ResNet Symposium 2010

Go West, Young Man they said …

and so I did. All the way to Western Washington University in Bellingham (that’s north of Seattle) for the 2010 ResNet Symposium. Sure, I had to pass through a John Hughes flick to get there but the conference itself was quite good. Attendence was down this year in part due to the remote location (a hop and skip across the border to Canada, eh?) and partially due to economic concerns. Still, I came home with a lot of new ideas.

A quick summary of the sessions I attended :

Student Supervisors & the Key to Professional Development w/Indiana University

IU uses a combination of a mentoring program, online performance records, and shift reports to keep track of their student workers progress. Any issues are noted and addressed immediately. They also keep track of training that every student employee is required to complete. After a year (or two) of this process, IU discovered that the supervisors need more supervision that can only come from the full-time employees keeping a better eye on things.

Expanding and Reinventing Your Services w/Kent State University

Kent State’s Help Desk recently began supporting both Faculty/Staff and Students. In this regard, there wasn’t a lot that differed from Luther. They did talk about Branding and Rebranding. For instance – introducing new names or major services in August is generally a bad idea as the community is too busy to notice at that time. Waiting until October or November generally results in a better acceptance.

Transforming the Customer Service Experience w/St Cloud State University

St. Cloud made big changes to their Help Desk over the past year. The session talked about how to improve assistance and visibility to the community and how to improve the Help Desk itself. This included making How To videos, empowering Help Desk staff to resolve issues, and using an online application called WhenToWork to manage scheduling problems. All their Help Desk staff are required to attend weekly meetings as well to check on progress or address any questions that arise.

Start Here : The Commons Help Desk w/Santa Clara University

Santa Clara went over the trials and tribulations when they switched to a merged Help Desk/Reference Desk, just like what we are presently doing. They started from scratch complete with a new $85 million building and new teams. Their ultimate goal is very similar to what we are doing with one major difference – the lack of a merged organization. This led to problems with lack of communication, coordination, and cooperation. They are still in the infancy of their program so it’ll be interesting to revisit in a couple of years.

Hardware Repair Facility w/Yale University

This was a hot topic and Yale put on a presentation about their newly established repair facility. The short of it is – we’re doing everything right. A separate space, plenty of storage, and means of tracking work orders and laptops. All that is already in place here. I picked up a few suggestions on designating spaces and some extra tools that will come in handy.

Keynote : Information Technology and Human Motivation by Michael Walker (Beacon Consultants)

This was pretty interesting and probably good to watch again when the videos come online. Michael talked about why it is important for IT to think about motivation in regards to how technology is used and how we want people to use it. There’s way too much for me to type up here.

The Energy Savings Sitting on Every Desktop w/Michael Walker

The entire conference revolved around the concept of sustainability (fact – WWU is powered 100% by renewable/green energy) so I decided to sit through this session. There was quite a bit of interesting facts on just how much each computer costs not only in electricity but also cooling costs ($3 – $30 per computer per year), peak load, air pollution, etc.

The good news here is that what most everyone recommended, we are already doing – Using the Power Save features, shutting down computers at night, etc. Luther and LIS are definitely ahead of the curve.

Overall – I am constantly amazed when going to conferences at just how far ahead of the curve Luther and LIS are. Many of the presentations talked about big changes that we made several years ago. This left me feeling pretty good but there are always opportunities for improvement.

And lastly, because it’s not ResNet without a bit of fun, here I am telling my kayaking partner (Carol from St. Cloud) to make a break for the Canadian border in our kayak.

(Courtesy of Scott Stamm)