The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Wired Campus

September 21, 2007

Tech Therapy Podcast: Flying a Plane While Building It

If you haven’t listened to this week’s episode of Tech Therapy, you’re missing a good one. (You’ll never miss an episode if you subscribe here.)

Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast field a couple of questions from a participant at the University of Indianapolis: Tech officials get slapped for not communicating enough — how do we fix that? And how do we stop people from coming to us at the 11th hour to fix their technology project or plan, after they’ve already bought all the equipment?

Among the highlights of the podcast:

Learning to talk: “A couple of years ago I started recommending to people to get a PR person for IT, because communications is a critical component.”

Warren turns down a job: “There were lots of problems, misunderstandings, 11th-hour decisions…. The president used a metaphor for me: What they had been doing was ‘flying a plane while building it.’ Sound familiar, Jeff?”

Planning and design are everything: “If you go into building without a lot of up-front thinking, you pay a lot on the back end, and it’s the same for technology.”

How is technology like crack? “There are two industries that refer to their customer base as ‘users’: information technology and illicit drugs.”

Posted on Friday September 21, 2007 | Permalink |

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