Tuesday, November 4, 2008 --- Educause Meeting Minutes

Educause: Business Schools and Colleges IT Officers
29 October 2008 4:55pm – 6:10pm W330C
Lloyd Goad introduced the session and Carol Henry the co‐ordinator. He introduced the group list on
the Educause website. The group indicated they would like the blog and wiki option placed on the
constituent group list.
Everyone introduced themselves.
The attendees identified a number of topics for discussion.
• Impact of the economic situation on business schools
o Will be pressured to justify our budgets and why we exist ‐‐ be prepared
o Tie your activities to revenue generating programs ‐‐ U of Florida IT group generates a
lot of revenue through support of online programs including instructional design
services
o Link initiatives and strategies to the organization’s strategic and tactical goals. Simplify
IT infrastructure to fit strategic goals
o More demand to use videoconferencing and other technology to bring in speakers more
economically
o Rent out facilities to paying customers (may have to alter building plans to make
facilities more attractive)
o Penn State is using Web 2.0 alumni website to link alumni and students – linking for
mentoring purposes for example – with a very large uptake
• Pressure for more integration with central IT
o Leverage best of central IT while adding what is needed (don’t duplicate services)
o Use central IT to do what they do best so you can do more within the school that they
can’t do
o Volunteer for campus wide projects and offer the school as the guinea pig
o Some things are done better in large scale – understand which fit in your organization
o B‐schools can be considered a “magic kingdom” by central IT groups because they don’t
understand the environment we have to serve
• Business school IT mission (in the light of SaaS, cloud computing, etc.)
o Know your “value proposition”
o Core competencies that are key (responsiveness, agility, quality, individualized and
customized attention, institutional knowledge, “business‐like” services, JIT support and
training)
• IT working with faculty to improve pedagogy
o Support for Web 2.0
o Pedagogy must drive the technology
o Typical business faculty need more support (than say engineering and science faculty)
School achievements
• Oakland College in Michigan developed a student assessment system
• U of Florida developed software to make iTunes more usable
• Arizona State used PeopleSoft CRM as a helpdesk system as well as supporting recruitment
• Boston University installed lecture capture capability
• Penn State developed a Content Management System jointly with central IT on open source
platform
TBS Roundtable Annual Survey
• The PDF version of the 2008 survey results are posted on the TBS Roundtable public website at
http://tbsroundtable.org in the Current News section.
• A few paper copies were made available to attendees.