Last edit: 05-03-17 Graham Wideman

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Advocacy

Though there were many opportunities to "promote the cause" I will describe just two here.

The "Administrative Knowledge Environment" Presentation and Demo

This PowerPoint presentation, developed in early 1997 by my manager Ellene Gibbs, associate Patrick "PowerPoint" Vesey and myself, captured the essence of what we were trying to accomplish with the information infrastructure. Slides described the current state of play, distilled the theory into simplest terms, and proposed a campus process to get there.  An associated web-browser-based demo showed the campus org chart as a live tree-view, with hyperlink nodes that brought up university or department data or other info in other panes.

The presentation was given to President Weber, and then later for Dr Weber to a wider audience, and subsequently on a number of occasions.  Generally it was well received.  However, management attention to the campus process for achieving the goals has not been maintained.

Shared Visions

In early 1997 President Weber launched what was called the "Shared Vision" process, wherein stakeholders from all parts of the campus community, and from all levels, were invited to participate in a series of conventions and committee processes, to hash out where we wanted the campus to be headed.  This culminated in a series of presentations by the committees, and votes on the relative priorities of the proposals to be advanced to senior management for implementation.

So I became a core participant in the committee process attending to use of technology on campus, and represented the needs and opportunities of the information infrastructure.   Ultimately, these proposals garnered significant support, and were passed on to senior management, along with many others.  In the final management report there was good news, and bad news.  The proposal was funded -- but the amount was zero.   By that time, however, there was widespread disillusionment in the Visions process (in my view because of prior unrealistic optimism that Visions projects could be justified in the face of other pressing needs), so the zero result was taken merely as an amusing footnote.

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