Last Friday was an interesting point in the IT@Illinois discussion. Together with Craig Jackson, Chuck Thompson, Dan Jacobsohn, and Kelly Bridgewater, we organized the Friday morning caffeine break to be an open dialog of the IT@Illinois project. It turned out to be really valuable. These are some thoughts I had coming out of the discussion.

The top priority for everyone is getting the mission actors what they need and not taking away the people they have locally positioned. All the concept authors want to give the faculty, staff, and students the tools they need to do their work. This core value translates into a needed agility at the mission actor level in order to be able to provide them what they need as quickly as possible.

The current agility needs to be improved on the commodity services like e-mail and identity management, and current unnecessary duplication of effort needs to be significantly reduced at the edge. This idea is where the real differences come into play in how to accomplish them. The seemingly agile ability of an IT professional to install a Ubuntu box with Apache, MySQL, and PHP to run a Drupal site for a faculty member is a form of false agility. While yes it is possible, the cost of that instance of agility impacts the IT professional's future agility as well as the agility of the broader organization. While identity management is now a project of the University Technology Management Team, they are looking at a five year process to complete it. That sort of time line drives the edge to find their own solutions.

A key component of the future is a shift in our IT culture on campus. The shift towards a more collaborative, more collegial, and more trusting IT culture started early last year, but it went into high gear to the broader IT community after the IT@Illinois project was announced. The changes can be seen in the peer coaching group, the leadership community of interest, and the Friday caffeine breaks. The more recent trend has been a shift from talking about good ideas to actually taking action towards implementing good ideas. One of the first of those was the IT@Illinois social networking opportunities calendar from the peer coaching group.

This last point continued in a conversation that happened among a handful of the participants after we had ended the fuller meeting. In it, we discussed how there are some aspects of the concepts that we have common agreement and understanding. There is nothing stopping us from starting to implement some of those common aspects now. There is a growing feeling of empowerment within the IT community and how we should maybe stop talking about doing things better but start to actually do things better.

A couple hours later, the announcement from Chancellor Herman came that Provost Katehi was leaving the University to become Chancellor at UC-Davis. Provost Katehi initiated the project back in December 2008, and losing the project initiator will definitely put a little bit of a crimp on things. The IT@Illinois project is not going to die in its tracks. We have not only a strong grassroots cultural shift in the works, but we also have started to get strong buy-in to the goals of the project within the IT community. Our next step is going to be working harder to involve the rest of the campus community: faculty, students, and staff.