I love everything about sports, but I especially love observing good coaches. When I moved to Minnesota in 2013, I was delighted that we have one of the 12 WNBA teams in the country. And it turns out we have one of the best coaches as well. This summer, ITS spent time on our coaching and conditioning, getting ready for this 2024/25 “season” at Carleton.
At the beginning of the summer, ITS staff finished their annual reviews. I encourage the department to think of these as coaching conversations. I want us to talk as partners about our accomplishments and areas for improvement.
In my review, I shared with Michelle (Mattson) that one of the goals I had set when I started at Carleton 11 years ago, was to successfully balance the sustainability of IT services with ongoing innovation. She wisely suggested that some of these goals could benefit from smaller, more measurable outcomes.
Here are some recent tangible examples.
On the sustainability side: the EIS team leveraged new tools from the SEAMS Project to gain efficiency & accuracy in how we move data between systems (e.g. from Workday to 25Live), the TSG team consolidated printing into one vendor for more efficient support & print queue management, the SIG team consolidated IP addresses and reorganized the CMC Data Center, and the new Planning & Communications team started investigating processes & tools for better management of IT projects.
On the innovation side: I attended an excellent AI Summit in NYC, a dozen staff from across ITS participated in an AI book discussion1, the AT team prepared for campus exploration of AI, and the SIG team installed an open source AI tool from Vanderbilt University, which could provide more functionality & privacy of our data at a lower cost than the current subscriptions to ChatGPT and others.
I’ll share more goals in future newsletters, but I probably won’t share my thoughts on Coach Reeve or how it’s going as a rookie in my daughter’s fantasy football league. Feel free to stop me on the sidewalk to talk sports — or to talk about technology, your choice.
I want to close this article by sharing a link to the 2024 Annual Report, which provides a summary of ITS activities and initiatives plus a two-page spread of fun statistics. We find it valuable to reflect on the past year, and are glad to offer a deeper view into the workings of technology at Carleton.
I wish you well as we begin 2024-2025.
Welcome back!
-Janet
1“Everyone is Above Average: is AI a leveler, a kingmaker or escalator?” by Ethan Mollick
Teaching with AI by Bowen and Watson (ebook link)
Demo below of Jules White using gen AI prompts in creative & useful ways