Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else; New York Times, 2/13/16

Quentin Hardy, New York Times; Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else:

"To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.

“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”...

By 2020, Mr. Stephenson hopes AT&T will be well into its transformation into a computing company that manages all sorts of digital things: phones, satellite television and huge volumes of data, all sorted through software managed in the cloud.

That can’t happen unless at least some of his work force is retrained to deal with the technology. It’s not a young group: The average tenure at AT&T is 12 years, or 22 years if you don’t count the people working in call centers. And many employees don’t have experience writing open-source software or casually analyzing terabytes of customer data."

Departing Pitt library director ‘‍finessed’ the system into 21st century; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/26/14

Stephanie McFeeters, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Departing Pitt library director ‘‍finessed’ the system into 21st century:

"Mr. Miller believes these transformations have been largely positive. As director of Pitt’s libraries, he was always ahead of the curve and excited about modernization, planning in a way that involved the entire staff, his colleagues said.

When Mr. Miller arrived at Pitt in 1994, he judged the libraries to be disorganized and overcrowded. He set out to restructure the system and make it more efficient, closing half a dozen libraries, shipping books to a new storage facility and re-engineering back-room operations.

Tim Deliyannides, the university’s head of information technology, said Mr. Miller was forward-thinking and quickly shifted the library’s focus.

“From the very first time he came to Pitt, he had the vision and foresight that the role of the library would be completely redefined by information technology,” Mr. Deliyannides said. “He’s very bold in committing to a new activity and re-allocating resources, and sometimes that means we stop doing things we have always done because we’re moving in a new direction.”"