Comments for CIOh-no

Comment on I Have a Suggestion, “No more Suggestions!” by strategic change management

strategic change management — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:09:06 +0000

strategic change management…

Great post. My approach to strategic change management says the quality of the first five percent determines what happens in the rest of the process. This same principle applies to many situations….

Comment on CI-whO? by pmasson

pmasson — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:58:14 +0000

Well it is “CI-whO.”

Comment on CI-whO? by Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:53:29 +0000

Maybe you could actually state your name somewhere on your blog, rather than making me look it up in a Campus Technology magazine article?

Comment on The More Things Change (Bb Buys Another LMS), The More They Stay The Same (Reaction Filled With FUD) by John A Arkansawyer

John A Arkansawyer — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:50:42 +0000

Open source advocates shoot themselves in the foot when they emphasize the ability to muck around in the source code, as that implies the code needs to be mucked around with on an everyday basis for production use. That’s not true* of any major open source project I’ve ever used in production.

*To get Perl 5.8.0 to compile on NCR/AT&T Unix, I had to make a couple of changes in the install script. I call that a configuration change, not a code change.

Comment on The Question Shouldn’t Be; “Why IT Projects Get Killed…” by PM Hut

PM Hut — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:03:46 +0000

Here's a complementary article on the same note: Failure Causes in IT Project Management. I think the 2 articles relate to each other, as usually failure causes are the same causes that can get a project canned.

Comment on lol l8r by Dennis Callas

Dennis Callas — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:19:01 +0000

The following is the policy statement that was included in the course syllabus template, based on discussions with SUNY Counsel:
CELL PHONES/TAPE RECORDERS/ELECTRONIC DEVICES IN THE CLASSROOM: Students are required to turn off cell phones (blackberries, etc.) in class and may not use recording devices, unless the student has a documented disability which permits recording, or permission of the course instructor. A student’s refusal to turn off a cell phone (blackberry, etc.) will be cause for dismissal from class. In addition, use of ANY electronic devices (for text messaging, listening to MP3 players, inappropriate use of a laptop, etc.) which disrupt class will also be cause for dismissal from that class.

Comment on The Most Poisonous Force in Technology by What Really Happened at SUNY: Another View at e-Literate

What Really Happened at SUNY: Another View at e-Literate — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:54:35 +0000

[...] the death of SLN2, my good friend Patrick Masson has lifted the veil just a little bit higher in a recent blog post. As a side note, I am thrilled to see Patrick join the blogosphere. His blog, [...]

Comment on The Most Poisonous Force in Technology by pmasson

pmasson — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:58:51 +0000

Greg,

I completely agree.

Comment on The Most Poisonous Force in Technology by Greg Ketcham

Greg Ketcham — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:36:54 +0000

Patrick:
Really, whether or not an open architecture would better serve the SUNY community vs. a proprietary commercial LMS was never the issue. The central issue, IMO, was the process of diffusion of innovations. What? No one in the Tower ever read Everett Rogers? The attempts at gaining buy in from key constituents – the CTO communtiy – range from laughable to downright pathetic. There was simply no attempt to understand key concerns that CTOs might voice – such as SLAs, support processes, migration processes, actual development timelines. You know, hard data

I would still submit that, by managing the change process correctly, there might have been a higher level of buy in and acceptance across the managerial strata of SUNY. But since SLN 2.0 was essentially presented in a “we know what’s best for you” manner, not surprisingly, it wasn’t an easy pill for many to swallow. If today’s present leadership had been in place at that point in time, we might be at a different point than where we are today. Effective leadership means actually talking and your constituents – something that was not in evidence in the past within SLN executive management.

Greg Ketcham
MIDizen X

Comment on The Most Poisonous Force in Technology by Bill Fitzgerald

Bill Fitzgerald — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:26:36 +0000

Thank you for sharing your ideas about this — I hear similar sentiments voiced on an almost-daily basis by forward thinking insiders from large within education and business.

What’s interesting is the “bottom line” argument as voiced by your first commenter: “This post truly highlights the fact that the “bottom line” can be the driver is most any industry, be it private sector, public sector, and even public education.”

Done well, building on top of open source products allows organizations to build a scalable structure that can use the innovation flowing from the various open source communities. Really, if an institution is smart enough to leave core code untouched (to allow for clean upgrades between versions) and use open standards to create connections between different applications, the TCO becomes a wash.

RE Beth Harris’s comment: “Anyway, none of this really matters since it is just a matter of time until teaching and learning are not bound by the walls of the LMS — and become truly collaborative by being public, cross-institutional, and international, and until what students (and teachers) create can be recreated by anyone, anywhere. We just have to bide our time…”

Yup. There’s no surer sign of stagnation, isolation, and eventual obsolescence than sequestering oneself behind a wall.

Cheers,

Bill