It is an odd thing being the first Chief Technology Officer for Harvard University. There is no history of what the job entails. There is no precedent. I am, quite frankly, making things up as I go along (with the help and advice of others, of course).<\/p>\n
But that is part of the attraction of the job. I’ve been a software developer most of my life, and I have always enjoyed the activity of building things. Now I have a chance to build something that (among other things) builds software. Raising the activity up a meta-level means thinking about things differently, and trying things that I’ve not done before.<\/p>\n
Now is an exciting time to be in information technology at Harvard. There are a lot of folks who understand that technology is key to the way the university will work moving forward, and are willing to try new things. While there is always some resistance to change (especially at an institution that has been so successful in the past), I believe that there is a real chance of doing some transformative things as CTO.<\/p>\n
The purpose of this blog is to communicate what I am doing, and to hear from readers if they think that this is the right set of things to do. I’m hoping that this (along with some other things that I’m trying out) will become a mechanism for two-way communication on the changes that we will be undertaking. I remember once being told that people like change, but resist being changed, so it is important to bring them in to the discussion of what is going to change and how the change is going to happen. I’ll try to be as transparent as I can in writing this, and hope that any readers are honest with me about their own thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is an odd thing being the first Chief Technology Officer for Harvard University. There is no history of what the job entails. There is no precedent. I am, quite frankly, making things up as I go along (with the help and advice of others, of course). But that is part of the attraction of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3814,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3814"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/4"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/waldo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}