I work in an office that is part of a large, statewide system. Sometimes the greatest challenge we have among the business executives we are working so diligently and hard for is effective communications. But having the desire to communicate and work well together is not the same as making it real. We clearly needed a better platform, as my teenaged daughter recently quipped, “email is for old people.”
That's why we rolled out a new collaboration platform a few years ago with the explicit goal of looking for ways to automate workflows and business processes. So far it has been a tremendous success. As of this moment, we have substantially more team sites than people in our system office. We continue to see a large number of requests for work process automation. Our teams are thinking about how to engage the entire state and crowdsource priorities within the system.
Adding technology innovation to collaboration has helped people who are deeply passionate about higher education have their voices heard and work better together. To my daughter's point, there are better platforms out there for collaboration than email. Part of what we’re trying to do is enable better collaboration that is very easily manageable and configurable, thanks to IT. Another part is to deliver all of this to mobile devices so content can be consumed that way as well.
Finally, we want to layer services on top of what is already built so we can enhance collaboration and make it better. No big surprise that we want IT to be seen as the department that says yes, not the department that says no.
Curtis A. Carver Jr., Ph.D. is the Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer for the Board of Regents of University System of Georgia (USG). In this capacity, he oversees a statewide educational infrastructure and service organization with more than 190 innovators and more than $75 million annual investment in higher education. He also provides technical oversight of the USG Shared Services Center. Dr. Carver has led the transformation of IT services by partnering with USG business owners, institutions, and other state agencies to jointly solve problems.
