Virtual IT Town Hall Recap - May 3, 2022

May 12, 2022

John opened the Town Hall by celebrating this month’s two commencement ceremonies (for the class of 2020 and 2022) and three alumni reunions. He thanked the team for the role they played with these two graduating classes in ways that they have never played before because “a lot of their educational experience has ridden on your technologies and in your support.” He also referenced the April 26 Update on Workplace Arrangements, and the need to “wait a while before we revisit our plan” to see if there are impacts related to supporting the rest of our community. He asked for the team’s patience and assured them that IT will revisit this topic from time to time, but not in the next few months.

Key topics covered at the meeting included:

  1. Shared Objectives Across Operations (Jack Callahan), starting at minute 5:00
  2. Q&A (Jack Callahan), starting at minute 24:54
  3. Organizational Updates (John Barden), starting at minute 36:06
  4. Q&A (John Barden), starting at minute 54:30

If you were unable to attend, a recording of the meeting (including responses to questions asked during the Q&A session, starting at minute 44:21) is available to view until June 5, 2022. In addition, a response to one question that we were unable to answer during the meeting is provided below.

Q&A

As we move to a data-driven culture - if the data is inaccurate, how can we know that we are making the correct choices for staffing and other items we need to complete our work timely to support Yale?

As we work toward being more data driven in many facets of the university, we are putting pressure on the quality of data. Particularly in the context of making staffing decisions in Information Technology, we are reliant on many existing processes that collect information like Ticket Data, Incidents, and Time. These systems largely rely on self-reporting of information by the individual working a ticket or problem. As has been true in looking at broader data challenges across the institution, it is critical to leverage the legitimate processes to do the best we can to assure the accuracy of the data. As the question points out, we are relying on it, and need to continue to assure a balanced process design that makes it reasonable to collect and manage the information we need to make informed decisions. To the degree we observe material data problems, it will make coming to fact-based decisions more difficult, and we may have to work on data cleanup and process improvements over a period of time to improve the quality of information to support a decision.

One IT at Yale