Matsu’s World: The One Less Traveled

What time is it? Donut time!

Today is donut (doughnut?) day where I work. Well, every Friday is donut day where I work. We always start our day with a demartmental meeting where the main food group is donut — of course we are very inclusive — we eat all types of donuts.

Well, this article in Wired was e-mailed to me yesterday and it really amused me since donuts are such a standard part of the life of I.T. people in my department. How can you argue with free donuts? My answer… you can’t!

I recently took my teen aged son to a baseball practice at an indoor arena. At the same location and time there was a soccer game taking place. As I watched the soccer game I was reminded of many of the characteristics of a good team, both in athletics and in business.

The soccer players each had specific roles or positions they played. While they had clearly defined roles, they also worked fluidly and occassionally helped each other out and covered other player’s positions when needed. At one point the goalie moved way out of the goal and another player automatically move in front of the goal. THAT’S the way a department should work! I didn’t hear anyone say, “that’s not my job” or “who do you think you are doing my job” and they all worked together to accomplish a common purpose.

They also talked all of the time. They were constantly calling out to teammates and communicating either warnings (or opposing team members’ presence) or opportunities to pass or score. They anticipated things and then talked to their teammates to make sure everyone knew the situation and had a heads up on what could happen. It was easy to apply that kind of communication to a healthy work environment.

There was an expectation that each person would pull their weight and perform their very best. And, when the ball was passed from person to person there was a trust between players. Skills were needed at both the individual level and they had to rely on each other and work together to score.

We’ve all heard that a well run organization takes teamwork, but watching a skilled and high performing soccer team really drove home to me the importance of each person doing their part and understanding their role but being flexible enough to fluidly help out in other roles as needed and then go back to their primary role when they were done. To do that there must be a high level of trust and respect between team members.

The final thing I noticed, which is very true of a workplace team, is that players were changed out from time to time. Right now, I’ve got two team members that I need to hire and so it’s important that I find the people with the right skills and ability to be a true team player in order to have a well run department.

As some (or most) of my readers already know, I work as a technology director at a private college. Working in the higher education market has unique challenges and opportunities for technology professionals. And, there are some really great professional organizations for I.T. folk who work at colleges and universities. One organization is Educause.

If you work in higher education (anywhere in the world) and you don’t know about Educause then take some time to visit their website and review all of the free materials available to anyone. I have benefited greatly from my association with and membership in the Educause organization. This week I am attending the annual Educause conference, which is being held in Seattle, Washington (USA).

So far the conference has been great. Today is the last day. This afternoon I will be visiting two colleges/universities in the area. I always enjoy visiting other campuses to see how they deal with I.T. issues and how they have implemented technology. In this case, I know the I.T. directors and will enjoy learning more about their workplace as they have told me many stories about their campuses.

Before I sign off, I must give a shout-out to Judy and her class at Whitworth College (oh, okay I’ll acknowledge you are now Whitworth UNIVERSITY). I hope you are learning a lot about technology.

Today I attended pre-conference meetings and then the opening events for the technology conference I am attending in Pennsylvania. So far, there have been two surprising discoveries.

First, this past year several of the other affiliated colleges and universities have struggled with staff cuts as they experienced varying degrees of enrollment declines (or in some cases a lack of growth – flattening enrollment). This has placed a great amount of stress on the I.T. departments as they either had positions eliminated or experienced hiring freezes.

Second, it was a pleasant surprise to find out that another school is using Ruby on Rails for some application development. In fact, they used that open source development platform for three different applications they developed in-house. I can’t wait to get my programming staff in touch with that other campus’ programmers who use Ruby. I’m sure they will have much to talk about and may even be able to exchange some knowledge. It is unfortunate that I couldn’t have my programmer(s) here to attend the conference with me. But, that’s a different story…

Tomorrow I give my talk on what CFO’s need to know about CIO’s. I hope it’s well received.

Day one is good. Looking forward to the rest of the week.

The second full week of June I am planning to give a couple of presentations at a technology conference that I think will turn out to be a lot of fun. The first presentation is titled, “Ten Things Every CIO Should Know About CFO’s.” The subtitle of that talk could be, “What it takes for CIO’s to successfully work with CFO’s.”

(For those readers who are not familiar with the acronyms CIO and CFO, they stand for Chief Information Officer and Chief Financial Officer, respectively.)

The second talk is the same thing from the opposite perspective. Yup, you guessed it, “Ten Things Every CFO Should Know About CIO’s.” If you have not figured it out, I work as a CIO and I report to the CFO. He will be helping me with the second ‘top ten’ list of things to know.

The particular conference I am attending is a joint conference of higher education CFO’s and CIO’s (and other IT managers), so the topics seemed especially appropriate. I’ll let you all know how it turns out. And, after the conference, I’ll post my two lists of ten things.