New Project

This has been a pretty eventful week at work. I've been filling in as the Interim IT Director the last few months (one of the reasons the blogging has been pretty light). My boss was filling in at an interim Vice-Chancellor position but this week it was announced he's coming back down to the Director position and I'll be going back to Associate Director. I've made a conscious decision in my career to only move into positions if I love the work. I don't want to move up for the sake of moving up, or for the money, prestige, etc. I love my job and don't want to get into a position where that is not the case any more. It was a great opportunity to test the waters at the next level up and I hope to have a chance again in the future. I won't miss all the meetings and dealing with budgets, but there are some real satisfying aspects to it as well. I'll still be the Director until the end of July so I'll have a little more time to get in trouble.

Our Board of Trustees approved a contract on Monday with a company called Neudesic. They are going to help us build a new student system. It's not the typical path that colleges take, and I am very excited about it. What excites me most about it is the chance we are going to have to do something truly student-centered. My experience with the packaged systems is they tend to be designed around the back office operations and not around the student. We are going to put the students right in the center of the design and build a system around them. It's going to take us about 4 years to do the whole thing and I can't wait to get started. Details will be posted here as they develop...