[94] in I/T Delivery
5 Sep 1997 Delivery team leaders meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
Fri Sep 5 14:37:55 1997
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 97 14:38:57 EDT
From: wdc@MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
To: delivery@MIT.EDU
Cc: kkibbee@MIT.EDU, saurons@MIT.EDU
Next Meeting 26 Sep in E19
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Present: Bill Cattey, Tim McGovern, Bob Ferrara, Jana Tarashenko
Ken Higgens, Paul Page, Steve (Wade) Neiterman, Rocklyn Clarke,
Greg Anderson, Jonathan Venezian.
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1. Status/ Announcements
Hiring:
A big ad just went out to The Boston Globe covering IT, not just IS.
Paul Page has a full staff (jokingly we say 'for the moment').
Craig Fields is leaving Team Athena. We're gonna try and fill the
position in advance of Craig's Jan 1 departure.
Crosstalk:
The Faculty/Academic computing forum will be held 16 Sep from
2:00 to 4:00 in E40-316. Presentations and discussions on Web-based
environments for teaching and learning.
for more info: http://web.mit.edu/acs/www/Pracitice.dir/crosstalk.html
Ixos:
Imaging system integrated into SAP
Demo:
Thurs 11 September in two locations:
9:00 AM in E19-758
1:00 PM in N52 Geneva Room
ABAP:
Training Course in W89 Sep 29 - Oct 3. (Five full days)
The class has open slots. If you wish to attend, contact Paul Page
ppage@mit.edu, x8-6207
SAP:
Open house to do overview and preview of training for SAP
(Open institute-wide) Held in the Bush Room Monday 8 Sept.
Tues Sept 9 12-4 is SAP Web Integration Team luncheon and
follow-on training. E40 Visitor's Center.
4th Quarter Reports:
Q4 reports went out. The project Database did some help in doing
quarterlies, but the vision of being able to do quarterlies just from
the project DB is not yet realized.
6 month review of Performance Appraisal goals:
Bob's talked to all his people.
How are everyone else doing?
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2. Short Updates
Project DB:
Implementtion team has been going slowly (summer vacations and higher
priority projects have taken precedence.)
Next meeting of the team is on or about 18 Sept.
New version based on brl expected to come out WITH documentation
in a couple months.
As part of the competency group planning effort, there will probably
be a Discovery project for a database to track effort. The project DB
may be a central part of an effort tracking system. (The Discovery
project will help decide to build/buy/whatever.)
ITLT Update:
Brainstorming and redesign of Quarterly reporting.
The competency group planning team made its report and recommendations.
The Admin/Finance team also made its report and recommendations.
N42 Move news.
Continued discussion of layout and design of the spaces.
Sapphire report:
Sapphire is the big SAP user group conference.
SAP has taken over financial systems over the whole aerospace industry
in the sort space of two years.
The bad news is that SAP is having so much success in other areas
the University market may not get the attention needed to do things
best. The good news is that the Public Sector Liason person at SAP is
well experienced with MIT needs and is a very good person.
MIT has been working to get SAP to do Certificates. The delivery
date may be too late, so another point solution involving Kerberos
is being contemplated.
IXOS looks like a viable solution for SAP and Document imaging.
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3. Discussion:
Competency Group planning team:
Greg Anderson gave a brief history of the team efforts.
DEFINITELY look at the web page, it's useful:
http://web.mit.edu/is/competency/cg-plan/
The team's recommendations and a revision for the Director position
description were part of today's meeting handouts. The recommendation
are on the web page. The position description was shown to the ITLT
yesterday and is under revision.
One big issue in "the Competency stuff" is nomenclature. We don't know
WHAT to call it that will not raise SOMEONE's red flags.
Some discussion ensued on clarifying some of the thinking that went
into the recommendations, and the role of the director. That thinking
will, we expect be embodied in a real report, rather than bulletted
items and an oral tradition. :-)
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Format of Delivery Team meetings:
Think about this some more.
Talk.
Send ideas in Email to Bob or talk in person.
We'll discuss this at a future meeting.
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Technial Training input for Kate Kibbee
Technical training should recognize that the technical folks in
the organization have been chosen for being self starters, and
internally motivated, and tightly focused. Some technical training
will, at best, be just funded or facilitated individual trainings.
There is LOTS of internal expertise that isn't being disseminated.
Some of this is due to people with the expertise being focused on
their tasks instead of training. Some of this is due to people
who could benefit from the exchange being focused on their tasks
instead of learning. Even so, internal seminars are a good thing,
and we should do more of them.
Seminars could be helped with some administrative support. Also
by maybe having a regular forum for such things.
Strategic areas we see for Training:
Windows NT (NT 5 is coming very soon)
Dynamic Web page generation
SAP
Oracle (specifically Oracle 8)
Maybe emerging technologies where we can get some perspective:
CORBA
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4. Round Table
Paul Page says that another SAP phase II pilot is getting planned for
some departments in the school of engineering.
Jana reports that she's going on vacaion soon.
She also reports that a contractor familiar with ICE-9 is coming on
board to help with Telecom issues.
TQF: physical plant is asking for finer grained access control.
There are business and strategic issues around this issue.
Rocklyn: More functionality and bug fixing for SAP-Web being rolled
out beginning of October.
Bob Ferrara: procard is working, and scheduled for full migration into
production.
Tim McGovern: There may be more vendors being considered for hooking
into the MIT Card and ECAT-II.
Coding on the Writing Requirement project has been put on hold.
Continued reorganizations in the Dean's office, and instability
of the Mac technology base are major factors. Re-scoping, re-planning
re-architecting are taking place.
Bill Cattey has been living in SGI hell. They've come to closure on
the blue-line hangup source. (This time for sure!) Bill is working
with highly placed SGI folks to create a graceful transition from Indy
to O^2 that SGI has heretofore failed at. The method and timeline is
STILL undefined.
