 I think it's about time to get started. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and you've reached one of the project briefing sessions in the next to last day of our 2020 spring virtual member meeting. And I'm delighted you're here with us. We'll be hearing a presentation from Dale Hendrickson and I'll say a word about that in a minute. After Dale's presentation, Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate some Q&A. I would note there is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen and please feel free to use that. It'll bring up a box where you can enter questions and feel free to enter questions at any point during the presentation when they occur to you. We'll address them all at the end, but there's no reason to wait till the end to ask them. I'd also note the chat box. We will be using that to provide you with a few URLs that might come in handy as you enjoy the session. Now let me turn to the subject at hand, which is IT Guidance at the Yale University Library. And guidance is a fascinating word there, which I think that Dale will expand upon a bit, but at least the way I read this is when you look at a large digitally intensive institution like the Yale Library, or Yale more generally, there is an endless and highly distributed demand for IT services and IT support and help in using IT to transform and expand the things that the institution is doing. And the process by which one deals with that on an ongoing basis is, at least based on my observation, one of the really genuine challenges, especially in a situation where you can't infinitely expand resources to match up to the demand. And I believe that Dale is going to give us some very helpful insight into how Yale has found a way to navigate that process on an ongoing basis. And I stress process and navigate. It's not a problem you solve. It's a process you manage. So I'm delighted you're here to share your experience and your insights on this, Dale. And with that, I just will thank you all for joining us and say over to you, Dale. Thank you for that introduction, Cliff. Before we get started here, I just wanted to give you a hint of what's to come. I mean, this presentation is inspired by a recent book I came across. It was called Math with Very Bad Drawings. So I'm going to follow that as my inspiration and add my own element to it, not only bad drawings, but bad writing as well. So we'll get started then. So what is the purpose of the YUL IT guidance process? So one of the things that we've ran into is that we have a very small IT unit given the scale of the Yale University Libraries. When I say this number, I know some of you may be from smaller institutions and it sounds like a lot. However, I'll put it into context of the overall size of the organization. So we have a staff of roughly 25 people and this covers everything from server management all the way up through software development, project management, and endpoint technologies as well. So that's pretty much a comprehensive IT unit that takes care of everything. Now, when you think about Yale University Library having nearly 500 employees, that all of a sudden puts into scale that this is a very small group and a very large organization comparatively. When I look at our colleagues at other schools that have IT units, the proportion is much higher. So we're roughly, I don't know, five percent or so. And other institutions of our scale or the percentage of scale is around 10 to 12. In some cases, 15 percent. And I know that in academic libraries there's not a direct comparison, but it kind of gives you an idea of what we're facing. So we have a really discrete and small set of resources that the organization is calling upon in order to make this digital transformation or proceed forward with these digital initiatives. The problem was there was a lack of transparency and there wasn't clarity on the systems involved or how you get into the process. We'll go into that a little bit more too. So the real issue was where are decisions being made and who's accountable for them? So the IT guidance process is really about diving into the decision rights and the accountability framework. So library IT resources are being used effectively. So the question might be, so why did this need to be created? You know, most libraries have a series of committees that are covering a lot of the areas that are active in the organization. There are sometimes committees on committees depending on the scale of the organization. So we had some of that. We had advisory groups. We had user groups. However, the past to authority about making those decisions and who was ultimately accountable was fairly vague. So one of the first steps that we did was we ran a survey, a little bit of context for you. I've been at Yale about three years, just over three years. And I want to make clear that I believe my predecessors did a great job and they definitely fulfilled the needs of the time. However, fresh eyes come in and as I did and are able to view things a little bit differently and build upon the work that was done in the past. I really do want to emphasize that a lot of great work, I'm building on great work done in the past. So we ran a survey and we, of those roughly 500 people, we interviewed on one-on-one basis 73 people within the library covering a multitude of functional areas and levels of the organization. The university librarian down to line staff at the desk really trying to get a feel for how IT, library IT was serving the rest of the organization. Eleven themes were identified as we went through this, you know, what are the staffing issues, communication, always an issue, you know, we're not getting enough communication out of library IT about what's going on. A real desire for collaboration and feeling like there wasn't sufficient collaboration that was going on between library IT and the rest of the organization. For me, that's a very critical element that I really wanted to dive into and see if we could figure out how to remedy that. There were questions about how do you ask for library IT time if you have a project that you want to dive into that has an IT component? How do you get that time? What are the services that we are offering? People didn't even know clearly throughout the organization what services that library IT provided, as well as endpoint support, you know, what's our vector into the organization for that. And this goes also hand in hand with this is where does library IT take control of a certain problem or an issue and where does central IT, Yale has a fairly large central IT organization and their lines there were a little vague. Then there was just getting a sense of the perceptions about library IT within the library. Some of them positive, some of them understood the resource constraints that we were dealing with. Others were like, you're really not serving my needs. We also had a lot of questions and requests about how do I ask for basic help. So that was troubling as well. These things needed to be addressed. Two interesting things appeared that were beyond the scale of just library IT. They involved the leadership and the cultural shift of the organization that was going on, which was definitely beyond the scope of anything that library IT could handle on its own. There was also some talk about how our projects that we were working on getting prioritized and what was the role of the library executive council. So at the Yale University Library, the library executive council is the senior leadership chaired by the UL of the Yale University library. So the question was, well, how many of these things are making to that group for prioritization and how do I know about it and what do we do. So this is a term I've been using for some years and I think what happened is a lot of people perceive things as an arbitocracy. Not a bureaucracy, not chaos, but an arbitocracy. It seemed rather opaque and arbitrary about what direction library IT resources are being directed. And again, I want to say this is mostly a perception issue, but I think there was some truth to it as well. When you're talking about how organizations are structured, it became very clear that, and we'll go back to that arbitocracy term, is that Yale library IT was working on an organization of culture model as opposed to an organization of process. So what that means is that it was personal relationships that were really guiding the work that library IT did. You know, when an organization is smaller, that is actually a very effective and efficient way to get priorities organized and to the right people to get them accomplished. The challenge though is that when you're dealing with an organization of scale of Yale, that becomes very difficult. And again, it seems arbitrary about where these priorities are set. So in my mind, we needed to move more to the process side while still respecting the culture because that's very valuable as well, as I said. And as I mentioned earlier, the lack of transparency and trusted systems about how library IT resources were allocated was very troubling. Again, and we wanted to make a more equitable and clear way path that people could then develop, interact with library IT. Another thing we learned, and in my mind this is worse, is that library IT was the ones in control that we were making the decisions for the library. That was a perception at least. I know internally that really wasn't the case, although in some cases I think it was true. And what people were thinking is that library IT was in control of the priorities of the library. And in my mind, we needed to flip that around to make the library controlling the priorities of library IT. So I was looking for a map. I went out and I did a lot of research. And unfortunately, there isn't a clear map out there about how to do this. There are a lot of structures about IT governments and books out there that you can dive into. I was fortunate enough to have a resource in the CIO of the Southern Methodist University who's been involved in this activity for a long time. So I drew on that. So it was really a matter of taking all these pieces and putting it together in the Yale University Library. Through that process, I realized that, well, there was some internal work to do within library IT before we could really begin to map our way out to beyond the confines of our own unit. So that generally means that you have a reorganization. And one of my personal management or leadership philosophies is that people are rarely, if ever, the problem. It's usually a situation problem. So if there is a barrier in way or a work process that is not clear or people feel like they don't have control over their work, that's a problem of the situation reorganization to fix. It's very rarely that you have a person that just is completely ineffective and not able to do the job that they're asked. Oftentimes, they just don't know what job they're supposed to be doing. So I wanted to make sure that we were focused on that. Additionally, just before I arrived, they were wrapping up what I like to call a deathmark project, meaning that it was a high priority at the university level. We got a very prominent person's collection donated to the university. And we were busy building a digital collection system for that collection. And it turned into a death march near the end as requirements were changing and deadlines were coming due. So when I arrived, the engineering team, the software development team was exhausted to the point many of them were looking for alternative employment. And a lot of them found it. So there was a big transition there as well as far as who was available to work on these projects with knowledge and the history of where systems were the way they were. So through this, we reorganized into four discrete units. We have an endpoint group focused on the endpoint technologies of the organization. I'd like to simplify this as anything you touch, look at, or hear. Be that at your desk or in a conference room. We also have what we call the client services and IT operations. This is where our main outreach people are regarding particular projects, products, sorry, as well as project managers. And we have a web designer in that group as well. We have the engineering team. So this is the software development team. And then we have our DevOps and infrastructure, which is the back end, the systems side of things, the dark arts of IT that manage the back end servers and the storage. And with that, we also developed a new mission. We wanted to make sure that it was clear to library IT that our role was in service of the university library. We existed for a reason. Fortunately, we also had a very supportive CIO who understood the distributed nature of Yale and the associated distributed nature of IT at Yale. So he was very clear that no, library IT exists because there is specific domain knowledge in the library that can't be fulfilled by a central IT organization. So we were able to really define library IT again as in service of the Yale University libraries. That also gave us the opportunity to rethink our relationship with central IT to the point where what are we doing that we could hand off to them more effectively. So that's one of the things that we've been also working on is making sure that we're moving closer to the core and valuable activities of the library and handing off those more commodity activities to the central IT unit. One of the other exercises that we did was create and really define identifying what we, the term we call our service domains. So that process took place by examining all of the products and services that the library IT was supported. Through that process, we identified well over 130 different applications that library IT was engaged in. And then we had to work through rationalizing how they fit together and not and as well as who should be working on them, not necessarily who is working on it, but who really should be focused on that. So with that, we realized that a group of applications or program services generally focused on a specific area. A great example is our ILS, we're a Voyager library. And people were talking about things in terms of just Voyager. Well, if you dig into that a little bit deeper, you find out that there's this whole ecosystem of applications that support that particular product. There's custom code that were custom applications that were used to manipulate data that move it into Voyager. And for us, Voyager is a major hub for pulling data out and moving off to other applications. So there was a whole suite of tools that were surrounding them. And through that process, we identified 15 areas that we call service domains. Now, this is still early in our thinking as we're moving through this process. That's obviously far too many. However, we did want to be able to logically group the different tools and services that we were using into a particular service domain. Now, with that, I'll now get back where the a little bit later in the presentation about why the service domains were an important foundation piece of moving forward with the IT guidance process. One of the things that we really worked hard on is the leadership, the senior leadership in the library. And how did that fit together? Earlier, I mentioned there was a group called the Library and Executive Council. Well, with a lot of debate and a lot of really, I think honest conversations, we were trying to decide whether this group should take over this role as the IT governance or guidance group for for low library. And it was determined through these conversations that, no, we need to have a separate group that is focused strictly on IT. One of the other innovative things that I didn't cross my mind as we were diving into this is that some of the senior leaders were like, well, in reality, more and more people are doing IT that are not in library IT. So we need to make sure that there's some kind of guidance around that as well. So the way the charter was written for the ITFC, the IT Steering Committee, was to say IT within the Yale University Library, not just library IT. An important aspect, too, is to make sure at least I advocated strongly is that the university librarian be a member of that group. Now that person doesn't chair or facilitate that group, but I really thought it was important for Susan Gibbons, in this case, to be in the room hearing these conversations going on related to IT in order to make sure that we were focused on the strategic side of things. So the ITFC really is the strategic body related to IT within the Yale University Libraries. The other important aspect of the ITFC was to really establish their role in decisions and accountability and authority over IT within the larger organization. So kind of setting up that role and turning it to that group and saying each one of you that serve on this has a role in decision making and then setting priorities and then holding folks accountable to getting that work done. Another key component was an advisory group. The advisory groups were charged by the ITFC and moved under the ITFC as their main accountability group. A key component of the advisory groups when they were formed is that sponsors were defined that were members of the ITFC. One of the things that we determined fairly early, and I'll go back to identifying those service domains, is that a clear line of authority, it was often not available for these different products when we looked at more different services that were being offered in the library. The common person was the university librarian. So if you look at the ILS, which is again the obvious example, it touches multiple areas within the library. So I couldn't go to one UL and say we need to make a change in this spot and then have it, one person make that decision. Well, it was usually a group discussion at the highest levels of the organization. So it was important to make these advisory groups have direct access to the people that ultimately could make a decision if needed. Then another key component was identifying the co-chairs of the group. The way it was structured is one co-chair was from library IT, and then another co-chair was from a functional area in that prime area of the functional area of the service domain. And then the advisory group would be responsible for a service domain. And it was clear that with that title advisory that decision making at least initially would not be the core activity of that advisory group. So there were many groups that already existed in the library. My goal was to not create yet another group of meetings and another group of committees, but can we repurpose some existing groups and reform them and change the structure a little bit and formally put them into the structure by a clear charge without creating a whole different group. And we've done that in several cases and I'll go into that a little bit later. Another key component that I requested early was consulting support. I knew that some of the co-chairs had not had this kind of leadership role before. They hadn't run groups, these standing groups that would be feeding content up to the ITSC for consideration and decision. And I thought it was important that people come in with the skills, basic things like how to effectively run a meeting, how to communicate with the group effectively, how to communicate out to the rest of the organization as far as the activities that were going on. And then as well as starting to think about how we manage the digital artifacts of the group itself. How do we make sure that those items are available to everyone on the advisory group as well as being able hopefully available to the rest of the organization. So we engage consulting groups for that. Now the other thing with the advisory groups is that they could spawn off what we call a working group. So if you think of the ITSC as a senior leadership of the library, most of the advisory groups were directors or managers within the organization. So these were higher level folks. That was one of the changes that occurred when some of the groups were reformulated is that some of the membership wasn't quite balanced. Of course we have to be aware of how do we develop our younger staff or our staff that are coming in to the library as a career change and how do we bring them along as well. So we built in the possibility of having members roll in as a development opportunity but the main membership was really in that mid-tier of the organization and with that nice bridge between the day-to-day tactical and the strategic focus of the ITSC. So with that recognition what we had to do was create working groups as part of this component with the advisory groups spinning off working groups to be able to focus on the tactical and the detailed elements of whatever question or problem they were looking into. So to sum up that and put it into a picture this is kind of the rough drawing of how the overall structure works meaning that the ITSC has a series one or more sorry I was a database administrator in a previous life so I think an entity relationship diagram. So you have the senior leadership having one or more advisory groups with arrows of communication going back and forth and then the advisory groups forming their own working groups to look into different problems and the working groups didn't have to be made up just of the members of the advisory group. They can be brought in people brought in from across the organization to focus on whatever problem they were looking at and then library IT was off to the side there to support and to be available to the rest of the group. So this is the overall structure we wound up with I have many more much more complicated drawings but I thought we would keep it simple for this presentation. So I'm going to race past the slide. So how is it working so far that might be first thing on your mind. Well I think it's overall it's working pretty well up until about mid-march and things kind of went a little bit in a different direction. We were getting some good traction in some areas and I'll go into the some of the advisory groups that have been formed and what they've been working on. However around mid-march even though this was streamlining the decision making that had been occurring in the past and was clarifying who could make the decision obviously when you're in a crisis decisions need to be made faster and priority shift. So we've been working to make sure that the advisory groups are still engaged that they're consulted. However some of the priorities that they were putting forward have been reshuffled and moved around by senior leadership as we're trying to address the crisis of the moment. One of the things that I was getting anecdotally is that the library IT had finally figured out how to gain total world domination of the YUL. So this was our plan to take over the library. The real intent of course was quite the opposite. So obviously more communication needed to needs to happen and more outreach by our group and more communicating what we're about and some evangelizing about how the process is working in some of the groups. These are the early groups that have been charged so far. So we have the digital collection systems advisory group. Some of the products that this group is looking at is aviary from our AVP. We also have a very ambitious digital collections initiative project going on where we're moving from our previous hydra-based digital library over to a more modern Sambara-based digital collection system with IIIF and using some of the more modern tools and again redesigning it for sustainability and for the future. One area that I really recognized was a pain point was endpoint meaning that people weren't sure well why does so-and-so get a new computer and I don't or why is the equipment so old in room X as opposed to the equipment that's in this room. So this was an effort to get those key people together to start talking about well this is the budget we have for endpoint where it is the most effective and most appropriate ways to spend that money. In my mind that was very important and when you're in IT you tend at least for me I tend to look more at the backend systems and look at the engineering what are the software applications that we're developing for our patrons. However on a day-to-day basis and I think many of you are aware of this if your computer is not working you're not working so this was something that was very much on the minds of the people within the library so we definitely moved that up to the list of advisory groups that we wanted to get formed. Then we also looked at the ILS the integrated library systems advisory group there had been a group in place but it was a user group that had formed organically that group was very effective at helping us with our ILS version upgrade. We did a significant upgrade to Voyager however the lines of authority and where they went if they were having just agreements internally were not clear so we transformed that group into the ILS advisory group and then the preservation systems AG so the Yale University library runs Preservica as our main digital preservation system but then there's a lot of other applications that surround that and it's one of the in my opinions one of the most important activities that the library is doing for the long term and it really requires in my mind a focus because they need the resources in order to do that core functionality of preserving knowledge for the future. Some of the groups that we're looking at that we've had charges that we're trying to develop is we were taking our Aeon user group so we were moving that to access for a special collections AG some of these names are still a little bit clunky as we move forward. The quick search advisory the quick search advisory is our blacklight instance that unifies all of our different collections under a single search box so we wanted to get us away from the name quick search and move it to what it really is about which is the unified discovery advisory group and then research sharing and reserves advisory group the way the structure of the library is is that access services activities take place in multiple locations with multiple lines of hierarchical recording and the effort here was to try and clean that up again recognizing that a decision made in one library could affect the others as far as functionality of the overall system. So one of the things that I was really looking forward to was having IT guidance process review and planning retreat in March of 2020 so that we could really evaluate and then approve well obviously that did not happen so what we did was we kind of went around and figured out a way to run a survey to figure out how things were doing and we limited it to the people that are actually participating in the IT guidance process now so this is the ITSC members as well as all the members of the advisory groups. One of the things that gave me some hope is that the results indicated that those that are participating for the most part had a good understanding of what the goals of the IT guidance process were about so that was heartening however I do want to emphasize once again these are people that are directly involved in the process I still don't have a clear picture of what's going outside of those that are participating and then one thing that's very important to me is how is this impacting the rest of the library do people understand why we're doing this in the context of being able to achieve the library's goals we've got decent responses here it still concerns me that the large group of people even participating in the process were fairly neutral about this being something that was going to be ultimately valuable to the library so one of the as we proceed into this and I do appreciate close insight at the beginning that this really is a process it's not a destination so it really is a journey and I my goal again to take it back to the very base is that we want to make sure that library IT is in service of the Yale University libraries we want to make sure that the library is controlling library IT resources and another really important for me personally is to make sure that we are collaborative and that we are seeing as colleagues in achieving the goals of the organization and I think we're on the right path but it's going to be an iteration really focusing on that agile methodology realizing that this is a complex evolution as far as how IT is managed at the Yale University libraries and where we're going and we have to adapt to the times and the environment that we're in and I just really want to emphasize that you know I talked about the arbitocracy I do I'm one that believes in bureaucracy in the sense that you need the right amount you just need enough bureaucracy that transparency and trust are available to those that are looking in from the outside and realizing how the system works and I think we're making our first steps in that right that direction and I'm looking forward to seeing where we go with this in the future and with that I wanted to open up two questions thank you Dale that was really interesting hearing about your process at Yale and it made me wonder if other organizations other library IT organizations out there have done anything similar so I'm hoping that if anyone among our attendees has had a similar experience that they'll share it with us and with that I just want to invite our attendees to please share any comments or questions you have with us now by typing them into the Q&A box and we will field them here live and while we're waiting to hear from our attendees I wanted to first comment on how much I really enjoyed your very bad drawings inspired talk which to me was reminiscent of the XKCD comics really good except maybe with a little more color I was wondering if at Yale campus IT is using any a similar kind of structure or is this something new at Yale are there other departments or divisions that are approaching these problems similarly and also how how does library IT fit into central IT at Yale that's great that's a great question so the CIO at Yale and me started two days apart so he's been there three years a little more than three years now and one of the things that he came in was he realizes that governance and guidance was missing at that level as well so that was one of the areas where he started to focus on so of course the scale and the focus of the governance at that level is a little bit different so we've been able to work together very effectively and one of the his early groups that he formed was the IT leadership council the IT leadership council is bringing together other CIOs and senior leaders in IT around the campus into one group and we meet regularly and I am the chair currently the chair of that organization the other thing that he did was really start to you know in a similar way of the service domain concept but at obviously a larger scale he put together what he calls pillars of focus and with that there's the administrative pillar the student services pillar the research pillar Yale obviously has a medical school so they have medical care and patient care pillar but one of the things that he really realizes that we have a very large library and we have other cultural heritage institutions on campus so he put together a cultural heritage pillar as well and provided it with resources to support the library and the museums as well on campus now given the scale of the budget that that group has it's very small however it did give visibility at the highest level of Yale about there is this other area where there are RT needs and that has been rather effective we are currently working on a melon grant with the support of the central IT organization to take that idea of unified discovery to one step up not only talking about the libraries but bringing all the cultural heritage institutions on campus together in one unified interface that's a very exciting project so the CIO has been very supportive of this and again I think I mentioned earlier he really understands why there needs to be a library IT as well as an IT unit in the school of management and at the school of law that specific domain knowledge in that space is very important and you know his efforts are like well what can you give to me and what services that can I offer that would offload some of the things that you're currently engaged with and give you more resources to actually tackle library problems so we've been having great support centrally from the CIO and and his organization oh that's great really interesting and I guess particularly good timing there on the hiring serendipity so thank you for yeah man I was very fortunate we we are two different personalities but we have a very similar philosophy about IT and the organizations that we support really interesting okay thank you we have a question now from Ann Barrett and Ann asks how did the IT staff feel about letting go of the arbitra um yeah exactly that's a really good question in the sense that when you're in that arbitrary environment people can make decisions on a particular relationship that they have so they have more control or power over a particular spot it took a little time and it really I'm really focused on being patient and giving people time to understand the new paradigm that we were moving to and that it wasn't a reflection that they were doing work in the past having been through reorgs or changes it's often a senior leader will come in and say what the heck are you doing why are you doing it this way without recognizing that a lot of hard work and thoughtful work went into getting to the place where people are now so I really wanted to build as I said earlier on what has been done and also give staff time to understand their new roles and help them along the processes they move into a different working environment um we've been pretty successful uh if you look at the engineering team um we had developers in several different locations within library IT well we consolidated all of them into the the central engineering team and those resources are now shared you know and initial resistance from some of the folks about well this is what I do this is my area of knowledge has turned to the focus of well you know I still get to do that stuff and people still turn to me as the expert but I also get to play with some new stuff I get to try something different that I hadn't been doing in the past so that's helped as well as being able to get people to know that the work that they've done in the past and they're doing now is valuable but also same to them look at the opportunities that you might have as we move to this new model great thank you and thank you to Ann for that question of a really good question we have another question now coming in from Don Waters hi Don uh Don says hi Dale excellent presentation the other day there was a discussion of institutional approaches to library IT that were hinged to Sange's idea of the learning organization did you by chance by chance attend that presentation and if so how would you relate Yale's guidance approach to the idea of a learning organization if you didn't no worries but there seem to be some interesting parallels and contrasts indeed there there are there are um I was really excited to see I think there were two presentations that I immediately picked up on that were based on the fifth discipline on Sange that's been a book that's been in my quiver for a long time and that idea of building a learning organization is something that I've been focused on throughout certainly my the last 14 or 15 years that I've been in libraries is how do we continue to build on that yes I did see the presentation and the parallels are definitely there and what I'm also very focused on is taking those concepts and that transparency right learning organization mean one of the elements is that you can learn from your peers and one of the tools that I'm trying to to pull out is is instead of having a walled garden where the contents of the advisory groups are locked off and only visible to the advisory group is actually turning that around and having them default to openness so making sure that this was available and searchable by the entire organization rather than just themselves so really focusing on that so yes I really appreciated those two presentations that focused on that side of it and the learning organization and certainly have been using those concepts as I move forward and again trying to move that outside of what library it the rest of the organizations very helpful says Don thanks so much and yes please feel calm to contact me if you want to talk about it more in depth yeah and and I also just wanted to point out that those that the video of that session is online now so folks want to check that out there definitely are a lot of similarities and pair places to to compare there so thank you for that we still have time for questions so please feel free to type your questions or comments I'd also like to invite anyone who'd like to make a live comment or ask a question live if you can raise your hand your virtual hand and I can unmute you again it would be really interesting to hear any other experiences that folks may have trying to implement a similar project like this one or if you're if you're considering doing something similar with your organization we'd really really love to hear about it now and while yes please go ahead I was gonna say one of the the things that I think might be it's a little bit difficult when I talk about the scale of Yale's libraries I came from two smaller institutions so I dealt with these issues there as well and to say that you would have to build out what I what we're doing at Yale with the IT steering committee and the advisory groups and the working groups in a smaller organization I think you can probably identify service domains uh and then figure out a logical grouping and work in smaller groups and still wind up with a similar result as far as aligning IT activities and making sure that IT activities are focused on the most important thing so that's something that as I've gone through this process of really trying to focus on is okay yeah we're doing this at that scale and you can see all these groups and a lot of people might be thinking that oh well we're just too small for that and I would say they're I think past definitely that you can take some of these ideas and apply them to a smaller organization yeah that's a good point Dale thanks for bringing that to to our attention there are so many ways to adapt these strategies in so many different situations I just wanted to point out that I've shared in the chat box the direct link to the video of the session that was presented just recently advancing the learning organization reframing IT projects as a catalyst for change that Don Waters referenced in his question there it's a great presentation I would encourage everyone to watch that if they have the time yeah it was very very interesting I was also curious to know Dale if I might continue with my own questions here but please anyone who has questions we really would love to hear from you so I think if I understood correctly and please forgive me if I got this wrong that part of the impetus for making this reorganization had to do with sort of a crisis moment in the organization I think you know you commented about the death march that ultimately led to the departure of several staff you know I mean that's a very traumatic situation for an organization and in some ways maybe could be seen as opening up an opportunity for a change like this but in other ways may lead to even more resistance from staff feeling like oh gosh just one more thing to think about can you speak to that experience and how it impacted this reorg sure um yeah that's the in my book I call that oh yet not another thing right we've been doing on this we've got all this stuff and now all of a sudden this is coming on yeah yet another thing uh I'll say that as I mentioned earlier I was very cognizant of that people had a lot to do and they were doing very important work and I really did focus on giving people time to move into the new roles so when I first arrived I said well year one we're gonna look at the organization what we do and how we work year two we're going to organize ourselves in a different way that supports future work and then year three we might actually be prepared to start to engage in that work as we've gone through that transition period so as people moved into new roles I was very careful not to say to someone don't do that you'd be like okay is there a way that we can hand this off or we're moving in a different direction here without having to go back and and really be directive to folks about this new direction I was fortunate that we were in a place where we were open to that I was new that there's always an advantage in that there was a degree of skepticism about oh what is this going to look like how is it going to do and I think we've been successful in that um it definitely would have been a challenge if there was entrenched uh agendas that that were unwilling to move and that might have altered the plan and the approach for sure you know you do have to adjust to the environment and meet people where they are in order to start to initiate a change effort um but I have to say the group of people that I have are great um and through surveys and checking with my own staff the degree of satisfaction about their work and how we're working now is multitudes higher than it was when I first arrived so seems to be working I know I don't necessarily had a great answer as far as what would have happened on the other side we're just saying that seems to be working for us yeah yeah sure no it's of course that it's hard to know no crystal balls but um but yeah it's interesting to look at it from that perspective well thank you very much and and thank you so much Dale for uh sharing this with us at CNI uh it's really very instructive very interesting and we appreciate your coming here just invite any attendees who are um with us who might like to have a chat with Dale to please hang around um you can raise your hand and I'll be happy to unmute you just have an exchange of um yeah so thank you so much everyone for being with us here and we're really glad that you made time to attend the CNI session at our virtual spring meeting before the meeting comes to a close tomorrow be well and we hope to see you soon take care bye bye everyone