April 10, 2012 at 11am EDT via Google+ Hangout.
Attendees: Chris Eagle, Jim Phelps, Todd Piket, Jesse Safran.
- Set up Google Hangout. It took about 15 minutes for everyone to get connected.
- Introductions. All introduced themselves. This is Jesse's first New2HE call. He works for Green Mountain College, a small (<1000 students) college in Vermont. He mentioned the have a very limited IT budget and are also remote, so their services are more limited. The other people on the call are from large institutions and Jesse was able to give a different perspective to several discussions during the call.
- Discussion. The discussion this month was around resistance to change, and in particular, passive resistance (just waiting for the initiative causing change to go away).
- Chris gave an example of people nodding their heads but not really embracing change.
- All commented on how cultures are hard to change; that HE requires more political capital than private industry, and that just showing justification (money savings and/or productivity gain) isn't sufficient.
- Some techniques to engage people were discussed including: shareholding mapping, "fast or right?" (users choose right when explicitly made to choose), using examples of past successes, and patience (change usually is somewhat slower in HE).
- We did not cover the question in item 4. These will be covered at a future meeting.
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