I reflected a bit this weekend on wearing dual hats as both a Director in our Senior Management Team as well as a DL serving (BAS, Chancellor's/EVC units Planning & Budget, VPAA, VPDUE, University Relations and Student Affairs). It's evaluation season, so as I think back on another year of service a couple of nuggets fell out.
Operational v. Strategic
Starting back in 2006, I began getting my thoughts together about a new role I had been placed in; Divisional Liaison. Here are some of my notes from that time. See the article, The Evolving Divisional Liaison Role that provides additional detail from the past five years.
[Updated May 2008]
We've come a long way towards solidifying the role of the Divisional Liaison within the campus IT community. Some of our greatest wins as a collective body are in our ability to shape services, understand each divisions' priorities and find opportunities to collaborate on ideas that will eventually turn into campus services.
Background
The UC Santa Cruz http://emergency.ucsc.edu web site is used as a primary information source for near real time information in the case of a campus or regional incident.
The emergency site is based on the Drupal platform and runs under Aegir on an Ubuntu operating system. The hardware running the site is nearly five years old. It has several other Drupal sites running on the same hardware. We manage this server using a combination of shell and Webmin.
I finally got bugged by not having enough automation in text processing for the TPP project. In TextMate, I edited the Text bundle duplicating the remove Trailing Spaces and creating a remove Trailing Commas. It's a simple perl expression, perl -pe 's/[\,, ]+$//g'.
Huge time savings. One click vs scanning through the file for commas. More to follow on TextMate modifications.
As we prepare for the Fall quarter, I'll have some new responsibilities that include Physical Security Systems and an increasing role in supporting Student Affairs and the Chancellor's Office divisions. This reorganizational effort is driven by budget constraints. My personal action plan is to start learning some of the processes, people and technologies at work in these divisions through the Fall and Winter.