Author: Cole Camplese

Recognizing Ourselves

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A few weeks ago I was part of a team that got to review the ITS Excellence Award nominations. There were about eight of us in a room reviewing dozens of submissions from our peers across the organization. Probably one of the most postiive meetings with my team I’ve been a part of since being here.


The notion of recognizing our own work is one that pays deep dividends in the long run. The fact that members of the team take the time to reflect on the work of one of their colleagues and fill out a nomination speaks volumes to the kind of team we have here in IT Services. It means people care about each other and have the capacity to recognize their work. I like that.

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On more than one occasion those of us in the room mentioned how great it could be if the people we were reviewing could hear the amazing things not only the nominating person wrote, but the overwhelmingly positive remarks that often flew around the room from the committee. When it was all said and done, we walked out of the room feeling really great about our team, our work, and what we were accomplishing. Together.

3 Things you can do with UChicago Voices today

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What I really like about a blogging system is that it is truly a platform for digital expression. What I mean by “platform” in this context is that it allows you an easy to use environment to publish digital content. UChicago Voices is built on WordPress, a blogging system, but I like to think of it as a publishing engine. With that in mind, what are a few things you can use it for today? If I were a student getting set to wrap up the academic year, here are three things I would consider launching with Voices before it is time to head home for the Summer.


Start a Blog

This sounds like a no brainier, but giving yourself a place to write during the Summer months is a long term gift. Not only can you cultivate a habit of ongoing reflective writing, you will be building a living and searchable repository of your Summer experiences. A space that you can share in the moment that belongs to you, not trapped in FaceBook, Tumblr, Snapchat, or somebody else’s space is a really powerful thing. A blog space is personal to you and you control what you write, share, comment on, and everything in between. A blog is a great place to capture the things you are doing outside of the traditional academic experience. If you are reading a great book, have seen a great film, or taken a road trip try and put into pictures and words how that experience impacted you. The evidence you build of your experiences will provide an interesting backdrop to the months spent away from UChicago.

Build a Photo Journal

Many of the pictures we take end up in other places online — Flickr and Facebook for example — and never end up in a place that we ultimately control. Voices is a great place to take, share, and manage your collection of Summer experiences. Again, the gift of doing this in a platform like Voices is that these photos are in your space, not in the hands of a corporation. The other benefits are much like the notions inherent in starting a blog. You will be actively challenged to not only take great photos, but to share the ones that matter to you and the audience that you will ultimately create. Taking the time to care about which photos get shared is a different experience than simply shooting selfies and sharing into Snapchat.


Create a Digital Notebook

I’ve used blogging platforms for years as a “personal content management system,” especially to create and organize notes. To make it easy to use for keeping your course notes together, create a private blog and set up categories for each class you are taking. Each note gets a category related to the course you are taking. There are some really positive affordances in using a blog as a digital notebook — search is a breeze, all your notes are stored (and managed) in the cloud, you can easily mix media by adding photos and video to your otherwise text notes, and by using categories for your classes, you can quickly and easily filter course specific notes. I have seen this done across an entire academic career and having access to 4 years of notes in one digital place is quite impressive.

So there are three quick thoughts on things you can do with Voices this Summer. I hope some of that is helpful.

IT Services All Hands Reflection

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This time last week I was finalizing my slides for the IT Services All Hands meeting. I was trying to figure out how to cram six months of observations and forward facing action into 60 minutes and still leave some time for Q&A. I was also wrestling with the level of transparency to provide into the (typically) more opaque stuff within an organization — things like budgets, constraints, staffing levels, and the stuff that usually stays in the back office. I’ve believed that for a very long time that open is truly like an opacity slider that moves from transparent to opaque and that there is a time and a place to be very thoughtful about how aggressively you move that slider.

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I decided to move the slider as close to transparent as I could without creating any problems. In other words, I believe I shared the realities of the organization as I see them. And that is an important point to focus on, “as I see them.” What makes that important is that I am seeing ITS with very fresh eyes and from a different vantage point than the members of the team. I see my day to day struggles first hand, but most of the time, not theirs. I know the strain and stress many are under, but I feel it differently. I can show empathy, but there is the reality that I probably have a different view on things. Having these kinds of conversations pulls our perspectives closer together.

By being as honest and open as I could I was trying to create a shared sense of understanding of where we are as an organization. My feeling is if we all understand where we are we can better shape how we talk about our environment. Knowing that we are dealing with financial pressures helps us all better contextualize why it is not the right time to make that hire, make that investment, or take on that project. Knowing reality together allows us to see the organization through a similar set of lenses.

I also wanted to share just how transformative our work is to UChicago right now. Within the next five years we will have completely replaced our primary ERP environments, will have made massive improvements to our network infrastructure, and completely reinvented our service management and delivery approaches. And those aren’t pipe dream promises. We have already moved to WorkDay for HCM, are in the second phase of PeopleSoft Student, and working our way into a new Financial system. The network team is at the start of an incredible initiative to overhaul the campus network to make it faster, more reliable, and advance our stance in cyber research infrastructure. Tie that together with our complete reimplementation of ServiceNow and the ongoing work to redesign our customer service approaches and we are in the middle of something extraordinarily exciting.

A part of the conversation that went too quickly, but is of great importance is how we manage our teams and use our Values as part of the decision making process. I hope I was able to reinforce how our Values truly do matter and how we are living those at work every day. I shared a model for advancing staff empowerment that deserves a longer post in and of itself, but the slide that I used is below. My goals are to improve on boarding, reduce time to productivity, provide staff with a framework for success, greatly increase engagement, and radically reduce turnover. I believe all of those are tied together in a systematic process that starts even before a new staff member is hired. There will be much more coming in the next couple of months with regard to this work.

Empowerment Process

There was actually so much more that we covered. All in all, I really enjoyed the time we spent together. There were some really hard questions that I tried to answer. Some I was able to with depth, while there were others that we had to agree that there is more work to be done to get to an acceptable answer. I left feeling energized by the level of engagement and even more committed to delivering on the promises that I’m making to this team and that we are making to our University.

The after hours get together at the Pub wasn’t too shabby either.

Growing Voices

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Just a quick post to note that Voices has crossed over the 50 sites and 300 users threshold. While that is still small, it is interesting to note that this has happened without really any publicity at all. There was a Chicago Maroon article, but that didn’t share the URL for the service. I am hopeful that we will see an uptick in use for the Fall Quarter. I think once we start to work more closely with faculty partners we will see enhanced growth. From experience, that is when things start rolling. I want to challenge the IT Services team to look at novel ways they can use the service for a couple of reasons … first, I believe a tool like this can lead to intergroup discovery in ways that are sometimes difficult. Additionally, I think if we discover interesting ways to use the service it makes promoting it that much easier.

For now we will use word of mouth as we continue to see how people are using the service.

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Lynda Campus at UChicago

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Right before the break we executed a license of Lynda Campus for the entire UChicago community. We replaced a small set of licenses that had been manually managed in a check-in/check-out scenario … I asked for a license and was told there was a two week wait for one, so we wanted to do something about that.

I’ve been a very strong supporter of providing high quality and accessible learning opportunities through online providers for a very long time. When I was at Penn State and Stony Brook we had campus wide licenses and worked hard to drive adoption and use of the service by all members of our community — primarily students.

While students are a big reason why we moved to a campus-wide license, I am seeing an incredible opportunity for staff to utilize Lynda to stay current, move forward, and develop professional skills. The catalog of courses offered by Lynda continues to expand in very interesting directions. In fact, I believe there are significant opportunities to increase engagement, retention, and save real dollars through the use of eLearning as a supplement to traditional professional development.

Take for example the course I just completed, “Holding Skip Level Meetings.” This course teaches a framework for better managing a skip level meeting … what is a skip level meeting? It is a meeting held with staff at least two levels below you without their direct manager in the room. I do this type of thing informally in my Coffee with Cole sessions and find incredible value in holding them. What I learned from the Lynda course is that I am not maximizing the opportunity and might even be creating unneeded anxiety in my direct reports — clearly not my intention. Going forward I will use lessons I learned in the Lynda course to make the meetings stronger and more comfortable.

I took this course over a series of days on a variety of devices — I watched on my desktop computer, on my iPad, and my iPhone. The total time invested in the course was a little under an hour, but I was able to learn in small chunks of time where I could find them. And I will add that I really did learn some very valuable pieces of information that will change my behavior. I will be challenging us all to take advantage of Lynda in structured ways as we move forward. I even earned a certificate and a badge (that’s a post for another day).

Lynda Certificate

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Maybe it is the Apps

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I continue to be amazed at how the iPad Pro is pulling me into the “Post PC Era” that Steve Jobs promised many years ago. Now that I have a Smart Keyboard I can do nearly everything, as a matter of fact I think yesterday may have been the first time since getting the iPad that I took my MacBook Pro to the office … and that was because I knew I had to present at a board meeting. Looking back, I could have easily presented from the iPad with my HDMI adapter.

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Since I’ve gotten it, I have traveled with it, designed with it, written with it, read with it, built presentations with it, worked on far too many Excel spreadsheets with it, and everything in between. I know my use cases are my own and your milage may vary, but it is an exceptionally powerful computing device for the kinds of things I do. This morning I was catching on some reading at Medium (on my iPad) and came across a similar sentiment penned by M.G. Siegler …

In fact, my biggest takeaway (tech-wise) from the trip may have been just how little I used the MacBook. I brought it more or less “just in case”?—?because, how can you possibly travel for three weeks without an actual computer? Well, turns out you can. Turns out, your tablet and even your phone are computers. And turns out you can almost for sure do everything you need to on those devices.

via Post-Post PC — 500ish Words — Medium.

And that is what I am finding, I just don’t use my laptop all that much. I should say that at this moment I am sitting in front of a traditional computer at home, looking at an old fashioned Safari window on a nice big 27″ monitor. I still do a ton of work on that and my iMac at work, I am finding that I am losing a place in my mobile routine for the MacBook. All of this makes me wonder what our collective computing needs might be in the next two years? If my use is any indication then the ability to work in front of a large display when you are rooted at a desk may stick around, but I am betting as more of what we do while moving will transition to thin panes of glass that have purpose built apps to do the things we do on traditional machines in more efficient ways. As a quick example, think of the difference in speed and ease of using Concur on your computer in the browser versus using it on something like an iPhone or iPad (I don’t have an Android device, but I would imagine it is similar). It is usually a tap or two to approve expense reports on my iPad or iPhone, while it is a long process to log in, navigate, approve, verify, and log out on my Mac. Imagine when more of what we do multiple times daily that grinds 5, 10, 15 minute distractions into our routines become simple taps on purpose built apps — we will be more efficient and more effective. More and more of what I do can be done faster on my iPad Pro and even on my iPhone as more purposefully built apps emerge that support my business workflows. That exact set of scenarios makes me do the same thing each morning, again following what M.G. says …

So this leads me back to my bag of gadgets I carry around on a daily basis. It has always been sort of insane, but now I’m the one who can actually see it. So the past few mornings when I’ve gone to put the MacBook in my bag, I’ve stopped for a second: why do I need this thing again?

What I am wondering is if we focus on apps that can make our business run more efficiently, will our purchasing habits change? Will Universities start putting devices like iPad Pros onto desks of various members of the staff community instead of the traditional Mac or PC? What would the support costs look like on devices that are inherently more secure and are potentially easier to manage through MDM? I believe when we have more use cases like the Concur one I shared, the efficiencies gained will be well worth the transition. But, hey, that’s just like my opinion, man. What’s yours?

UChicago Field Notes

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As we quietly roll out the UChicago Voices platform I have been thinking of novel ways to share examples of the platform can be utilized. It is WordPress, so it is obvious to think of it as a blogging platform, but I learned years ago that a blogging platform is best positioned as something more than a blog. It is important to see it through the lens of a “platform for digital expression.” I have been talking about that for years and sometimes you can see people’s eyes light up and sometimes they just shrug their shoulders.

I’ve also learned that it is important to show examples of what I mean when I talk about this concept. With that in mind I decided to put together a simple photo sharing site that allows multiple photographers to share what they are seeing. I decided to call it UChicago Field Notes and invited a couple of people to kick the tires with me — to experiment in a homegrown UChicago photo platform.

There are only three of us, but I would love to add more so if you are interested just let me know in the comments and I will invite you. It is really straight forward — take a picture, log into the Field Notes site, and make a new post. I have to admit, I made it a little easier for myself and cooked up an IFTTT script that takes any of my Instagram photos tagged #fieldnote and auto publishes it to the Field Notes site. I love being surprised by other people’s photos and this is an interesting way to see what a few people find interesting.

UChicago Field Notes

Back to this idea of a blog is more than a blog. I spent time yesterday with colleagues in a our career services group here on campus and shared this one example and it resonated to the point where they are going to try out Voices as a way to expose more of the career opportunities that we provide to students. Students will have access to a multi author site and will record their trips to various companies in various cities. We talked about being able to quickly shoot and share photos, videos, and reflect on the things they are learning on site … all in real time. In that one example we can see a blogging tool as something that is much more than what one might think of as a blog — it becomes a place to share, save, and express yourself digitally. That is a critical skill in the world we live in now. I’ll share more examples of how Voices can be used and as I do I will continue to invite you to do the same.