The CTO Project

8-9 catch up on email. Calculate and communicate to the managers the “loaded rate” for our staff so we can suss out how much we’re actually paying for projects. Ask HR to add email addresses to job postings so folks can submit applications electronically. Post my vacation time to my boss’s calendar. Get coffee.

9-10 Campus planning committee to review the new entrance to campus: discussion on walls, brickwork, lighting, architectural symbolism, and, yes, the f-f-f-f-font for the sign.

10-noon check email. Sign up for more golf lessons. Read an article about IT policy making. Review last year’s security audit. Assemble info for our reaccreditation self-study, which is like a sort of self-incrimination exercise. It’s due on Monday and they want 5 years of annual reports. We have 0. I’m glad I have the excuse of “hey, I’m the new guy!”. Grab lunch.

12-1:30 attend campus-wide diversity forum. We talk about how we can be more diverse.

1:30-4:00 check email. talk to a Dell rep who’s upset because we may not buy the $220K SAN they spec’ed. Talk to a SAN consultant. Read an email from a student-run diversity group that, apparently, was sent to everyone on campus. Note this was not an approved mass email and begin to look at the headers and try to figure out if we actually have any policies against this. Start to receive complaints about the email. Start to respond to the complaints. My boss calls. Everyone’s now complaining to everyone and the boss wants to know how someone could have gotten everyone’s email address. I note several different ways and suggest that because the email was not sent anonymously and because we do have a posted policy against such activity, we could just hand it to student affairs to deal with. I then draft a revision to the policy to make it clearer how someone could get such a mail authorized. I send the revised policy to my boss and a few others, respond to more complaints.

4-5 meet with staff to review our entire enterprise architecture. we agree to bring in a SAN consultant and start to prioritize architectural concerns and solutions.

5-6 check the email again. read CIO magazine. Look at the Chronicle of Higher Ed headlines. Look at Slashdot. Space out.

6-7 attend a “linux lecture”–a student-run series on open source software. There were 5 of us checking out open source video editing software. We decide to start a linux users group next fall and I ask a comp. sci. professor if we might want to teach a class on open source software development. He’s interested. eol at 7:15.