Distributed Thinking

I'm delighted to welcome Jason Murphy, who joins us as our CRM Architect, and Wilbert Kraan, our new Data Architect.  Both Jason and Wilbert have worked as consultants for several years and bring new skills and considerable experience to IS.  They both know more than I do about their respective fields, which is how I like to hire people. So the Enterprise Architecture practice now comprises the three of us, instead of me working on my won, which means we have more capacty to guide the University's IT architecture.  We can offer a greater range of skills and can bring a wider range of experience to bear.  I'm really excited about the opportunities this presents. As his job title implies, Jason will focus on contact relationship management, working to build a user community and to create a strategy for managing and improving the University's relationships with prospective students, research partners, community organisations, and other parties - to give them all a b...

Last Friday I gave a guest lecture to third-year Informatics students on the Software Design and Modelling course. Professor Stevens, who leads the course, asked me to repeat the presentation that I gave last month to an audience of University staff.  She thought that many of the issues I covered would be relevant to the course, and the topic of improving the online student experience was clearly one that the students could relate to.  It's a long time since I did my own degree but unless times have changed markedly, I suspect that students don't often get to see the issues around integrating many pre-existing systems, rather than building small systems in the lab. I enjoyed the session.  I don't often get to meet students, so this was a refreshing experience, and we had a good discussion following the presentation. As expected, they confirmed that the online experience currently provided by University systems is "all over the place". One of the questions ...