ITS Presentation to Grinnell Board of Trustees - Facilities Committee

Jottings from Ray Kuntz, Director of ITS 2013-03-15

Great meeting last Saturday morning with the Facilities Committee of the BOT. Appreciated the time with them; appreciated the opportunity to interact. Great questions. High engagement. Attending were: Todd Linden and Shelley Floyd (Trustees), Keith Brouhle, John Kalkbrenner, President Kington, Susan Schoen, Jim Swartz, Angela Voos, Jon Case-Minners and myself. Discussion (questions) centered around data warehouse, cloud computing, and generally "how are we doing in ITS?" Our overall message was:

Data warehouse: we have created a white paper: "Grinnell College, Becoming a Data Driven Organization, Analytics and Decision Making". This paper will be presented to the President over the next week
Cloud computing: a practical idea; the economics need to come down a bit; bandwidth costs in rural Iowa create unique transport challenges; some topics, like Google email need to be explored this FY
Maturity is a process. It is about continuously moving the ball downfield
Grinnell looks like most all other colleges our size. They all face similar frustrations and similar growth topics. We don't own this space...
The ITS team is competent, highly engaged, and cares greatly

We have an engaged Board and engaged management team. They are top tier. They add perspective, direction, and leadership. We can be thankful for them. Ray