11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers
Agenda
- Review, and approve minutes from last meeting
- people can update the minutes themselves if I got something wrong.
- Hot Topic Roundtable
- bomgar: DITR and Sloan are top users; license to be renewed. helpdesk staff being briefed on using it more often or better. Costs of license are being divided among the user constituencies, but not more seats right now. Question: has the idea of people peeking in to their machine to fix things remotely surfaced as an issue that should go to TAP, say? Oliver remembers there was a TAP meeting, as an afterthought to the Altiris review. (Action: circulate the link from the TAP meeting, back when it was TRB. ) Chris: The concern is that it's a server sitting in the basement of E19 (and needs a more permanent home).
- Mr Aguocha is doing a bang-up job. He will have to disappear in Jan when Joszef comes back, but that would be sad. Barb wants to surface the idea of someone else hiring him in to the organization because we ought to keep him.
- Brian Murphy: he's back home in the US and wants to resume work in early January.
- Hermes Training overview from Barbara was well-received by Pubs. An emergent effort to consolidate widely distributed hermes-like material into the One True system. Philoosophically, where should all knowledge live?
- Exchange project is going well, though Calendaring is not.
- Drupal: is looking at mid-to-late January for a migration environment to be up and ready to fill. Production-ready environment is what we mean. Migration completed by then is NOT the plan.
- Lots of cross-campus interest in Drupal, judging from the reception of a Drupal presentation at Webpubs.
- DCAD has a new threefold brochure.
- VoIP transitions are ramping up again after a couple quiet weeks. Where are we campus-wide? ~30%.
- ACD upgrade is happening this week -- dec 3 to 5. No user-visible impacts planned.
- Daptiv meeting on Friday is ON and should be unset from Tentative. Come if you can. Confirm attendance to plan food.
- Anne has no hot items but we are glad to have her back.
- News from CSIR -- turning ideas in to actualization.
- Kate -- are we still using the Vacation resource tracker thing. We haven't decided not to, so we plan to make it so. Action: use Day Event to record your outages. If you know you're not around, put it in so we can all know. It should be one spot for Wilson or whomever to look.
- Review and discuss cost-saving ideas
- What should we do next with the cost-saving brainstorm list -- how much filtering can we do on our ideas ahead of time. Need to have Wilson in the room to do.
- Comment: many ideas seem HR related (salary reductions..., managing how people do work...)
- The CSIR group's attitude is just get them in, and don't preedit anything. Sensitivity about HR-ish impacts is in the front of the group's attention, so we don't need to be afraid of it.
- Is submitting an idea an endorsement of it? No. The idea is an idea. Want to make sure that pretty raw ideas are "forgiven" for their rawness.
- What does the CSIR team really plan to do?
- Area ideas are collected from the Area. May or may not be directorate specific, -- brainstorming is the key quality.
- Groundrules of the CSIR group are NOT to make judgements early nor to task the person submitting it with the responsibility of carrying it out.
- The ideas that are thought to save MIT money are best.
- The level of comfort within the group is currently these ideas are good to submit and openly discuss within the CSS Managers. The risk is that someone outside CSS will propose the same idea that we didn't want to put forward. Manageable risk.
- Process suggestion -- give everyone a change to "vet" the wording of a suggestion before it goes.
- Listing the risk of doing an idea is important -- the "Impact" column would serve to hold both positive impacts and negative.
- The finance team wants to be able to assess all the ideas for their cost-savings potential, drawing on the raw idea pool, with estimates of money saved of whatever quality of estimate. Managers can estimate based on their own pool of finances. Extrapolating a broadly applicable idea from one small budget to a larger organization budget will turn an apparently mickey-mouse idea into a powerful one.
- Some idea changes would be more about influencing behavior less than saving a few bucks in one budget. Finance team needs the chance to really vet it, together with the other CSPMs.
- Proposal on the table: ideas generated by the group should not go forward to the central list without clear signoff by the submitter. The back-and-forth between Rob/Anne and the idea generator will be to have a feasibility discussion as the idea matures.
- Each idea should have an "Opinion" section associated with the idea, input from others about what they think.