Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

Photo courtesy of Scottishgames.net

I’m not sure if it is physically possible, but I feel like I have been in adrenalin or some kind of a rush the last few weeks. My mind is just racing with ideas and I just have not had the need to sleep. Some of my colleagues wonder how I am able to function with 2-3 hours of sleep a night and work all night. It’s hard to explain, but while I do “work” until early hours in the morning, it’s not really work, it’s just fun. Maybe I have some sort of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of wanting to learn as much as I can, but with social media, one link leads to another and before I know it, I’ve spent all night learning some idea I just stumbled upon on twitter.

Work/life balance is a concept that comes up from to time within student affairs professionals and to me, this balance, for me personally, has nothing to do with the amount of time I spend “working” and with my personal life. For me, it’s more psychological/mental. I can spend all night “working” or have 60+ hour work week but when I find what I’m “working” on really enjoyable, then it’s not really work.

I consider myself very lucky and blessed that I have a job that I truly enjoy and I have a team I enjoy working with. I love learning and being presented with challenges, both of which my job offers me. Everyday is a learning experience and while I certainly do experience some momentary frustrations when challenges are presented to me, the thrill of being able to move projects going, get folks working together certainly more than make up for the frustrations.

Who knows what future holds for me but I’m just having a fun time right now and I am not taking this for granted.

Fear does not paralyze me but it does provide me with that extra motivation to take action, to spend more time learning,  to improve myself.

Job security is something I don’t believe in anymore given the volatility of the economy. I have this fear that I will be the first person to be laid off at my organization when the budget gets worse or when the university starts consolidating technology units.  I’m not the most technically adept one amongst my co-workers, I don’t hold advanced technical and/or management degrees. I’m at the level of middle management. These are all factors that make me feel uncomfortable. But what I’ve learned a long time ago is that there’s a few people that can outwork me. The only person I know who can is my father who worked three jobs or four jobs at a time in his lifetime.  I may not be the smartest but I will work, learn 20 hours a day if I have to, just to keep up.  At the end of the day, there’s no one that will look out for me but myself. I’ve learned from experience that talks reassuring me about my place in the organization are just talks. I’ve learned to trust only few individuals who will actually look out for me.

I have this fear that I will be left behind when it comes to technology. The speed at which consumer-led innovations like social media, mobile and cloud is quite fast and I don’t want to be left behind, especially in my position in the technology field. It is this fear that I learned to accept the inevitability of having to work in a world where I will not be able to keep up with the new gadgets, new ideas but instead of resisting it, I will just have to keep up as much as I can and maybe stay ahead of the curve if that’s even possible.

I’m actually a very positive person and I hope for the best, and I can make something out of any situation.  Fear does give me that extra kick from time to time to get me to the next level.

I have a great boss who I have a lot of respect for and one I really work very well with. He has  a track record for getting things done, he is very supportive of his staff including me and he is a very hard worker.  We also have different communication and leadership styles. In general, I interpret his style as more direct and task oriented. My style is more relationship oriented and more participatory/facilitator.  I am not really quite sure why our styles are so different. It could be just  our personalities or maybe  because of our cultural backgrounds.

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Two weekends ago, I went to the driving range and I was hitting the balls pretty well. Then I decided to get contact lenses the following Monday because I wanted to start playing sports again since my eyeglasses had became too cumbersome. Last Sunday, with my new contact lenses, I went to the driving range and all of a sudden, I could not hit any shots at all. My swing just didn’t feel right. As I would set up and look at the ground, something felt different. The clubs look different and it seems my depth perception has changed. It took me awhile to figure out what has changed until I realized it was my contact lenses that was the difference.

As I took a break from hitting balls, it dawned on me that this concept of changing my lenses at work led to changing my perspective. I don’t mean lenses as in getting new eye glasses or contact lenses. What I mean is more of a mental lens. Before my wife went for a vacation to Seattle the beginning of September, I was getting a little frustrated trying to figure out how to promote the use of social media and cloud. Because of security and policy concerns, there were (still are) hesitation on the use of these technologies as business tools. Taking the vacation provided me some time to clear my mind and put on a new set of mental lenses which allowed me to look at the situation a little differently. I came back with the perspective that while the adoption of these technologies might be slower than I would like, I understand that it is a process that requires examining constraints and having to accept that our organizational culture and personalities will ultimately dictate the pace of adoption. I also came to realize that I can continue exploring the benefits of social media and cloud on my personal time knowing full well that the knowledge I acquire now will be of value to my organization at the time we are ready to come to terms with the risks/rewards of these technologies.

School year just started and I am excited, really excited and optimistic about the prospect of what my team and my organization can accomplish this year. We’re going through perhaps the biggest project our department has ever undertaken, the conversion of our mainframe-based student information system to .net environment.  This project is in addition to multiple enterprise projects throughout the entire Student Affairs division. With the decreasing budget and changing demands and expectations of our customers, technology have become more central to the operations of the departments. Personally for me, I am excited with the challenge and opportunities of  merging consumer technologies (social media, cloud computing, mobile) with enterprise IT. I think the last time I saw this much shift at work is back in the mid-1990’s with the advent of the web.  There were paranoia about security, employees wasting time on the web, or if web was of even any value to  our organization. But just as I am seeing the same fears and concerns, I also see the same curiosity,  grassroots adoptions and even some level of  formal institutional adoptions of these  consumer technologies. The reality is that the demographics of those we serve in student affairs have changed and along with these changes are the expectations of more agile, more open systems.The students we serve are far different from those in the 1990’s. Our students grew up with technologies that we did not even envision back then. The rise of social media as we know it now, arguably, could be traced back to when friendster came to existence in 2002.  The creation of facebook in 2004 and twitter in 2006 further changed the social media landscape. With the increased and more robust wireless infrastructure and cheaper mobile devices, the way our society communicate is far different.

I wrote a blog post a few months ago that for social media to thrive in our institution, it has to be formally adopted.  Since then, our organization has created a formal position to coordinate divisional efforts to advance the adoption of consumer technologies.  Just as I had suggested in the same blog post, our organization has created a productivity/security group composed of individuals representing different perspectives to properly assess the integration of these technologies for business use and to address the challenges of accommodating the needs of individual users for flexibility with the needs of the enterprise.

In addition to social media, my team has begun to explore and develop mobile web sites. Using the UCLA Mobile Framework, we are exploring how we can use it within our existing content management system. Personally, I have learned a lot the last few months on the principles of mobile web development.  I truly believe mobile devices has begun and will continue to significantly alter how universities do business.  By taking advantage of the features of mobile devices such as geolocation, multiple inputs (QR Codes, NFR, location, gestures) and the fact that they are widely available even in the poorest sections of the world, in my opinion, more and more business transactions will be conducted via mobile devices.

Just as it was in the mid 1990’s for me when I woke up with a book about web development in my hand and go to sleep with it, going to sleep at 4 am, spending every night learning about how to develop web applications, I find myself in the same situation now. I wake up every morning to find some new knowledge via social media, new ideas I want to research, new applications I want to build. I go to sleep with ideas in my mind on what technologies mean to me, to my work.  It truly is an exciting time and I’m just enjoying the ride!