Alexandria

As I said in my SoTeC conference overview, the first key note presentation of the conference was a dual presentation, the first half being Peter McGarahan of McGarahan & Associates talking about “IT Technologies That Will Change the World,” and the second half Jake Henderson, Director of Computer Services at Mater Dei High School, talking about implementing mobile technologies at Mater Dei by rolling out 2,200 iPads to faculty and students. The second half, about the high school, was naturally the more entertaining, but I’ll take my notes from the two halves in order.

Peter McGarahan spoke about designing with the customer in mind, not like the scene in Apollo 13, the one where the boss dumps a bunch of odd bits and pieces on the engineers’ desk and says, “Your job is to make this fit into this, using only this.” [LG: Actually, those Apollo 13 engineers did very cleverly work with their customer, the crew on Apollo 13, in mind, but of course McGarahan's point is that you avoid setting your customer up to have to do that kind of thing.] As a negative example, he gave a woman who, impatient at being told that “It’s all about the customer,” snapped, “It’s all about the process, not about the customer.” [LG: I'll get back to that woman, when discussing a later SoTeC presentation.]

Too often, support directors aren’t strategic. It’s hard to be strategic in the day to day, when you’re delivering tactically.

Here’s what’s happening now: Rapid technology changes, prioritizing investments, looking at resources. Telecom jobs are going away, and desktop jobs are challenged. There were 5 billion smart phones in use in 2010, and will be over 6.7 billion by 2015. We are not the world leader in smart phones; we are behind in smart phones. Tablet sales were 54.8 million in 2010 and will be 214 million by 2014.

There’s a global skill shortage in some technical areas, even during a recession. Where’s the gap and why?

“If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” Some people have been at the same job for 20-25 years, not learning, not challenged, and now are laid off. Don’t let that happen to you.

IT and business will be one and the same. We need IT pros with good business skills. You are the CEO of your career. Track the market (demand for skills and business trends) and keep reading. He suggested several books: Good to Great, Built to Last, and The Destruction Imperative.

The changing customer is social, digitally connected, informed, and demanding. To satisfy these customers, businesses need to put the cloud first, and prepare to deal with a fragmented cloud of smart phones and tablets. We’re living in the age of mobility, with Wisconsin cheese makers now using iPads to let people anywhere in their plant control any of their cheesemaking panels. Soon, every IT group will have a mobile strategy group.

Smart phones will become either crucial or disruptive, as they provide innovation but also challenges of competing operating systems. Social computing and mobile phones will continue their love affair, and data, photos, music, movies, and books will all be on the same mobile device. 37% of workers now use their own PC or smart phone at work, leading to a consumerization of IT. McGarahan talked about filtering at the workplace (he didn’t mention explicitly that smart phones get around filtering, for better or worse, but I guess it was implied), and then about rogue or shadow IT through mobile devices. There are tensions between the consumerization of IT and traditional standardization and security.

Marketable skills: Leadership/relationship building, passion for business, strategic and digital thinking.

Future careers: Hybrid IT professional, business innovation, business processing, business intelligence, vendor management, business IT account manager, customer service manager, keeping the next generation of IT professionals trained.

Jake Henderson then spoke about implementing mobile technology at Mater Dei High School. Jake Henderson grew up on a farm in a small town in southern Utah, where he learned his work ethic, “Do not be afraid to take any job anyone offers.” From a start at a local junior college, he took his degree in business management information systems into various inventory jobs, where he learned “Don’t be afraid to try something you don’t know.” And so he worked his way up to his current job as Director of Computer Services at Mater Dei High School, the oldest and largest Catholic high school in Orange County, with 2000 students and an almost college feel, the second largest Catholic/private high school in the US, located in Santa Ana. While Mater Dei has a champion basketball team, it’s not just known for its athletics. 99% of its students are admitted to four year colleges, and yet it manages, through scholarships, to maintain a high level of diversity, “not just the typical private education.”

What was Mater Dei’s mission, that led to the iPad roll out? A modern day high school is literate in technology. At one time, a technology literate high school had one computer for the whole high school. [LG: Yes, that would be my time. Horace Greeley High School, my alma mater and one of the best public high schools in the country, was considered particularly well equipped, back in the day when I was there, because they actually had a computer.] No more. Now we’re moving from 1-to-1 to 2-to-1 or x-to-1, as students use phones and iPads, and it’s not uncommon to see a student have three devices hooked up to our network.

Mater Dei needed a cost effective, usable, manageable device. They picked iPads, because they are flat and predictable, unlike Droids which change from vendor to vendor. An iPad will last 2-3 years and run all apps. That factor, not price, was the number one factor in making their selection. To get to this selection, first the diocesan technical geek tested many, many devices. In 2009, they marketed their 1-to-1 program. In 2010, they narrowed their choices to three devices. After a year’s deferral, they reached the point of implementing the program, and picked the iPad.

To plan the roll out, Mater Dei selected a three person team. This three person team turned into a one person team of Jake Henderson when the other two people moved on. They were the largest organization doing the entire organization with one device. They picked white devices for teachers and black for students, so they could keep track of who was using the teachers’ iPads. Then they had to “over plan, over plan, over plan.”

He showed us an iPad with a bend, turned in by a student after a ten day wait and some pressure from his father (and replaced at the student’s expense). Another had a missing home button (“it just fell out,” said the student). They had a 2.5-3% attrition rate in iPads, “dead in the box, dead after a week, or dead because of a screwdriver.”

They picked a technical committee that had to select core apps, become trainers, etc. “Teachers are the worst students ever.” They asked questions. These were important. You have to be patient and respectful if you want buy in. Sometimes, as IT people, we’re impatient, and we know everything, but we have to listen.

They arranged six days (not hours) of Apple professional development training for teachers. First Apple trained the technical committee, and then the committee trained the staff. Core department apps were chosen, and there was a parent orientation.

MYTH: Kids are technology experts.

Reality: Kids are NOT technology experts, just because they know how to get around Facebook. You still need to teach the teachers to teach the kids.

They ordered 110 teacher iPads and then a huge order of 2100 iPads. Only two people had the key to the iPad room. All of these iPads had to be unpacked, configured, etc. There were no bar codes on the iPads (“Uncle Steve, he doesn’t like things that don’t look pretty, and so the bar codes are now gone from all Apple devices”). They picked a wireless provider.

At this point, Jake Henderson had to cut off his presentation (the only flaw in an otherwise interesting presentation being that it hadn’t quite been written for the available time), and let people know that he would be on the upcoming mobility panel (but I wound up going to another workshop instead of that one).

I have more SoTeC notes to come, but they’ll be interspersed with DBSA conference notes, so you’ll get a mix of blog posts on IT and blog posts on mental health for the next week or so.

Tags: cloud, consumerization of IT, iPads, Mater Dei, mobile technology, shadow IT, smart phones, SoTeC, Southland Technology Conference, tablets, Wisconsin cheesemakers