First day at the technology conference

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.

Advertisements