NERCOMP 2010 - #nc-2010

I attended the Northeast Regional Computer Program (NERCOMP) conference this past week in Providence Rhode Island and wanted to share my thoughts and observations on the conference. NERCOMP is an affiliate of EDUCAUSE and it’s mission is to communicate and share Information Technology strategies with Higher Education organizations in the Northeast United States. Overall it was a good conference however I thought the first day really dragged but the second day was much better and I really enjoyed the second day.

I enjoyed the keynote on the first day by James L. Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia who spoke about the disruptive forces that challenge most Higher Education organization. Here is a link to James L. Hilton’s keynote discussion.

A common theme that I heard over and over again was the impact of the economic crisis on Higher Education and the need to do more for less. The session that I enjoyed the most went into detail about this topic and was called “Technology During an Economic Crisis: The Benefits of Open Source” by Brian Hutzley, Vice President for Business & Finance, SUNY College of Technology at Delhi and Patrick Masson, Chief Information Officer, SUNY College of Technology at Delhi. Both Brian and Patrick provided a transparent view into what they do and how they go about open sourcing the requirements gathering, the vendor selection process and overall support by putting everything in a wiki and using the wiki as a discussion forum and not just a document repository.

For those folks in the Enterprise 2.0 space, the SUNY Delhi wiki implementation and the process built around the use of wiki is a great example of how you can transform your process to be more efficient and realize cost savings in the process. Here is a link to the SUNY Delhi wiki and also a link to Patrick’s presentation. To get a real sense of how Patrick opens his process and shares everything with his team, his customers and his vendors, here is a link to an outline in the wiki of his presentation that he shared with the SUNY community.

Another session that I really enjoyed was Cloud Computing in Higher Education: Changing the Way We Provide Systems by Rosalyn Metz, Systems Administrator for Curricular Support at Wheaton College. There was a lot of interest for this session as the room was filled that there were many people standing in the back of the room. Rosalyn did a great job, first by offering to extend the cloud conversation after her presentation by following her on twitter @rosy1280 and then by stepping thru her presentation and by sharing screen casts of how use Amazons EC2, S3 and how to build and Amazon AMI. I had a nice discussion with Rosy after her talk and found her full of energy and passionate about computing and technology in general. Here is a link to her presentation and here is a link to Rosy’s personal blog which I also found interesting and full of technology discussions.

One of the benefits of attending conferences is meeting and networking with new people and catching up with old friends and coworkers. I ran into an old colleague, Mark Damian from MIT who had moved to TUFTS and we had a couple of great conversations surrounding Technology, Managing people and resources and Higher Ed in general. I recorded one of our conversations and may share it in the future, however I wanted to share part of our conversation with you.

Mark Damian was a Senior Manager at MIT and he moved into a Director, Enterprise Applications role at Tufts University. Mark has a great style and is a real leader, he has a great mix of empathy and can be quiet and laidback but at the same time can be very direct and is not afraid to bring up difficult topics.

I asked Mark “what it takes to be a successful manager” and here is his response ..

You have to figure out what works for you, and you need to understand peoples perspectives on things. You need to be a good listener and communicator and you need to be patience and flexible.

It is always about the people, you have to be able to relate to people, follow through, build credibility, and when there is a conflict, let others know that you understand their position and that you are there to work with them and to provide service for the good of the organization.

I asked Mark “what are the commonalities between MIT and Tufts”

The work is almost identical, there is always too much demand for supply and its about prioritization and organization and about working with people and making sure that they can be transparent and comfortable enough when talking with you, so that when there are issues, you know about them and help resolve them.

I asked Mark about “his transition from Senior Manager to Director” …

Going through a transition is always hard so you need to lead by example, exercise patience, and give yourself some time for reflection.

It was great running into Mark and again I thank him for his time and friendship.

From a planning and delivery perspective, the Providence Convention Center was a great facility. The WIFI was great and I really like the public laptop and printer setup that allowed folks without a networked device to stay connected. However, I do have a few recommendations for future NERCOMP events.

I found having the NERCOMP Conference page hosted on the EDUCAUSE site somewhat difficult. Nercomp.org is a great site with a lot of rich content however I found finding the link to the NERCOMP conference difficult and buried on a sub link. This was my first NERCOMP and it took me 10 clicks to find the address to the conference. Another suggestion for next year would be to include more Cloud Computing, Enterprise Social Computing and more discussions surrounding delivering services for less money.

Overall I enjoyed myself and would recommend NERCOMP for those folks supporting Technology in Higher Education.