With this in mind, Humanities Academic Computing was presented with yet another line management change. In the regular game of Deputy Dean Draughts - which sometimes more closely approximates Lightning Chess - portfolio switches led to the current Deputy Dean:IT becoming the outgoing one, and one of the others becoming the incoming one, with much nodding and hand-shaking and secret sympathies exchanged all round.
The incoming Deputy Dean:IT has an advantage over previous incumbents, however: He is at least familiar with the area, having served on HUMANITEC since its inception, and is thus not faced with the same steep learning curve routinely served with acquisition of this portfolio. We're not booking him into Kenilworth Clinic just yet, as a result.
But it does rather prompt the question: what wears incumbents out so fast? The frequency with which I seem to change line managers is starting to approach the ferquency with which I change lovers, and that is truly alarming. At an average of one a year since the Faculty's inception, tenure in this position does seem disproportionate to the longevity of, say, the outgoing Deputy Dean of Finance (held by a single person since 1999) or the paltry couple of incumbents handling space, or staffing, during that period.
Perhaps a clue is to be found in the rapid rate of change within the area itself. In 1999, large numbers of staff were still without even a working PC on their desks. The erstwhile Social Science, and Arts, Faculties had decent computer labs at undergraduate (shared between the two) and post-graduate level, while Education had an ageing one, Hiddingh Campus was blessed with a cursory one and Music had a small handful of Bondwells running a DOS application with difficulty. Arts had a single staff member running the Language Lab, and Social Science had three staff members with various roles. Integration of ICTs into the curriculum varied from exciting things happening in Psych II to outright hostility in other departments.
Since then we've come a long way. Via a detour through the Valley of Outsourcing, the Humanities Academic Computing team has grown to five official members, dotted-line relationships to a number of others located within departments in the Facullty, and an area of operation stretching over several campuses, a rich and changing canvas of disciplines and has acquired a respectable budget now comfortably measured in millions rather than tens of thousands, with a brief that has morphed from operational to strategic.
The plodding plan-implement-monitor-review linear approach has dissolved in a flurry of constant change and growth, with the team rising to new challenges moment by moment and information ageing and becoming redundant almost as soon as it is passed on. And while we, as Humanities Academic Computing, perch on the exciting interface of technology with teaching and research, for those who opted for the quiet, considered life of an academic, it can all be a bit much.