) money is only a means, not a measure of success like in the corporate world
- Have a stop doing list
- Preserve the core values (signature of mediocrity is incosistency of values)
- Change the cultural and operating practices, specific goals and strategies (not core values)
Six things to check for people in the right seats
- Fit with the core values
- Don't need to be managed
- Realize they don't have a job, but rather responsibilitiy
- Do what they say 100% of the time
- They are a window (share success and take blame)
- Passion for what the institution does
Recommended things to do (more at http://jimcolins.com):
- Build personal board of directors of people with character
- Get young people in your face
- Turn off electronic gadgets and put white space on your calendar for disciplined thought
- What is your question to statement ratio? Double it in the next year.
- Start a "Stop do list"
- Suspend titles and articulate responsibilities
- Discover the below water line risks and take them away
From the sessions
There were several themes that emerged from the sessions I attended as well as the sessions that were being offered. I group them as follows:
- Cloud Computing (Private and Public)
- High Performance Computing (Research Computing)
- Virtualization
- Sustainable IT
- Financial Constraints
I attended numerous sessions that address all of these in various overlapping ways. Of particular note was the growing number of schools providing students and researchers with access to there own internal cloud computing environment on an On Demand basis. The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) project out of NC State, which Pat Dreher (former MITer) presented about, was particularly exciting. They hace created a open source project that provides an internal cloud to students and researcher that can be leveraged to load balance with unused cycles for HPC isntallations as well. I think there is a lot of potential in this area to consider what MIT should be looking at in terms of service to students and researchers. We have been leveraging Amazon services for a while through various grants, but those resources will start to cost more eventually. The VCL provides a web frontend that enables its users to request an n-node cluster of machines and chose which image of operating system and applications should be installed. They then use that for the requested timeframe and then it is returned to the pool. Financial comparisons of this done in Virginia show the VCL configuration to be much more cost effective than other options they considered.
To be continued...
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