Part of the focus of this year’s Campus IT Planning program is to make it easier for the Stanford IT community to connect and collaborate with colleagues across campus who are working on similar projects.
To that end, the Campus IT Plan Project team will coordinate and facilitate two to three summits this year that will each focus on a different strategic area from the Campus IT Plan.
The first summit was held Oct. 5 and focused on Content and Data Management. It was hosted by Stanford University Libraries (SUL) and met with great enthusiasm and participation from attendees.
“When we kicked off the Campus IT Plan effort last year, we asked the campus-wide IT community how they would use the information in the plan,” said Tara Robenalt, Campus IT Plan Program Director. “They emphatically responded that they would find people working on similar efforts so they could collaborate, share knowledge, negotiate with vendors, and share resources to develop technology solutions together. The summits are organized and facilitated opportunities for them to do just that.”
The summit was formatted in the “unconference” style, where participants who signed up in advance could take the stage during “Minute Madness.” During this time, they had one minute to summarize an effort they are working on in the area of Content and Data Management.
Thirty-seven efforts were presented in all, and then attendees had the opportunity to generate and vote on topics for table discussions. The topics with the top votes were:
- Multimedia archiving and streaming
- Document management
- AWS strategies
- Research data, data management, storage
- Web architecture, services, APIs
- Search, discovery, indexing
- ADAPT and Salesforce
For the remainder of the time, participants divided up into groups to discuss these topics, network with like-minded individuals, and explore ways to collaborate on their efforts.
Building upon good ideas, working together
Beyond the summit, participants were encouraged to continue the conversation and create a personal action plan of who they might follow up with and what actions they might take as a result of something they learned.
Tom Cramer, assistant university librarian and chief technology strategist for SUL stated during his opening remarks that the intent of the event was not necessarily to generate new ideas, but to find the good ideas that are already out there and build upon them.
“The surest sign of success for next year,” he said, “is not that we’ll have more efforts, but that efforts will be bigger because we’ve been able to find groups of people to work together.”
Missed the summit?
If you weren’t able to attend the Content and Data Management summit, check out the Resources page to view a video recording, photos, notes, and other resources from the event.
Next summit scheduled for January
The next summit is scheduled for January and will focus on the strategic area of Teaching and Learning. It will be hosted by the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. Registration will open in the coming weeks and will be posted in the event section of the IT at Stanford website.
Learn more
To learn more about the Campus IT Plan, the Content and Data Management summit, or other upcoming summits please contact the Campus IT Plan project team.
