Launching Lux and revisioning IT staff development discussed at the May IT LT meeting

The IT Leadership Team meeting met on May 31 and discussed the following topics:

Launching LUX – Yale’s Cross-Collection Discovery at Yale

LUX: Collection Discovery—Yale’s new cross-collection search tool—launched internally on May 16, and publicly on June 1. The launch was marked by press events celebrating worldwide online access to more than 17 million items within Yale University’s museums, libraries, and archives.

Robert Sanderson, Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage at Sterling Memorial Library, and Jeff Campbell, IT Associate Director for Cultural Heritage, joined the meeting to share their perspective on developing the technology behind LUX. Sanderson, Campbell, and other project partners sought to accomplish the following goals:

• Create one knowledge base that exposes relationships.
• Enrich Yale’s records with external knowledge from fifteen other knowledge bases.
• Develop data standards, interactions, and automation for over 41 million records.

These goals were accomplished through “collaboration, the use of sophisticated technologies (e.g., knowledge graph), and hard work,” Campbell stated. Over 100 people within and outside of IT were involved in developing and promoting Lux. As Sanderson put it, the result is “game-changing for the cultural heritage space and fulfills Yale’s mission of preservation and access to its collections.” 

Since the launch, over ten peers have approached Yale to learn how to create a similar system. From the start, Yale designed the system to be shareable across the domain, with interoperability, common technologies (e.g., Python), an enterprise-class and reliable database (e.g., MarkLogic), data standards, and open-sourced code wherever possible.  

Learn more about this groundbreaking platform in a recent article in Yale News. 

Engaging IT leaders in IT training and staff development

Advancement and Web Technologies team members, including Hadar Call, Taber Lightfoot, and Michelle Morgan, shared their IT training and development progress and sought input from fellow leaders.

Guided by a vision to create an IT environment that is learning and development-focused, they are working to:

• Encourage curiosity at all levels and across central and distributed IT.
• Engage IT staff to be curious, learn, and teach.
• Create a common IT language for foundational skills.

They are focused on keeping the program straightforward, flexible, and aligned with IT goals and initiatives to provide clearer paths to advancement and opportunities to pursue new skills and interests. To achieve these goals, they started by hiring and transitioning the service; engaging stakeholders, learning partners, and peers (e.g., Harvard’s IT Academy); and creating a three-year roadmap to help plan and prioritize work.

As one action on their roadmap, they conducted a feedback session with IT Leaders to understand the current state, desired future state, and potential activities to enhance IT training and development. Highlights from the session include:

Current state

• IT staff are encouraged to pursue training and certifications, but it is not required (except for university-mandated training or select IT-mandated training, including Unconscious Bias).
• New employees attend IT’s and Yale’s New Employee Orientation.
• Managers are required to attend the Managing at Yale program. 
• Functional training may be required, depending on the role.
• Internal processes and tools are reviewed by managers/team members.

Desired future state

• Enhancing onboarding training that includes business process training (e.g., purchasing, budgeting, running a project, and customer experience training) and technical process training (e.g., incident management and service ownership).
• Offering rotational training across Yale’s schools and departments.
• Running tabletop drills to develop resilience.
• Increasing opportunities for job shadowing, rotations, and mentorship programs as new ways to promote growth.

Potential actions to achieve desired future state

• Introducing dedicated training days, times, and communities.
• Providing more time to cross-train on new technologies.
• Developing a more robust structure to house IT training and development offerings and a central IT policy and procedure database.
• Including vendors and contractors in these offerings.
• Establishing an anchor value that includes learning.
• Marketing training by themes and considering new ways to remind staff to engage in these opportunities.
• Sharing learnings from other teams and conferences across the organization.

Ask SLT
There were no questions asked during Ask SLT; therefore, John provided remarks on a few initiatives:

• CPMG work: John encouraged staff to be as precise as possible about anticipated commitments for the year ahead and to be mindful of the impact that work has on staff, contracts, budget, etc.
• Software: Due to budgeting constraints, IT needs to begin consolidating its preferred software selection. Service owners must engage our communities in these discussions over the next few weeks.
• Strategic planning: The SLT and IT LC will have two sessions—one in July and one in August, in addition to internal discussions—to start to think about BSC goals.
• ECDP program: Participation will expand to 20 people vs. 17 people in the prior year to continue to create internal growth at all levels.

The next IT LT Meeting is scheduled for June 28, from 9-10:30 a.m.