The Technology Committee met on October 3. The minutes are not available yet, but the SCLS Technology Team report is available. There was lots of information shared at this meeting. The notes are a report of the projects that the Tech Team has been working on this year. As I reflect on the information that was shared at this meeting, it seems that what we do falls into three categories which I am calling: Cruising, Crunch and Crisis (I like alliteration).
Cruising
Each year SCLS puts together a technology plan to map out the projects we will be working on. Much of the work we do falls under the "cruising" category. We are cruising along, making progress and getting things done. The bulk of the October Technology Team report reflects these planned projects. Each of these projects usually requires lots of investigation, planning, setup and testing long before it reaches the libraries.
Crunch
Every once in a while we need to adjust our workflow to incorporate something that was not necessarily part of our plan, but which will have a definite impact by a certain date. At the meeting it was shared that on September, 14 Google has announced the end of support for IE 8 effective November 15, 2012. This puts us into a "crunch" situation. SCLS needs to update a lot of PCs in a short period of time. What this will means is that we will go through a testing phase, but in order to get this work done, SCLS will need to put together a rigorous schedule to visit every library in the very near future. SCLS will need to set the schedule based on a variety of factors and we hope that libraries understand there will not be a lot of flexibility within this schedule. There will be a full report and plan for this project in next week's Tech News post. The "crunch" project is not a desirable situation of course, but it is inevitable and we do our best to adapt as the situation arises.
Crisis
The implosion of the Sophos antivirus software which occurred on September 19 is a prime example of a crisis situation. No one could have predicted this. In the end, it involved a rapid deployment of the whole investigation, planning, setup and testing process. It meant that many Tech Team members had to drop what they were doing in order to provide a solution. Many PCs were fixed within a week and the ones that failed are just now getting fixed. We cannot predict when this type of situation will occur, but once again the Tech Team is agile enough to jump in and get the job done. The down side to a crisis situation is that all of the work we had planned to do in this timeframe gets pushed aside. This means the "cruising" project timelines become delayed.
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