At Harvey Mudd we're getting into an IT planning phase. The College has not had a comprehensive IT plan for some time, so creating one was high on my agenda when I came here. We have a very good start in an IT Review that Joel Smith and Ted Dodds wrote in 2007.

In my first few months, I met with a lot of people to try to get a sense of what they saw as important for IT @ HMC, how CIS (the central computing entity) could improve services, and what they hoped to have in the future. I learned a lot.

We've now launched a website to help support the IT planning process. CIS staff helped me get this up. I'm trying an experiment with Comment Press from the Institute for the Future of the Book. It is a WordPress theme that allows people to comment on a text paragraph by paragraph, so I'm hoping that it will be useful tool for the HMC community to discuss the IT Review. I hope to do the same thing with drafts of the IT Plan, once we've got some written.

I also found this very nice idea for creating a timeline, written by Bryan Croxall while he was a Woodruff Library Graduate Fellow in Emory's Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT). It combines Google spreadsheets and MIT's Simile Timeline tool very nicely. I used it to create a timeline for the IT planning process, but it would be great for lots of different purposes. Once built, I can change the Google Docs spreadsheet and the timeline page reflects the changes within five minutes.