Hi, everyone! I'm Joanne Peca. I'm the Chief Information Officer at Penn State Altoona.
For those of you who don't know, Penn State Altoona is about forty minutes down the road.
So as John mentioned we do have some really interesting spaces.
And I will extend an invitation to everyone, if you're interested in a tour
or have any questions, we're very open to visitors. We love it.
So just a quick overview of Penn State Altoona.
We have about forty-two hundred students. We're oscillating some where between forty-two and
forty-three hundred. We have about six hundred and fifty faculty and staff.
I came on board February 2010. So John has
about a year and half on me in terms of tenure at Penn State Altoona.
And a, at Penn State, John's gonna be at Penn State Altoona.
But you know one of the things that he and I talk about
a lot, and actually you're gonna see a lot of recurring things between our two presentations, is that
we don't like to reinvent the wheel. And at Penn State
you don't have. One of the things I tend to say a lot is that
when I came to Penn State I started to feel like a kid in a candy store because
in my past positions I've been sort of
a mid-sized school. Basically about the same size as the Altoona campus, but we
operate independently. So a lot of things that we had to sort of do
on our own at the other schools basically
there was, as John mentioned, you know the University Park cloud that we could start
going out and using some resources. So basically what we're gonna run through here
and I'm gonna try to go kind of quickly so we have enough time for some questions and discussion.
But I basically have five rules of thumb that I've tried to use over the past
year and a half. That have helped us basically roll out
some new initiatives without getting additional staff, additional buildings.
You know for everybody's space is a premium. So basically
the theme is how do we do more with what we have?
So the first that I encourage everyone
to do is talk to your customers. When I came on board,
I basically spent the first probably six months of my life
going out speaking with faculty departments, staff departments
meeting both on our campus at Altoona and also at UP.
John was actually kind of enough, when I first started, one of our first meetings he had
candidate Excel spreadsheet with a list of about twenty or twenty-five people and he said, go meet
these people. Build your network. And it's huge you have to do that.
I strongly encourage you. As we see in this room today there are a lot
of communities. People are willing to share ideas and work with one another.
By all means go out and do that. But more importantly, you know, talk to
your customers first. Because you don't want to start going down
a path that turns out nobody wants, you know,
we can put, I have a great example of this, before I came on board there had been
a decision to put smartboards into one of our general purpose classrooms.
To this day, and actually I have our Instructional Technology Coordinator here,
to this day those things are not used. Because they were just thrown in there as hey,
it's technology. It's technology that nobody needed in that particular classroom.
So it was really wasted money. Wasted resources. So what you need to do
is to talk to people. Find out what they need. The other
thing that you can do once you've done that, is identify
and use what you have. And there's two aspects to this.
So first is look at your staff. At Penn State Altoona, again,
a school size of forty-two hundred students, we probably shouldn't of had
five disparek IT groups, and we did.
So it was a total of maybe twenty-two people including full-time and part-time staff.
But one of the first things I did was start to sort of lay
the ground work for, hey guys, this doesn't make sense. You know, we're all operating,
we're essentially doing the same things. But we
need to be working cohesively. And so I kind of actually
started working first with the individual groups and actually
in some cases they were one person departments, but I started talking to them and saying, we really
need to be a cohesive IT unit. After sort of
getting buy in from the right people and making sure that those affected
buy into the idea too. I didn't want to just like run to chancellor and say, hey, let's
do this. And we care who it effects and what they think about it.
But we got buy in from the right people. And what we've done is we've taken
basically we had something called the computer center. Which was one IT group. We had
telecommunications. We had instructional technology. We had an independent
individual working for our communications department. And we had
an individual working in engineering. We've actually brought in
everybody in engineering gives a solid report to the CIO now.
Engineering has a dotted line. We're still working through that one,
but the idea is we all have a connection now. The gentlemen who
works in engineering has all the resources of an IT
staff member. He is officially an IT staff member. So we can give him access to things like
CLM and administrative rights and all of those things that is was very difficult when it was
again, five different units. So start thinking about, you know,
if you have, and you don't have to get the CIO to do this,
you can start talking amongst yourselves and maybe feed some of those ideas up to
you know, again, the chance of the powers that be, to help sort of start making
a more cohesive IT unit. The other thing that
I really find important is, find the people who are willing to learn.
You don't need to hire somebody new to get a new skill set.
On my staff I sat down, you know, when I first started,
and I started talking to everybody individually and say, what do you do here? What do you want
to do? And you know, in some cases, we can make
what you want to do, what you do here. There are things that can align.
For example is, we actually had a faculty member come to us and say, I
really need some Lennox support. And I looked across my staff and I said,
you know we don't have anybody who does Lennox support. So then
the next staff meeting I had, I said, who wants to learn about Lennox? And it actually took
a couple of iterations of, really guys, who wants to learn about Lennox? But finally
we got some, I'll do it. But you know, as I
talked to them about it more, he said, you know, yeah, I'm willing to take this on. And it's actually
very new. It was just a couple weeks ago that he went to Lennox training that was
offered, it was an outside vendor, but it was offered through ITS.
And now we have somebody who at least has some ground work, so that we can start
you know, supporting Lennox as requested by the faculty.
So identifying those people who are willing to take on something new or learn something new is huge
in using what you have. And then also think about the
inadament objects. So what spaces do have that are dead? Or that are
under utilized that you could rework so that you have
a new resource. And I actually have a few pictures of some spaces that we,
where we did this. This picture is our student center.
This counter was actually used by student affairs. It just basically had
some brochures and documents. I don't even know if those things are really used.
It was just a counter and they said, ok, we can put this stuff on here.
So we went to student affairs and we said, hey, we have this idea. We're gonna create a mini lab.
There's a printer. Three work stations. Can we have that space?
Do you really need to put those brochures there? No, we'll put a rack
on the wall then put those brochures there and you can have the space.
So there you go. Not a lot of construction. Actually the counter was already there.
The only thing we're going to do is actually move the printer. We're gonna have our facilities folks
just build a little printer cart because we wanted to make it actually easier
to for some people to access print outs. Some shorter people, it's a little high
for those height challenged folks. So a little
tweak we were gonna make. But we actually did this last May. Very few
resources needed. Here's another space.
This is actually a close up. But this is actually media
scape unit from Steelcase. It's a collaboration workstation.
And actually in our case, you know, our students are using it. Maybe because it's in a lab space.
They are using it for collaboration. Now this is staged. I will admit.
These are a few of our student workers. But we actually installed these
must have been late April, it was right before finals week. And for about a
week they sat there. You know, we really didn't know what to do. So we decided to put out an email to our
student mailing list to say, hey, this resource is here.
We created a little one page sheet. Literally, I think it's six
steps on here's how you get the thing up running. If you haven't seen these units, they're pretty neat.
They have these little things called pucks you attach your laptop
output to it and basically you'd share your work.
Projecting out to those two screens. You can have multiple connected.
You can switch them around. All it took was that email. And what we did here was
this is actually the back of our lab and we had a couple of just plain vanilla tables there.
What we did was move those to the front where we actually had nothing.
And we, just so you know too, I'm a bargain hunter. I refuse
to pay full price for anything. And I worked with our Steelcase dealer. We got two
for one. So this is actually gonna mirror of this unit. They're back to back
and we got them two for one.
That's awesome. That's probably the best coupon shopping I've done in awhile.
But this is the kind of thing where the students come. They're using it.
They love it. And as John said, sometimes I just see students sitting there at
the tables. They're not even using the technology. Which is fine. Other times
like I said, we rolled these out right before finals week, we saw students collaborating on
powerpoint presentations and all those sorts of things where normally you'd see them all
sort of clustered around one persons laptop. So really exciting stuff there.
This is one of our downtown spaces.
And as you can see in that corner. This is sort of the long view. This is actually our
cafe in our downtown campus in our Aaron building. And that little
corner in the back where those machines are, was completely dead. There was nothing there
at all. So once again, we just went to
the folks who are actually sort of using that space in that area we said, do you care
if we kind said, you know, one L shaped desk and a few machines and a printer.
Now we have a mini lab. And everybody, yeah sure, you know, we're not doing
anything with the space. And there you go. And actually you'll see there too, as they turn some of the soft
seating towards that corner. So now it's like a little lounge/lab
that they can use between classes. And I should mention too, this is
our only sort of open space. We have a lot of classrooms with computers downtown,
but this would be, these four machines there are literally are only
open spaces currently. And we're actually working right now at creating more of those.
And this is just sort of a close up view and
you can't see it with the projector, but you'll see people are using
it in different ways. One person is using Facebook. These two actually, I think, are working.
But the idea here is, as John says, students do need a place to sort of
kick back and relax between classes or maybe they need to get some work done.
between classes too. I talked a little bit about
reorganizing. So again, I don't want to repeat myself, but
see where you can identify where
your sort of not working as efficiently as you can. And again,
one of my favorite examples is, when I started, IT used to be completely
flat organization. And actually it all reported up to business services. We didn't even have an
IT manager. I'm sort of the first one. So what we had though is
we had six people handling labs. And each person had a different lab.
Even to set another login. It was completely different
from one space to the next. And that was one of the first thing faculty says. I walk into a classroom
and I don't know from one place to the next how to login. In some places I need to
use a wireless and some places I don't. It was really a confusing thing for our faculty.
So one of the things we've done is, we started using
operative lab management. And we're actually not
to, John I need to talk to you, because you need to get on a Mac side so you
can hook us up. But we're actually using it on our Windows side of the house now.
So first of all that took care of whole problem with it's different
from one space to the next. Well then we also talked about six people having labs
down to, we're down to about two and half IT. And we're actually still
training cause we're shooting for just two people to be fully responsible
for labs.
You may have heard something about this with John and
this may actually be a quote from John because it's one of those things where, you know,
you have to look at what you're doing. You're not, at least I'm not going
to get any new staff in the near future. Not that I don't
necessarily think we need to grow. I think we need to figure out what we're doing
that we shouldn't be doing. So my first example is, if you happen
to have somebody who comes in with a nine year old laptop, just stop,
nobody should be spending time on a nine year old laptop. I would rather, out of my own
budget, buy somebody a new laptop than work on a nine year old laptop.
And I've taken that tack at our campus now. It's you just give that to me.
I will give you something brand new. It's kind of like I'm
luring them. Or offering them a trade. But it's really worked. Because for a lot
of people, you know, they've had that machine for nine years. They know how it works.
So they needed some sort of incentive to give that resource up. But we did
literally have a nine year old laptop walk in. Just a little, a few months
after I started. This can't continue to be propped up.
It's sort of, it's almost the opposite of what I'm saying.
here, but one of the things that I did implement was a help desk. We had no help desk
when I first started. I know it sounds ground breaking, right, oh, a help desk, great.
We actually had people call in and they would talk to our administrative assistant.
Who would take a message and put it on our work order system and it would be assigned
to tier two immediately. There was no tier one remediation.
So as it turned out though, our administrative assistant was
really good with software. And she was very trainable on some of the other
tier one questions that would come through. So we started training her on that
and your sort of saying, you're stopping
what, we're stopping people wandering our hallway.
We would literally have faculty come in and say, I need somebody to help me. And they would have
no particular place to go because we were just a hallway with a bunch of offices.
And we didn't have a place for people to go. A help desk. So people are starting
to come into a help desk. They understand now we got actually two staff members. We've rebalanced.
Moved some people around. Reclassified some folks. And now
we've a help desk. And we're stopping the idea of just wandering
the IT hallway and grab the first you can.
So progress. And then finally again, I just
want to reiterate. Building your network is a huge thing.
When I came on board here, there are so many resources that we can be using.
Media Commons community is a great example. Nick Smerker
and I have just started working together in the past few months. But there are a lot of things
that we're able to do and we're planning to do because
we're working together with the Media Commons resources and Penn State Altoona's resources.
Also on our campus ourself I've built a
relationship with our library director. Who has been kind enough to start taking on
the responsibility or actually we're in the process of having them take on the responsibility of checking
in and out some of our portable devices that normally that would have been
our instructional technology group's responsibility.
And this helps on two fronts. One it gets us out of the business of
doing that. We don't have recreate a library system and basically try to keep track
of what's in, what's out. And also our library is open longer.
We actually have hours into 2:00 am some nights.
So students could literally come in at one in the morning and say, all I need a video camera and they can get it.
They're not told to come back at 9:00 am. So they have a whole night of filming then.
So you know, building your network, again, both across campuses.
Within your own campuses. It's hugely important. And it will help you get out of the business
of recreating the wheel. And maybe doing some work that you don't necessarily need to do
in yourself. So that's it. Five easy steps
to start doing more with what you have.
And I guess I'll open it up to questions for either John or myself at this point.
There's just a couple minutes. So if you guys have anything.
(Question) Probably more of a
ignorant question, but what's the downtown Altoona?
Actually Altoona has two campuses. Basically Ivyside campus is our traditional
wooded, leafy, beautiful campus. And then
what happened in the past, I would say, seven years or so, downtown
Altoona is about ten minutes away from the Ivyside campus. And it was sort of
going the way of dodo. You know, it was a lot
of buildings that were not being used. A lot of them had the old
they're beautiful buildings, but they were just falling into disrepair.
And so what Penn State Altoona's been doing is actually leasing some of the buildings
and renovating them, turning them into classroom spaces. So we actually now
have five buildings in downtown Altoona. So we actually have
little mini multi campus system going on down there. But it's wonderful
for the town. Again, we're revitalizing our downtown area.
And it's really nice too, because we're really doing some interesting things with our spaces.
And as has been mentioned, our communications program, our nursing program
and actually now entrepreneurship program has a new building as of August.
And we're doing really top notched technology work in all of those spaces.
They even renamed the one street Blue and White Way.
Yes, yes our 12th Avenue is now Blue and White Way.
(Question) To go along with what both of you said
this morning, and I'm Jeremy Heath from Altoona. Talking about leveraging
your vendors. Obviously University Park does have some
design services. But sometimes they're very, very busy and they can't
accommodate you in a timely manner. What we have done is
leverage for AB design work, one of our vendors
has donated a lot of time to do our design work for us.
They also bid on the project. Now we do hire
them from time to time. We hired them to design our third floor
communication suite and our fourth floor nursing suite, because
of the complexity of those two floors. But that's another thing
we could do is go to your vendors and have them
do your design work for you.
(Question) I was interested about the library.
The library system I think reports,
they don't report to branch campuses, they report to main.
And you know, this 2:00 am, I mean
I think it's wonderful. Cause that's when students do most of the work
is like from, you know, ten o'clock to four o'clock.
So I was just interested, how did all of that work to
convince the library system,
our library, to move to a 2:00 am closing period?
I can't speak to exactly how it worked out between
say our library director and the library system.
But I can tell you that, and maybe,
this what the attraction needed. It came from our students. Our student government actually
came to the library and said, we really need this. And actually
it's, I think it's a certain section of the library that's open. So it's not, you know,
the whole run of the library, but they still have a number of resources
that they need. I mean most students these days are using the online resources anyway and they just need
maybe some support from a library. So I think that's probably the key difference.
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