Hi gang. I hope everyone has had a great summer full of successful projects and you have stock rooms full of your favorite and essential equipment. Well…I at least hope you have had a summer full of successful projects because until you live on somewhere else in the multiverse, odds are you don’t have a stock room full of equipment. The supply chain nightmare in which we find ourselves shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon and the impacts are starting to cascade. Advanced planning is great, but when your primary manufacturer moves from ship dates to ship quarters, alarm bells should start going off. As you know in higher ed, we must thread the needle on our install windows. If one thing gets pushed, then we run into an ever-evolving scheduling nightmare. I speak from firsthand experience of this situation from last summer, and it took until Winter Break to get it all sorted. So, what to do if you have standards, but cannot get product to support those standards? You check your priorities and make it work.
Our faculty and students don’t care what widgets and whatsits we install. If they can achieve their goals and objectives in learning and research, it doesn’t matter to them what the hardware is. If it works, and it is stable, then it is mission accomplished. It is up to us to make sure that we are flexible enough to know what they need and how to make it happen. Adhering to our campus standards is great and when times are normal this is an easy process. But when we hear that we cannot get what we need for 9-12+ months, alternative plans need to be considered. I cannot hold up projects and installations for that long without negative impacts to my faculty and students, and they are my number 1 priority, not a manufacturer. This brings me to my central point, standards are great, but don’t handcuff yourself to them. My standard is not based around a piece of hardware or platform. My standard is ensuring that my faculty and students have a fantastic experience in the classroom and the technology that is deployed helps teaching and learning. We should continue to advocate for greater interoperability among manufacturers, but I am finding more and more that it is already there. I just had to look harder for it. Well, enough of my rambling…I hope everyone has a great start to the Fall semester.