June 2002 Memo

Dear Colleague:

Thank you for meeting with us and helping us to understand how we and our colleagues in C&C can work more effectively with, and in support of, you and your school, college, or campus. Over the last four months we have met with each UW dean. Through our discussions, we have heard that while C&C is doing a good job of building a high-quality technology environment for the university, we need to communicate better, listen better, and involve you more. We are committed to making this happen.

Meeting with you was our attempt at a first step. We recognize that we have much more work to do. As we proceed, we will need your advice on how best to meet these objectives and how to build the type of two-way communication that will make us all more effective in achieving our goals in support of the university. In addition, we will need a real partnership with you to succeed.

One common theme that arose during our talks was the need for C&C to inform you of directions C&C is considering, projects underway, and recent accomplishments. This is the first in a series of email updates we are initiating as one way to address this need. We will continue to send these updates, if they are useful to you. The following update is long and repeats information that we discussed with some deans, but we wanted to get everyone up-to-date. In the future, we expect these updates will be shorter. Please let us know if these updates are valuable and how we can make them more so.

We are sending this first update to everyone with whom we met. We are thinking that future updates should be sent to deans, administrators, and computing directors. Please let us know if these should go to additional people. This information also is available on the Web at http://www.washington.edu/uwtech/updates/

Thank you again for your time and valuable comments over the past few months. Ron, we, and our colleagues look forward to working with you on finding ways to serve you more effectively.

Ed Lightfoot, Sandy Moy, and Cindy Brown
UW Computing & Communications

Note: You will also be receiving a paper copy of this update. Please let us know how you prefer to receive future updates (e.g., by email only, email with Web links, paper only, etc.). We want to communicate in the way that is most convenient for you.