OneIT: MOR IT Leadership Development

One emphasis of Georgia Tech’s OneIT program is to promote professional development of IT staff across Georgia Tech, through activities like IT 101 and other peer-to-peer learning; on-campus training opportunities; interest groups, book club, and other related activities.

Through OneIT, the Office of Information Technology will make available a new professional development opportunity: the MOR IT Leaders Program. This established program, which draws participation from many respected higher education institutions, seeks to enhance the professional development of individuals who will play management and leadership roles within higher education information technology. More information here:

http://morassociates.com/resources/pdfs/2016_MOR_IT_Leaders_Program.pdf

GT’s participation in this program in 2018 will consist of two cohorts of six members each, drawing members both from within OIT and from other campus units.

The program involves a significant commitment of time and resources on an individual and institutional level, including:

  • Time commitment, including four 3-day in-person instructional meetings in various cities, as well as significant time reading and preparing for these meetings
  • Monetary commitment: the program costs approximately $6,000 per participant as well as travel expenses (estimated $5500). For the campus cohort, OIT will cover the $6k program cost, with the home unit of the individual contributing the travel costs
  • Administrative agreement: the leadership of the campus participant’s unit (e.g., Dean, School Chair, Director) must agree to allow the necessary time for participation in the program, as well as to fund travel cost mentioned above

Note that this program is available only to IT staff currently serving in a management role (i.e., with direct reports).

We realize the limitations of this opportunity, since it is available to a relatively small number of people. Depending on the program’s success and on available funding, in future years GT may make the program available to a larger number of people. Additionally, there is a related program for IT staff seeking to take on a management role (the Emerging Leaders program) — there may be future opportunities for this program.

The OneIT steering committee will evaluate and make recommendations for campus nominees. OIT has a separate process in place to identify participants. All recommendations will ultimately be presented to GT leadership for approval.

The nomination process for campus nominees will require:

  • A brief nomination letter supporting the nomination (600 words maximum). Either self-nomination or nomination by a colleague is acceptable. This should address how the candidate and GT could be expected to benefit from the program; factors suggesting the candidate’s prospects for success in the program; and any other supporting reasons for the nomination.
  • Confirmation that the candidate’s unit leadership agrees to the potential commitment of time and money.

Those with potential interest who want to talk to past participants may contact one or more of the following people: Eric BuckhaltPam BuffingtonJewel ColemanAndrew DietzScott FreidrichMaria HunterMarissa JulesJohn Wilson.

Campus nominations should be made through https://gatech.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_etHxWn4l7JYxOXH by end of day on October 31 2017.

OneIT: September Update

Hello IT community…

On behalf of the OneIT steering committee I would like to give a brief update on a few items, presented in concise list form for the busy IT professional:

1) ITIL overview workshop
‌ITIL overview workshop is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday Oct 10, all day, lunch provided, BME Room 1103

Presented by Knowledge Toolworks, this workshop is intended to provide the campus IT community with an overview of ITIL so that participants can determine how and which parts of ITIL may be of benefit to their IT organization. The workshop describes the ITIL Lifecycle phases and how they can help align IT with “the business”, control cost, improve IT service quality, balance resource allocations, and make IT a more enjoyable and stable working environment. Room for approximately 30 participants. We will be in touch again shortly to begin gathering a list of participants.‌

2) IT 101 October Sessions
The next sessions are scheduled for Oct 3-4, 9-11am each day, location TBD

A common observation is that new IT staff at GT, particularly those in support roles within campus units, have few ways of learning about the various services and collegial groups available to them. This course, divided into 2 sections of 2 hours each, is intended to give new or relatively new IT staff (including student IT workers) an overview of all standard IT services. (Employees of longer tenure are also welcome, of course.) Will also be available via Bluejeans session. Please let Steve Hodges (shodges@gatech.edu) know if you are interested in attending. Rough outline of content is at http://b.gatech.edu/2wMnvBd, though content is evolving.

3) IAM Helpdesk
Ongoing sessions scheduled for first Monday and third Wednesday of each month. The next is Monday Oct 2 @ 1:30pm. See OneIT o365 or web calendars for details.

The Identity and Access Management (IAM) interest group is running twice-monthly online helpdesk sessions. These sessions provide an opportunity for those working with IAM and integrations to ask questions of members of the IAM team.

4) Book Discussion Group
Next meeting is Monday September 25, 12-1pm in Student Center Room 321 — book to be discussed is Good To Great [ https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996 ]. For questions or to express interest contact group leader Gabe Vannice (vannice@gatech.edu)

5) OneIT social
The next OneIT social event will be held in the Student Center Peachtree Room, October 16th 2-6pm. Meet colleagues, network, play board games, and have some fun.

6) Cybersecurity Lecture Series
Passing along info about this series, which may be of interest to many in the community: https://iisp.gatech.edu/cyber-lecture

7) Interest groups
Interest groups in professional development, identity and access management, web leadership, and software engineering are ongoing [ https://www.oneit.gatech.edu/interest-groups/ ].

Another possible interest group for Women in IT under discussion. If you are interested in participating, please contact Marissa or Steve or the interest group leaders.

8) Future plans
Several items are in discussion/planning stages, including: speaker series for next-generation IT topics; mentoring program for professional development; leadership development opportunities; and knowledgebase for use in IT documentation and sharing across campus groups.

We welcome feedback at oneit@gatech.edu

OneIT: Continuing Developments

As the OneIT program continues to develop, we wanted to share some upcoming events and general plans.

As you may recall, OneIT is meant to explore and initiate ways to strengthen GT’s IT community, including: social and professional activities; professional development; knowledge sharing; and openness to shared experimentation.

Here are a few topics we want to share:

1) Calendar and Communication

With so many different kinds of calendar use, we don’t think it’s realistic to have one single calendar location for publishing OneIT events. With that in mind, we’ve settled on posting events in the following places:

a) a shared calendar in Office 365 — Outlook or OWA users should be able to find this shared calendar in the Office 365 directory by searching for OneIT or oneit@gatech.edu

b) the “Events” page on the OneIT web site [ https://www.oneit.gatech.edu ] (which also allows downloading .ics entries into personal calendars, if desired)

c) by periodic announcement to the CSR list and/or the new “Intranet of People” MS Team that Lawrence Sharp mentioned recently in ITAC

2) Next Social Event

In conjunction with the Interest Groups we’ve mentioned before, we would like to plan our next social event in late July as an “Interest Group Expo” — we’ll be in a space where we can mill about, have refreshments, and also ask questions or talk with Interest Group organizers to let them know what you would most like to talk about as the Interest Groups kick off in early fall (probably mid- to late-September). Summaries of the proposed interest groups can be found at https://www.oneit.gatech.edu/interest-groups/ .

3) Next IT 101

We plan to run “IT 101 for IT Professionals” again July 17 and 18, 9-11am each day, location yet to be determined. This “work in progress” workshop is intended to give relatively recently arrived GT IT Professionals broad exposure to IT tools and services at GT. But anyone is welcome to attend; please email shodges@gatech.edu if you plan to attend.

We also plan to run a “IT Governance 101” workshop for those who want to learn more about how the revamped IT governance process will work. Date and location yet to be determined.

4) Fall Seminar Series

In the fall semester we will offer 2-3 brown bag talks centered on topics of current IT interest. Examples may include Amazon AWS or MS Azure; containers; or other emerging technologies.

Thanks to everyone for your interest and enthusiasm in OneIT — over time we think this will develop into a collection of useful and fun activities!

 

 

OneIT: What’s Next

Recall that the OneIT program is meant to explore ways to strengthen GT’s IT community in a variety of ways, including:

  • social and professional activities
  • education
  • knowledge sharing
  • openness to shared experimentation

Having enjoyed an opportunity to network and socialize over King of Pops and paper airplanes, we want to continue developing the program with a couple of new activities.

1) Interest groups

The OneIT Steering Committee is necessarily fairly generic in scope — its purpose is to explore and encourage general ways to strengthen the IT community, independent of any particular area or type of technology. But we do see an opportunity for the campus to strengthen collaboration through formation of “interest groups” — these would be formed around specific topics or technology areas. OneIT can help support these groups by helping design, organize, and promote awareness of them.

Interest groups could vary somewhat in their purpose — for example, a discussion-oriented group might seek to solicit feedback or promote roadmap development of a technology or set of technologies, such as identity management. A working group might be established to create a proof-of-concept installation for a new technology. A study group might be formed to formulate a policy suggestion to be submitted to governance bodies. In any case, these groups would require

  • a description of their scope
  • a leader or leaders
  • a statement of goals, as concrete as possible

We believe there is opportunity for several useful interest groups across different areas — possibly involving aspects of IT such as identity management, enterprise data, professional development, development/service methodologies. The following two interest groups can serve as a starting point:

  1. Identity Management

    This interest group will promote the exchange of information and suggestions about all facets of identity management. The emphasis is on representations of people and groups in IT-facing systems. Current examples of technologies in this area include Mage, GTED, GRS, Grouper, GTAD, BuzzAPI. This is a community users group intended to discuss campus needs in identity, existing solutions and best practices, and possible service changes. This interest group will be led by Bert Bee-Lindgren.

  2. Professional Development

    This interest group, unlike others, will be led directly by members the OneIT Steering Committee — this is because the topic is broad and generally applicable across the IT community. The goal for this interest group is to develop a set of recommended practices for promoting professional development for members of the IT community. This may include an “IT 101” on-boarding curriculum to address the perennial complaint that new members of the IT community are often left on their own to discover available services and how to use them; or sponsoring a series of brown bags for outside experts to come to GT to discuss emerging technologies; or developing a recommendation for how to fairly fund professional development activities across the entire IT community.

Yet we don’t want to presume what is most interesting to the community. Therefore, we’d like to invite nominations for interest group topics through the rest of this month. Please send nominations to oneit@gatech.edu; we will survey the IT community in early June to determine the ideas which garner the most interest — these will serve as our initial interest groups.

OneIT intends to offer as much support as possible for these groups, such as promoting awareness of group purposes, meeting times, etc; support for scheduling meetings or locating meeting space if needed; a platform for capturing/sharing group work and results; technology resources if needed.

While the process of interest group nomination and formation is underway, we will also try a few smaller programs:

2) IT 101 for IT Staff

A common observation is that new IT staff at GT, particularly those in support roles within campus units, often have few ways of learning about the various services and collegial groups available to them. In accordance with the “experimental” tenet of OneIT, I will be offering a first attempt at a “curriculum” to address this need. (This is timely, as we in Ivan Allen College have a new staff member and need to do this anyway.) I will be in touch with more about this for anyone else who may want to join, but this is tentatively scheduled for May 10-12, 9am-11am — the first two days will be focused on campus services, while the last will focus on IAC-specific services (still open to anyone, but of less general interest). This is intended to give new or relatively new IT staff (including student IT workers) an overview of all standard IT services.

3) IT 101 for Students

Similarly, a common need across many parts of campus involves instructing new students about IT services available to them. (This is often a particular problem for graduate students, who have no standard introduction to IT services on campus and are sometimes unaware of useful IT services.) We will develop a standard introduction to common services for students in any academic unit. This should allow for a more cohesive view of IT at GT. We will make the first presentation of this class available in the first week of the summer term (week of May 15) and will be in touch about that separately.

4) Summer Social

We will also plan another social/networking event in late summer — most likely the week of July 24. We’ll be in touch with more detail closer to that time.

5) Speaker Series

We will periodically sponsor speakers on special IT topics — for example, these may be on emerging technologies of interest or service roadmaps for major campus IT services. We intend the schedule the first event in the speaker series in July.

We hope these activities will prove useful, but we’ll watch and listen carefully to determine if they are indeed valuable to the community. We see these as experiments to determine what kinds of activities help to build a more cohesive IT community. We welcome feedback or suggestions — please send those to oneit@gatech.edu. Thank you!