CIO Workshop

On March 2 and 3, with assistance from the workshop grant from NWACC, NW-HEAT, a consortium of smaller higher educational institutions in the Pacific Northwest, held a CIO workshop in Tacoma, Washington. The workshop, coordinated by Keiko Pitter from Whitman College and Raney Ellis from University of Puget Sound, was attended by 22 chief information officers and directors from 17 institutions. Presentations included "Staff Retention and Recruitment: Looking Past the Obvious" by Bret Ingerman, Asst Vice President for Information Technology at Lewis & Clark College, "IT and the Institutional Vision: Tools for Assessment, Performance Measurement, and Strategic Alignment in Higher Education" by Mark Nelson from The Hunter Group, and "Virtual Campus Communitiesºa Potential Role for Portals" by Mike Looney, President of GoCampus, Inc.

Aside from these educational and insightful presentations, much discussion took place to identify shared problems and ways to develop collaborative relationships in which institutions can combine resources to meet their individual goals. The following are some of the derived action plans:

1. Compile a "best practices" list
2. Conduct a joint workshop to develop a "Balanced Scorecard" for Help Desk and Faculty Support.
3. Conduct a more detailed workshop on "wireless network" as a follow-up to the pre-conference workshop at NWACC 2000.

In addition, the group reconfirmed the value and the need to continue two forms of NW-HEAT meetings: one for the front-line staff (the next meeting will be hosted by John Balling from Willamette University in fall 2000) and annual meetings of the CIO group (the next meeting will be coordinated by Linda Mantel from University of Portland in spring 2000).