There’s no better way to advance your professional skills than getting out there and showing leadership among peers. EDUCAUSE provides IT professionals great opportunities for speaking and sharing ideas with the larger higher ed community.
At the EDUCAUSE Connect event in San Diego, January 28-30, I did an interactive event with Patricia Schneider, Director of Planning/Programs at Arizona State University. Our session was “Growing the Next Generation of Higher Ed Leaders.” She and I walked through the chronology of a higher education IT professional’s career – from that first manager position, when you step away from being a tech expert and move into the realm of managing people. She ran an interactive exercise to show how management involves doing work in cross functional teams and the challenges of working together.
In my presentation, I continued the chronology theme at mid career, discussing the competencies that are necessary to move into senior IT manager positions that require greater understanding of leadership and appreciation of nuance. Participants analyzed a case study with a complex relationship setting that demonstrated the importance of understanding power bases, culture, and history, which are so important in our environment.
UC at EDUCAUSE Connect
UC was well represented at the conference, including:
- Larry D. Conrad – Associate Vice Chancellor & CIO, University of California, Berkeley
- “Getting Your CFO or Budget Person to Yes: Making the Case”
- Gabriel Youtsey – Chief Information Officer, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of California
- “Organizing Campus IT to Deliver Cloud Services”
- Ann Kovalchick – Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer, University of California, Merced
- “Vendor Management and Partner Management: What’s the Difference and Why Does It Matter?”
- “Implementing Organizational Change to Align Skills, Services, and Operations”
- Jim Phillips – Director of Learning Technologies, University of California, Santa Cruz
- “IT Accessibility – Developing a Campus Plan”
- “Faculty Technology Center – Ideas to Improve Faculty Engagement”
- “How Learner Analytics Stimulates Innovation”
- Thomas Trappler – Senior IT Commodity Manager, UCLA and University of California, Office of the President
- “Campus Collaboration in the Cloud”
- Also a “shout out” to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Division of Health Cyberinfrastructure, there as a vendor presenter for their extensive portfolio of managed information technology and data services in health care for the UC system, academia, and state and federal agencies.