Greg and Kat's blog

I know that a blog post with the title “Life Plan #3” should be preceded by life plans numbered 1 and 2. The thing is: life plans one and two have some actual realistic possibility of happening, so they aren’t as fun.

SFU’s CIO (Chief Information Officer) just quit. Or he “quit”. The rumours aren’t really clear. In any event, he don’t work here any more.

The CIO is basically an Associate VP Academic by another name. The position is responsible for the campus network infrastructure (including wireless), phones, computer store, email, WebCT, and a bunch of other stuff. Wait… there’s something else in there that’s important… what was it again… oh yeah!

The CIO is responsible for our information. The last guy was responsible for the purchase and subsequent support of PeopleSoft/SIMS/goSFU. You know: the millions-annually albatross around the University’s neck? Go ahead and read the “Peoplesoft in use” section on Wikipedia; I’ll wait. We bought in several years after those very public experiences. I have mentioned the SIMS project here before.

Amanda and a few others have opined that I should apply for the job. They forget two things: (1) I’m not qualified and (2) I don’t want to. I’m not qualified because one would need a hell of a lot more experience with managing both employees (I’d guess the headcount is easily >100) and budget (>$10M) than I have. Also, I’m pretty sure being an undergrad director isn’t sufficient qualification for being an associate VP.

The reasons I don’t want to do it are many. The biggest one is the most obvious: PeopleSoft. The only way to get away from PeopleSoft is to spend some money on another solution. There’s no money to do anything else because PeopleSoft costs so damned much. The person who gets the job is doomed to either spend even more money (in a time of cuts), or be the guy that keeps the shitty solution to the University’s biggest IT problem.

But (because Amanda knows me that well) I have been thinking about it. I’m the kind of guy that looks at the “Careers” section in the newspaper and thinks “CEO of a sporting goods company… yeah, I could do that. Maybe I should apply.”

If I had the job, I’d stop all development on SIMS and skim a quarter of the SIMS budget off for internal development of a replacement. The replacement would have to happen piecemeal, which would require a very clever architecture that could interface with the existing database. If other Universities in BC were willing to team up, it would make sense to join forces since our business practices are mostly similar and we could share most of the code.

Also, there’d be some modernization of the core campus IT infrastructure. Things like virtual machines and AFS would allow real-time replication of essential services across campuses, and leave us much less vulnerable to catastrophic system failures.

In summary: if they don’t hire in the first round and open up applications a second time, I’m going for it.