Weekly update 2006-02-24

This week: computer room planning, Provost interviews, staff interviews, CATalog


I think most of the activities last week were continuations of ongoing work, but here’s a quick summary.
Staff Interviews
I completed 12 more staff interviews, and I’ll be close to finishing up this week. I’m starting to interview key clients and learn about related programs, too, but my meeting schedule has started to drop off a bit. The interviews have been tremendously helpful, and I’ll compile a list of questions and points I thought were particularly useful.
Computer Room Planning
After several meetings to review options for the layout of space, contract terms, etc., we are nearly finished with the preparations for the contract for the computer room in Tech Park. I believe we will sign that contract by Wednesday this week and will then begin detailed planning.
CATalyst

The Steering Committee met again last week to get an update on the implementation; the project team (heads of the key departments) met again as well; and I met with the infrastructure support team on Wednesday. The production system is now stable; performance testing and tuning is in process; fault and fail-over testing was scheduled for this week. Functional testing is in process (e.g., running payrolls in parallel). This flurry of activity is typical for ERP implementations at this stage, but that doesn’t make it any more comfortable for the staff who are caught in the flurry.
Provost Candidate
I interviewed the second candidate for Provost, Dr. Sukhatme, and (separately) met with his wife, who works in information technology support in student services at SUNY-Buffalo.
Project CATalog
The CATalog project team has continued working on its findings and recommendations document, and I met with them several times to review the document and recommend edits. CATalog will provide a framework for integrating a variety of information services, including document image repository, business archives, etc.

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