SIGUCCS 2016

Do you always get what you want? Why do some attempts succeed while others fail? What can you do to improve your ability to convince others? Whether you work in sales, fund development or organizational management, powerful persuasion is an essential element of your success. This seminar will explore nine fundamental principles of human behavior and help you harness that knowledge to persuade the people around you. You will learn how to:

• Influence people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors




• Establish and maintain credibility




• Find the right audience




• Make big changes by starting small




• Create vivid appeals

During the last fifteen years, David Rendall has spoken to audiences on every inhabited continent. His clients include the US Air Force and the Australian Government, as well as companies in the Fortune 500 including, AT&T, State Farm Insurance and Ralph Lauren.  Prior to becoming a speaker, he was a management professor, stand-up comedian and endurance athlete. He also managed nonprofit enterprises that provided employment for people with disabilities. He has more than twenty years of experience leading people and organizations. David has a doctor of management degree in organizational leadership, as well as a graduate degree in psychology. He is the author of three books: The Four Factors of Effective Leadership, The Freak Factor, and The Freak Factor for Kids.

Think tanks are usually associated with non-profit organizations and institutes that perform research and provide advice on subjects such as public policy, technology, culture, economics, and so on. But your IT organization can stretch that term to cover a group of staff members who convene to generate innovative ideas that can be acted upon to improve the overall functioning of their department and the institution that it serves. An internal think tank is also a way for staff to share ideas that may not otherwise have a proper place to be heard and discussed. It gives motivated staff a forum to change and improve the workplace status quo.

At Fordham University, the IT organization implemented the “Innovation Group,” a collection of staff from IT and other university departments who met regularly to brainstorm, research, and carry out ideas to improve the workplace environment, build a stronger sense of community among IT staff and others in the university, and enhance the integration of technology within the university.

This paper gives an overview of the Innovation Group’s goals and methods for organizing and carrying out ideas. It describes some of its successful initiatives and the benefits incurred. It also reviews some of the challenges the group encountered and group’s next phase, which will be based on lessons learned from the Innovation Group’s first incarnation.

Monolithic imaging for faculty, staff, and students access computer deployments is less than ideal. Image sizes are massive and are difficult and time consuming to build. Furthermore, images are often outdated immediately after building what other packages, such as the flash player, receive updates. Package based deployments solve many of these issues. Individual packages within the deployment are updated one of the time, even automatically, while software repositories dictate which packages are required for each set up. Furthermore, solutions to handle these issues are often free and open source such as Munki, AutoPKG, and reposado. We will discuss how to create your own packaged based deployments using these tools.

Apple’s Mac Mini is a near perfect solution for use in the classroom; it has out of the box support for OSX and Windows, has a small form factor, and is relatively low cost. It does have its own unique challenges, one of which is a rear mounted power switch that requires a mechanical lever when securely rack mounted. At Carleton College, we were tasked with improving the performance and mechanical reliability of our Mac Minis by making them better than they were before. Better hard drives. Stronger power switches. Faster boot times. In this presentation, I’ll discuss how we increased overall performance using a combination of new boot protocols, SSDs, auto parts, a soldering iron, and a drill press.

How do you decide what to do with an enterprise PC that’s been replaced? What types of evaluation methods do you employ? Is the decision made by emotion, analysis, fixed planning, or just the conventional wisdom of “dispose after n years”? Let’s challenge that conventional wisdom and anecdotal logic, and think about objective and deterministic methods to measure a computer’s continued viability. We’ll talk about value proposition, opportunity cost, risks and benefits, secondary use cases, hard versus soft costs.

I will give some tips in how to turn all student workers into motivated student workers. I have 13 years of working with student employees. My experience has taught me strategies that work to motivate students. Having students in a work area can be challenging and rewarding. With the proper tools we can remove many of the challenges. Certainly some student staff are productive but many others seem to languish in mediocrity. We will look at ways to avoid having a group of unmotivated workers and build productive employees. We will also touch on some de-motivators that should be avoided. I have found that giving proper time and training to learn the expected work is critical. For student success the work done needs to be monitored and corrected in a way that does not appear as being critical. I’ve discovered giving the student worker tangible results of the work accomplished can go a long way in creating productivity. Find the right job for the worker by playing to strength helps build confidence in tasks. Lastly, to have a motivated student they must feel appreciated therefore let them know they are appreciated for their work and how it helps you.

Presenter: Nick Johnson, Co-founder of Software2

Desktop virtualization is one of the stand-out technologies of the past decade. The promise? To deliver all end-user IT services neatly wrapped inside a remote desktop window. It was every IT administrator’s dream. By providing a consistent desktop for each user, support overheads would be reduced to almost zero, and systems administration slashed to a fraction of previous efforts. But it was a promise that was never quite delivered.

Software2 work exclusively in higher education, helping improve the student experience with flexible application delivery, through their solution AppsAnywhere.

Nick Johnson will share his experiences, having met with over 300 institutions around the world, and explain how Software2 delivers even the most horrible-to-deploy apps (think SAS, ArcGIS, Solidworks, SPSS and JAWS!).

Do you have a lackluster digital signage network on your campus? Or are you considering adding visual communications? Your strategy will determine how successful you are at engaging your students, faculty and visitors. Without a strategy, your large investment will likely fall flat. In this presentation, we will look at key factors that can make your visual communications network shine.

Both IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Asset Management (ITAM) have common objectives, characteristics, and processes. There is significant overlap between these functions, particularly the request fulfillment process and the service catalog approach. We will talk about integrating data, systems, and processes used by both ITAM and ITSM for a more efficient, productive, and harmonious outcome.

IT Service Management in Higher Ed has its unique challenges.
Join us for a specialized discussion about 3 major trends driving service management
in the world of Higher Ed.