Distributed Thinking

This week I had several meetings with computing and e-Learning staff from the academic schools.  I find these meetings really useful to learn what matters to people who are using (or in some cases not using) IS systems in conjunction with their own applications.  First up was the Technical Peer Group for the university web site.  Here I gave a short summary of our preliminary investigation of whetheer Drupal would be a suitable CMS for the university's central web presence.  I'll write more about that another time.   We also had a presentation about how the university is adapting to the new law on cookies and privacy.  The meeting finished with a short discussion about getting central university data in order to create staff profile pages on school web sites.  We have yet to provide a supported API for this, so some enterprising school staff have found their own way to access the data they need.  This illustrates why a centrally supported in...