Fresh eyes are important: they see differently, uncover issues, broaden perspective, clarify thinking, suggest alternatives. This is why cross-cutting teams are so important to successful IT management and innovation. It’s also one reason to use consultants. But not the only one.

By “consultants” I don’t mean outsiders who are contracted to operate a service, implement a system, or otherwise do regular IT work; those I think of as “contractors”. (The language is imperfect, to be sure: those we contract with to do regular IT work often call themselves consultants, and those I think of as consultants often work technically as contractors. But this distinction between “consultant” and “contractor” seems reasonably clear, so I’ll stick with it.)

Purposes

In my experience, in or around higher-education IT we use consultants  for several purposes. It’s important not to confuse them, because arguably different purposes call for different kinds of consultants and engagements. I suggest there are at least five distinct categories: Implementation, Advice, Evaluation, Scrutiny, and Leadership.

Implementation. Consultants can play roles at various points as projects or services are conceived, developed, and implemented. They can assist with design, either of entire projects or of key elements: for example, if a campus is implementing a new parking system that authenticates electronic parking cards, collects parking fees, and interconnects its kiosks and gateways over the campus network, a consultant might help design the entire system, or might focus on a particularly vexing component such as ensuring that the system’s network use is PCI compliant (that is, encrypts credit-card information appropriately). Or they can critique how campus staff have designed an entire system or any of its components. They can help IT staff and their campus partners identify appropriate vendors, screen them, and make a good choice. Finally, they can provide oversight as a project goes forward or a service is implemented.

Advice. In this domain consultants bring expertise and experience to bear on various dimensions of campus IT, its organization, or the challenges it faces. I include hiring advice in this category, including both general guidance as to how positions should be specified and filled and more specific guidance such as that provided by search consultants. The category includes advice on how to organize IT, on how to describe and advocate its financing, or on other structural matters. And it also includes advice on campus IT policy, including both exogenously-driven policies ensuring campus compliance with federal and state law and endogenously-driven policies ensuring, for example, that IT is treated consistently with other campus resources insofar as acceptable use, disciplinary processes, and penalties are concerned.

Evaluation. Consultants can help IT organizations evaluate various dimensions of their activity internally (evaluation of IT organizations, staff, or function by outsiders is the next category, Scrutiny). Consultants can appraise the overall catalog of IT services and functions, or they can appraise individual services. Consultants can evaluate specific individuals, or the overall entity’s organization or effectiveness. Finally, consultants can provide benchmarks for IT staffing, spending, or service levels.

Scrutiny. As my friend and colleague Brian Voss has written with some passion, senior campus leaders often don’t understand IT. (I’ve written a followup to his piece.) Yet they know it’s important, and that it consumes substantial campus resources, and so sometimes seek external help to evaluate campus IT, usually from consultants. These engagements generally start with analysis of how campus IT functions, including the array, effectiveness, and cost of IT services. They usually go on to examine the organization of IT on campus, and especially the balance among central, departmental, and other IT providers. And quite frequently the engagement ends up focusing on IT leadership, specifically whether the CIO (whatever his or her title) is well aligned with what the campus needs.

Leadership. Finally, and importantly if rarely, consultants sometimes provide leadership for campus IT. This can take three overlapping forms: consultants can outsource leadership through long-term arrangements, such as Collegis does for many campuses; they can provide temporary leadership while a campus searches for a permanent candidate, as the aforementioned Voss did for Case Western Reserve; or they can provide supplementary leadership for a CIO who has become overloaded, undertaken a temporary assignment elsewhere on campus,  faces an unexpected set of challenges, or otherwise needs extra hands, heads, and help to get through a taxing time, transition, or project.

Types

As I suggested above, different uses of consultants call for different types of consultants. Here again there are usefully distinct categories to think about:

• Firms that market an extensive array of consulting, implementation, and other services across general markets, such as majors like Accenture, PwC Consulting, McKinsey, and Bain.
• Firms that offer similarly extensive services but focus on higher education, such as Collegis and Moran.
• Firms that focus in a limited area, such as Bruns-Pak for data-center design or Kroll for security, across general markets.
• Firms that focus on a limited area and on higher education, such as Unicon for Web portals on campuses.
• Individuals who consult freelance, usually with limited focus, in higher education–often retired CIOs.
• Individuals working  in limited areas for general markets or in higher education through formal or informal consulting groups.

An early (if unsuccessful) example of that last in higher education was the Educom Consulting Group.  A current general-market example (promo alert!) is Fortium Partners, which consists largely of consultants with years of experience as CIOs in diverse industries, like me in higher education. More on that below.

The classification works better as a table than a list:

I’ve seen the campus-consultant relationship personally from at least three perspectives. First, I (or more precisely my IT organization) was a frequent consumer of consultant services, mostly of the General/Limited type for the Implementation purpose. Second, on many occasions I served as a consultant to other campuses, of the Limited/Higher Education type (as a peer) usually for the Advice or Evaluation purposes. Third, at various points my IT organizations were the focus for consultant engagements of the General/Extensive type (McKinsey, PwC, CSC) for the Scrutiny purpose.

So What?

Looking across this landscape, it seems to me that some campus consulting needs are reasonably well served, and some aren’t.

Implementation. This purpose seems reasonably well served, with examples from all four consultant categories. I think this is because campuses are especially likely to seek implementation advice in areas where campuses resemble other entities (for example, parking systems), in which case general consultants can be helpful, or where they resemble other campuses (for example, instructional systems), in which case they prefer higher-education consultants. In either case consultants’ expertise tends to align well with campus circumstances.

Advice. This purpose is a bit less well served. Where campuses resemble other entities or other campuses consultants can be effective. But when advice is needed with regard to policy, or with regard to processes or problems that are more peculiar to higher education, advice from consultants unfamiliar with higher education can be problematic–for example, around security or procurement, where consultants often assume campuses have greater central control over their community and resources than is the case.

Evaluation. The situation here is similar to that for Advice. When the focus of evaluation is generic (that is, has no peculiarly higher-education attributes) and/or the consultant understands a campus’s circumstances outcomes can be good. Otherwise their usefulness can be constrained.

Scrutiny. Most campuses undertake Scrutiny without engaging consultants, relying on administrators and faculty outside the IT organization. This tends to highlight problems and to underrepresent success, since IT tends to be invisible when it’s successful. When campuses seek external help, sometimes they rely on CIOs from other campuses. More typically, they engage General/Extensive firms, use trustee visiting committees, or rely on IT members of accrediting teams. The first two rarely yield useful information, since the firms and committees often do not understand the campus context in which IT operates. This is the same problem that arises when generic outsiders provide Advice or Evaluation. Scrutiny by IT-savvy members of accreditation teams is much the same as relying on CIOs from other campuses ad hoc, and it can produce useful feedback.

Leadership. Campuses can find themselves shorthanded at the CIO level at least four different ways. A CIO may leave abruptly, and so the campus needs interim leadership until he or she is replaced. Similarly, a CIO may be temporarily assigned to other duties on or off campus, yielding a similar need for temporary leadership. A CIO may be temporarily swamped, for example by having to handle a major security breach, a system failure, or a major project. Or a CIO may face problems which he or she is ill equipped to handle, and so require senior-level help. The General/Higher Education firms I mentioned above both provide consulting in this domain, and sometimes campuses draw on particular individuals such as CIOs who have recently retired elsewhere. But overall it’s rare for campuses to use consultants for Leadership purposes, preferring instead to rely on temporary internal promotions or reassignments.

The lacunae I see are three: it appears hard for campuses to find consulting to provide Advice and Evaluation for campus IT overall, to provide productive Scrutiny of IT organization and resources, and to address temporary Leadership needs.

The Personal Note

People like me can fill some of these lacunae. I’ve done that freelance for years, as have many CIO peers from other campuses, often after “retiring”. Most of my own consulting has served Advice, Evaluation, and Scrutiny purposes.

But it’s hard for senior campus leaders to find people like me. And it’s hard for people like me to organize ourselves, especially in collaboration with complementary peers, to ensure that we stay in touch with current IT and campus thinking, that we market ourselves effectively, and that we draw on additional resources and colleagues as necessary. The Educom Consulting Group attempted to do this, but was unable to sustain itself. Collegis, Moran, and other firms that operate within higher-education IT have been more successful, but much of their success has been with smaller institutions. The lacuna remains.

And so to Fortium Partners, which I was recently invited and agreed to join as a partner. Fortium describes itself as “…an IT turnaround and technology services firm providing world-class IT leadership to clients focused on finding solutions to complex IT infrastructure issues or difficult-to–solve operational challenges.” Fortium Partners is modeled on Tatum Partners, a CFO-focused enterprise. In effect, it’s a co-op comprising people like me, except not just from higher education. I hope for two outcomes from this new venture: Interesting projects for me to work on, including some that take me into new domains, and a new resource for those work within and oversee IT on college and university campuses.

If, having read this, you’re thinking “hey, maybe Greg could be helpful,” drop me a line: greg.jackson@fortiumpartners.com

It’s 2006, and we’re at Duke, for a meeting of the Common Solutions Group.

On the formal agenda, Paul Courant seeks to resurrect an old idea of Ira Fuch‘s, for a collective higher-education IT development-and-procurement entity provisionally called Educore.

On the informal agenda, a bunch of us work behind the scenes trying to persuade two existing higher-education IT entities–Internet2 and National LambdaRail–that they would better serve their constituencies, which overlap but do not coincide, by consolidating into a single organization.

The merged organization would both lease capacity with some restrictions (the I2 model) and “own” it free and clear (the NLR model, the quotes because in many cases NLR owns 20-year “rights to use”–RTUs–rather than actual infrastructure.) The merged organization would find appropriate ways to serve the sometimes divergent interests of IT managers and IT researchers in higher education.

Most everyone appears to agree that having two competing national networking organizations for higher education wastes scarce resources and constrains progress. But both NLR and Internet2 want to run the consolidated entity. Also, there are some personalities involved. Our work behind the scenes is mostly shuttle diplomacy involving successively more complex drafts of charter and bylaws for a merged networking entity.

Throughout the process I have a vague feeling of déjà vu.

Partly I’m wistfully remembering the long and somewhat similar courtship between CAUSE and Educom, which eventually yielded today’s merged EDUCAUSE. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to achieve something similar for national higher-education networking.

And partly I’m remembering a counterexample, the demise of the American Association for Higher Education, which for years held its annual meeting at the Hilton adjacent to Grant Park in Chicago (almost always overlapping my birthday, for some reason). AAHE was an umbrella organization aimed comprehensively at leaders and middle managers throughout higher education, rather than at specific subgroups such as registrars, CFOs, admissions directors, housing managers, CIOs, and so forth. It also attracted higher-education researchers, which is how I started attending, since that’s what I was.

AAHE collapsed, many think, because of the broad middle-management organization’s gradual splintering into a panoply of “caucuses” that eventually went their own ways, and to a certain extent its leaders aligning AAHE with too many faddish bandwagons. (To this day I wince when I hear the otherwise laudable word “assessment”.) It was also affected by the growing importance of discipline-specific organizations such as NACUBO, AACRAO, and NASPA–not to mention Educom and CAUSE–and it always vied for leadership attention with the so-called “presidential” organizations such as ACE, AAU, APLU, NAICU, and ACC.

Together the split into caucuses and over-trendiness left AAHE with no viable general constituency or finances to continue its annual meetings, its support for Change magazine, or its other crosscutting efforts. AAHE shut down in 2005, and disappeared so thoroughly that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page; its only online organizational existence is at the Hoover Institution’s archives, which hold its papers.

At the Duke CSG meeting I’m hoping, as we work on I2 and NLR leaders to encourage convergence, that NLR v. I2 won’t turn out like AAHE, and that instead the two organizations will agree to a collaborative process leading to synergy and merger like that of CAUSE and Educom.

We fail.

Following the Duke CSG meeting, NLR and I2 continue to compete. They manage to collaborate briefly on a joint proposal for federal funding, a project called “U.S. UCAN“, but then that collaboration falls apart as NLR’s finances weaken. Internet2 commits to cover NLR’s share of U.S. UCAN, an unexpected burden. NLR hires a new CEO to turn things around; he leaves after less than a year. NLR looks to the private sector for funding, and finds some, but it’s not enough: its network shuts down abruptly in 2014.

In the event, Internet2 survives, especially by extending its mission beyond higher education, and by expanding its collective-procurement activities to include a diversity of third-party products and services under the Net+ umbrella. It also builds some cooperative ventures with EDUCAUSE, such as occasional joint conferences and a few advocacy efforts.

Meanwhile, despite some false starts and missed opportunities, the EDUCAUSE merger succeeds. The organization grows and modernizes. It tackles a broad array of services to and advocacy on behalf of higher-education IT interests, organizations, and staff.

But now I’m having a vague feeling of déjà vu all over again. As was the case for I2/NLR, I sense, there’s little to be gained and some to be lost from Internet2 and EDUCAUSE continuing as separate organizations.

Partly the issue is simple organizational management efficiency: in these times of tight resources for colleges, universities, and state systems, does higher education IT really need two financial staffs, two membership-service desks, two marketing/communications groups, two senior leadership teams, two Boards, and for that matter two CEOs? (Throw ACUTA, Unizin, Apereo, and other entities into the mix, and the question becomes even more pressing.)

But partly the issue is deeper. EDUCAUSE and Internet2 are beginning to compete with one another for scarce resources in subtle ways: dues and memberships, certainly, but also member allegiance, outside funding, and national roles. That competition, if it grows, seems perilous. More worrisome still, some of the competition is of the non-salutary I’m OK/You’re Not OK variety, whereby each organization thinks the other should be subservient.

We don’t quite have a Timson/Molloy situation, I’m glad to say. But with little productive interaction at the organizations’ senior levels to build effective, equitable collaboration, there’s unnecessary risk that competitive tensions will evolve into feudal isolation.

If EDUCAUSE and Internet2 can work together on the basis of mutual respect, then we can minimize that risk, and maybe even move toward a success like CAUSE/Educom becoming EDUCAUSE. If they can’t–well, if they can’t, then I think about AAHE, and NLR’s high-and-dry stakeholders, and I worry.

Lunch with an old friend, beautiful day in Washington, seated outdoors enjoying surprisingly excellent hamburgers. We’re going to talk about our kids, and what we’re doing this summer, and maybe even about working together on a project some day (as we did decades ago).

But as is so often the case for those of us who work in IT, first there’s a technical question about calendars on his iPhone. He’s not clear on the distinction between the iCloud calendar and the one installed by his campus IT group.

I clarify that one is personal and the other enterprise. That segues into a discussion of calendar/email/contacts services (somewhat inexplicably, his campus still uses Notes), and then into IT services and help desks.

My friend observes that his campus provides an excellent array of IT equipment, software (Notes excepted),  and services. But it also has one of those “your call will be handled by the next available representative” queuing systems on its IT help desk.

“I really hate that,” my friend says, as I swipe some of his sweet-potato fries. Because he so dislikes the queuing system, he says, he can’t think positively about his campus’s IT, no matter how good the rest of it is. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. (Why is the Bard on my mind? Because at home we’ve been watching the excellent BBC/PBS Shakespeare Uncovered series on Netflix.)

It’s a familiar refrain. I’ve just been rereading a 1999 article with advice for new CIOs, where I had this to say:

Information technology most often succeeds when it is invisible–when people do not realize they are using it and focus on larger goals. When you and your staff do things right, even spectacularly, no one will notice. This is immensely frustrating. The only comments you are ever going to hear–from the big bosses, from faculty, from staff, from the student newspaper–will be negative, sometimes vitriolically so. This will drive you crazy. No one outside IT at the institution will sympathize.

We like to think this is peculiar to IT. It isn’t.

Case in point: Registrars. During my tenure at the University of Chicago, we replaced an old terminal-based student system for staff only with a highly flexible, modern web-based system directly accessible by students, faculty, and staff. Students used to wait in line to give their class choices to Registrar clerks, who would then set class lists and enter data in the system manually. Grading, transcripts, and other processes were similar. No one was happy except the Registrar, whose staff and budget necessarily remained large.

The new system (now-defunct SCT‘s now-defunct Matrix product) changed everything: no more waiting in line, simpler scheduling, later deadlines for grades, online transcript requests, you name it. Asked about specifics, almost everyone described almost everything as better.

But no one seemed to feel any better about the University than they had before.

At lunch, my friend pointed to this apparent conundrum as an interesting parallel to “two-factor theory,” the suggestion by Frederick Herzberg that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are independent of each other. The Registrar’s customers were less dissatisfied, but that did not mean they were more satisfied.

Messier case in point: Business travel. Time was, one made business-travel arrangements by calling (or having one’s assistant call) a travel agency or travel office to make reservations and get a travel advance, and one accounted for the advance and/or got reimbursed for out-of-pocket expense by filling out (or having one’s assistant fill out) a form, attaching paper receipts to it, mailing it somewhere, and eventually receiving a check.

Today it’s much more typical to make one’s own reservations through an employer-provided website, to pay expenses with a credit card that charges the employer directly, to account for expenses through the same dedicated website, and to have any reimbursement deposited directly. This all goes much faster, and is much more cost-effective for the employer.

For those of us who like rolling our own, it’s also much more appealing. But for those who don’t, and who don’t have assistants, it’s more awkward and burdensome.

We implemented a modern travel system (Concur) while I was at UChicago. I know anecdotally that most users liked its speed and convenience, but the public reaction consisted largely of complaints (most of which really weren’t about the travel system, but rather about the loss of departmental secretaries as the University did away with them in favor of centralized clerical support).

Coincidentally, my current employer switched to Concur from a paper-based system shortly before I arrived, and I observe the same pattern: widespread private appreciation completely overwhelmed by isolated objection (much of which is actually about changes in policy, such as having to justify non-preferred hotels, rather than the system itself).

What to do? For the most part we can’t use Mark Antony’s technique: through sarcasm (“Brutus is an honourable man“–imagine the air quotes), he discredits assertions of Caesar’s evil. However, it’s unwise for us to treat our customers’ complaints sarcastically.

Rather, a principal strategy for those of us in domains where dissatisfaction automatically overwhelms satisfaction must be to minimize the former. For example, I wrote,

One way to gain unproductive visibility is by unnecessarily constraining choice. To avoid this, wherever possible use carrots rather than sticks to encourage standardization, so that homogeneity is the product of aggregated free choice rather than central mandate… Try to keep institutional options open. Avoid strategies, vendors, architectures, and technologies that constrain choice. Seek interoperability. Wherever possible, have spillover vendors… Think carefully ahead about likely small disasters, many of which are caused by backhoes doing minor excavation, contractors oblivious to wiring closets, incompetent hacking, vandalism, or broken pipes.

But although minimizing unproductive visibility is important, it’s not enough. Mark Antony didn’t rely entirely on discrediting Brutus; he also cited Caesar’s good:

He was my friend, faithful and just to me… He hath brought many captives home to Rome, whose ransoms did the general coffers fill… When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept…

Mark Antony understood that discrediting Brutus and extolling Caesar aren’t the same thing. But it was necessary for him to do the former in order to succeed at the latter.

So let it be with IT. We need to recognize more explicitly that maximizing the good things we in IT do to satisfy our customers and campuses (or other organizations) is important, but those good things are different from and do not counterbalance the unproductively visible ways we dissatisfy them.

“Why are you at NBC?,” people ask. “What are you doing over there?,” too, and “Is it different on the dark side?” A year into the gig seems a good time to think about those. Especially that “dark side” metaphor.  For example, which side is “dark”?

This is a longer-than-usual post. I’ll take up the questions in order: first Why, then What, then Different; use the links to skip ahead if you prefer.

Why are you at NBC?

This is the first time I’ve worked at a for-profit company since, let’s see, the summer of 1967: an MIT alumnus arranged an undergraduate summer job at Honeywell‘s Mexico City facility. Part of that summer I learned a great deal about the configuration and construction of custom control panels, especially for big production lines. I think of this every time I see photos of big control panels, such as those at older nuclear plants—I recognize the switch types, those square toggle buttons that light up. (Another part of the summer, after the guy who hired me left and no one could figure out what I should do, I made a 43½-foot paper-clip chain.)

One nice Honeywell perk was an employee discount on a Pentax 35mm SLR with a 40mm and 135mm lenses, which I still have in a box somewhere, and which still works when I replace the camera’s light-meter battery. (The Pentax brand belonged to Honeywell back then, not Ricoh.) Excellent camera, served me well for years, through two darkrooms and a lot of Tri-X film. I haven’t used it since I began taking digital photos, though.

I digress. Except, it strikes me, not really. One interesting thing about digital photos, especially if you store them online and make most of them publicly visible (like this one, taken on the rim of spectacular Bryce Canyon, from my Backdrops collection), is that sometimes the people who find your pictures download them and use them for their own purposes. My photos carry a Creative Commons license specifying that although they are my intellectual property, they can be used for nonprofit purposes so long as they are attributed to me (an option not available, apparently, if I post them on Facebook instead).

So long as those who use my photos comply with the CC license requirement, I don’t require that they tell me, although now and then they do. But if people want to use one of my photos commercially, they’re supposed to ask my permission, and I can ask for a use fee. No one has done that for me—I’m keeping the day job—but it’s happened for our son.

I hadn’t thought much about copyright, permissions, and licensing for personal photos (as opposed to archival, commercial, or institutional ones) back when I first began dealing with “takedown notices” sent to the University of Chicago under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). There didn’t seem to be much of a parallel between commercialized intellectual property, like the music tracks that accounted for most early DMCA notices, and my photos, which I was putting online mostly because it was fun to share them.

Neither did I think about either photos or music while serving on a faculty committee rewriting the University’s Statute 18, the provision governing patents in the University’s founding documents.

The issues for the committee were fundamentally two, both driven somewhat by the evolution of “textbooks”.

First, where is the line between faculty inventions, which belong to the University (or did at the time), and creations, which belong to creators—between patentable inventions and copyrightable creations, in other words? This was an issue because textbooks had always been treated as creations, but many textbooks had come to include software (back then, CDs tucked into the back cover), and software had always been treated as an invention.

Second, who owns intellectual property that grows out of the instructional process? Traditionally, the rights and revenues associated with textbooks, even textbooks based on University classes, belonged entirely to faculty members. But some faculty members were extrapolating this tradition to cover other class-based material, such as videos of lectures. They were personally selling those materials and the associated rights to outside entities, some of which were in effect competitors (in some cases, they were other universities!).

As you can see by reading the current Statute 18, the faculty committee really didn’t resolve any of this. Gradually, though, it came to be understood  that textbooks, even textbooks including software, were still faculty intellectual property, whereas instructional material other than that explicitly included in traditional textbooks was the University’s to exploit, sell, or license.

With the latter well established, the University joined Fathom, one of the early efforts to commercialize online instructional material, and put together some excellent online materials. Unfortunately, Fathom, like its first-generation peers, failed to generate revenues exceeding its costs. Once it blew through its venture capital, which had mostly come from Columbia University, Fathom folded. (Poetic justice: so did one of the profit-making institutions whose use of University teaching materials prompted the Statute 18 review.)

Gradually this all got me interested in the thicket of issues surrounding campus online distribution and use of copyrighted materials and other intellectual property, and especially the messy question how campuses should think about copyright infringement occurring within and distributed from their networks. The DMCA had established the dual principles that (a) network operators, including campuses, could be held liable for infringement by their network users, but (b) they could escape this liability (find “safe harbor”) by responding appropriately to complaints from copyright holders. Several of us research-university CIOs worked together to develop efficient mechanisms for handling and responding to DMCA notices, and to help the industry understand those and the limits on what they might expect campuses to do.

As one byproduct of that, I found myself testifying before a Congressional committee. As another, I found myself negotiating with the entertainment industry, under US Education Department auspices, to develop regulations implementing the so-called “peer to peer” provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008.

That was one of several threads that led to my joining EDUCAUSE in 2009. One of several initiatives in the Policy group was to build better, more open communications between higher education and the entertainment industry with regard to copyright infringement, DMCA, and the HEOA requirements.

I didn’t think at the time about how this might interact with EDUCAUSE’s then-parallel efforts to illuminate policy issues around online and nontraditional education, but there are important relevancies. Through massively open online courses (MOOCs) and other mechanisms, colleges and universities are using the Internet to reach distant students, first to build awareness (in which case it’s okay for what they provide to be freely available) but eventually to find new revenues, that is, to monetize their intellectual property (in which case it isn’t).

If online campus content is to be sold rather than given away, then campuses face the same issues as the entertainment industry: They must protect their content from those who would use it without permission, and take appropriate action to deter or address infringement.

Campuses are generally happy to make their research freely available (except perhaps for inventions), as UChicago’s Statute 18 makes clear, provided that researchers are properly credited. (I also served on UChicago’s faculty Intellectual Property Committee, which among other things adjudicated who-gets-credit conflicts among faculty and other researchers.) But instruction is another matter altogether. If campuses don’t take this seriously, I’m afraid, then as goes music, so goes online higher education.

Much as campus tumult and changes in the late Sixties led me to abandon engineering for policy analysis, and quantitative policy analysis led me into large-scale data analysis, and large-scale data analysis led me into IT, and IT led me back into policy analysis, intellectual-property issues led me to NBCUniversal.

I’d liked the people I met during the HEOA negotiations, and the company seemed seriously committed to rethinking its relationships with higher education. I thought it would be interesting, at this stage in my career, to do something very different in a different kind of place. Plus, less travel (see screwup #3 in my 2007 EDUCAUSE award address).

So here I am, with an office amidst lobbyists and others who focus on legislation and regulation, with a Peacock ID card that gets me into the Universal lot, WRC-TV, and 30 Rock (but not SNL), and with a 401k instead of a 403b.

What are you doing over there?

NBCUniversal’s goals for higher education are relatively simple. First, it would like students to use legitimate sources to get online content more, and illegitimate “pirate” sources less. Second, it would like campuses to reduce the volume of infringing material made available from their networks to illegal downloaders worldwide.

My roles are also two. First, there’s eagerness among my colleagues (and their counterparts in other studios) to better understand higher education, and how campuses might think about issues and initiatives. Second, the company clearly wants to change its approach to higher education, but doesn’t know what approaches might make sense. Apparently I can help with both.

To lay foundation for specific projects—five so far, which I’ll describe briefly below—I looked at data from DMCA takedown notices.

Curiously, it turned out, no one had done much to analyze detected infringement from campus networks (as measured by DMCA notices sent to them), or to delve into the ethical puzzle: Why do students behave one way with regard to misappropriating music, movies, and TV shows, and very different ways with regard to arguably similar options such as shoplifting or plagiarism? I’ve written about some of the underlying policy issues in Story of S, but here I decided to focus first on detected infringement.

It turns out that virtually all takedown notices for music are sent by the Recording Industry Association of America, RIAA (the Zappa Trust and various other entities send some, but they’re a drop in the bucket).

Most takedown notices for movies and some for TV are sent by the Motion Picture Association of America, MPAA, on behalf of major studios (again, with some smaller entities such as Lucasfilm wading in separately). NBCUniversal and Fox send out notices involving their movies and TV shows.

I’ve now analyzed data from the major senders for both a twelve-month period (Nov 2011-Oct 2012) and a more recent two-month period (Feb-Mar 2013). For the more recent period, I obtained very detailed data on each of 40,000 or so notices sent to campuses. Here are some observations from the data:

• Almost all the notices went to 4-year campuses that have at least 100 dormitory beds (according to IPEDS). To a modest extent, the bigger the campus the more notices, but the correlation isn’t especially large.
• Over half of all campuses—even of campuses with dorms—didn’t get any notices. To some extent this is because there are lots and lots of very small campuses, and they fly under the infringement-detection radar. But I’ve learned from talking to a fair number of campuses that, much to my surprise, many heavily filter or even block peer-to-peer traffic at their commodity Internet border firewall—usually because the commodity bandwidth p2p uses is expensive, especially for movies, rather than to deal with infringement per se. Outsourced dorm networks also have an effect, but I don’t think they’re sufficiently widespread yet to explain the data.
• Several campuses have out-of-date or incorrect “DMCA agent” addresses registered at the Library of Congress. Compounding that, it turns out some notice senders use “abuse” or other standard DNS addresses rather than the registered agent addresses.
• Among campuses that received notices, a few campuses stand out for receiving the lion’s share, even adjusting for their enrollment. For example, the top 100 or so recipient campuses got about three quarters of the total, and a handful of campuses stand out sharply even within that group: the top three campuses (the leftmost blue bars in the graph below) accounted for well over 10% of the notices. (I found the same skewness in the 2012 study.) With a few interesting exceptions (interesting because I know or suspect what changed), the high-notice groups have been the same for the two periods.

The detection process, in general, is that copyright holders choose a list of music, movie, or TV titles they believe likely to be infringed. Their contractors then use BitTorrent tracker sites and other user tools to find illicit sources for those titles.

For the most part the studios and associations simply look for titles that are currently popular in theaters or from legitimate sources. It’s hard to see that process introducing a bias that would affect some campuses so much differently than others. I’ve also spent considerable time looking at how a couple of contractors verify that titles being offered illicitly (that is, listed for download on a BitTorrent tracker site such as The Pirate Bay) are actually the titles being supplied (rather than, say, malware, advertising, or porn), and at how they figure out where to send the resulting takedown notices. That process too seems pretty straightforward and unbiased.

Sender choices clearly can influence how notice counts vary from time to time: for example, adding a newly popular title to the search list can lead to a jump in detections and hence notices. But it’s hard to see how the choice of titles would influence how notice counts vary from institution to institution.

This all leads me to believe that takedown notices tell us something incomplete but useful about campus policies and practices, especially at the extremes. The analysis led directly to two projects focused on specific groups of campuses, and indirectly to three others.

Role Model Campuses

Based on the results of the data analysis, I communicated individually with CIOs at 22 campuses that received some but relatively few notices: specifically, campuses that (a) received at least one notice (and so are on the radar) but (b) fewer than 300 and fewer than 20 per thousand student headcount, (c) have at least 7,500 headcount students, and (d) have at least 10,000 dorm beds (per IPEDS) or sufficient dorm beds to house half your headcount. (These are Group 4, the purple bars in the graph below. The solid bars represent total notices sent, and the hollow bars represent incidence, or notices per thousand headcount students. Click on the graph to see it larger.)

I’ve asked each of those campuses whether they’d be willing to document their practices in an open “role models” database developed jointly by the campuses and hosted by a third party such as a higher-education association (as EDUCAUSE did after the HEOA regulations took effect). The idea is to make a collection of diverse effective practices available to other campuses that might want to enhance their practices.

High Volume Campuses

Separately, I communicated privately with CIOs at 13 campuses that received exceptionally many notices, even adjusting for their enrollment (Group 1, the blue bars in the graph). I’ve looked in some detail at the data for those campuses, some large and some small, and in some cases that’s led to suggestions.

For example, in a few cases I discovered that virtually all of a high-volume campus’s notices were split evenly among a small number of consecutive IP addresses. In those cases, I’ve suggested that those IP addresses might be the front-end to something like a campus wireless network. Filtering or blocking p2p (or just BitTorrent) traffic on those few IP addresses (or the associated network devices) might well shrink the campus’s role as a distributor without affecting legitimate p2p or BitTorrent users (who tend to be managing servers with static addresses).

Symposia

Back when I was at EDUCAUSE, we worked with NBCUniversal to host a DC meeting between senior campus staff from a score of campuses nationwide and some industry staff closely involved with the detection and notification for online infringement. The meeting was energetic and frank, and participants from both sides went away with a better sense of the other’s bona fides and seriousness. This was the first time campus staff had gotten a close look at the takedown-notice process since a Common Solutions Group meeting in Ann Arbor some years earlier; back then the industry’s practices were much less refined.

Based on the NBCUniversal/EDUCAUSE experience, we’re organizing a series of regional “Symposia” along these lines on campuses in various cities across the US. The objectives are to open new lines of communication and to build trust. The invitees are IT and student-affairs staff from local campuses, plus several representatives from industry, especially the groups that actually search for infringement on the Internet. The first was in New York, the second in Minneapolis, the third will be in Philadelphia, and others will follow in the West, the South, and elsewhere in the Midwest.

Research

We’re funding a study within a major state university system to gather two kinds of data. Initially the researchers are asking each campus to describe the measures it takes to “effectively combat” copyright infringement: its communications with students, its policies for dealing with violations, and the technologies it uses. The data from the first phase will help enhance a matrix we’ve drafted outlining the different approaches taken by different campuses, complementing what will emerge from the “role models” project.

Based on the initial data, the researchers and NBCUniversal will choose two campuses to participate in the pilot phase of the Campus Online Education Initiative (which I’ll describe next). In advance of that pilot, the researchers will gather data from a sample of students on each campus, asking about their attitudes toward and use of illicit and legitimate online sources for music, movies, and video. They’ll then repeat that data collection after the pilot term.

Campus Online Entertainment Initiative

Last but least in neither ambition nor complexity, we’re crafting a program that will attempt to address both goals I listed earlier: encouraging campuses to take effective steps to reduce distribution of infringing material from their networks, and helping students to appreciate (and eventually prefer) legitimate sources for online entertainment.

Working with Universal Studios and some of its peers, we’ll encourage students on participating campuses to use legitimate sources by making a wealth of material available coherently and attractively—through a single source that works across diverse devices, and at a substantial discount or with similar incentives.

Participating campuses, in turn, will maintain or implement policies and practices likely to shrink the volume of infringing material available from their networks. In some cases the participating campuses will already be like those in the “role models” group; in others they’ll be “high volume” or other campuses willing to  adopt more effective practices.

I’m managing these projects from NBCUniversal’s Washington offices, but with substantial collaboration from company colleagues here, in Los Angeles, and in New York; from Comcast colleagues in Philadelphia; and from people in other companies. Interestingly, and to my surprise, pulling this all together has been much like managing projects at a research university. That’s a good segue to the next question.

Is it different on the dark side?

Newly hired, I go out to WRC, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, to get my NBCUniversal ID and to go through HR orientation. Initially it’s all familiar: the same ID photo technology, the same RFID keycard, the same ugly tile and paint on the hallways, the same tax forms to be completed by hand.

But wait: Employee Relations is next door to the (now defunct) Chris Matthews Show. And the benefits part of orientation is a video hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Brian Williams. And there’s the possibility of something called a “bonus”, whatever that is.

Around my new office, in a spiffy modern building at 300 New Jersey Avenue, everyone seems to have two screens. That’s just as it was in higher-education IT. But wait: here one of them is a TV. People watch TV all day as they work.

Toto, we’re not in higher education any more.

It’s different over here, and not just because there’s a beautiful view of the Capitol from our conference rooms. Certain organizational functions seem to work better, perhaps because they should and in the corporate environment can be implemented by decree: HR processes, a good unified travel arrangement and expense system, catering, office management. Others don’t: there’s something slightly out of date about the office IT, especially the central/individual balance and security, and there’s an awful lot of paper.

Some things are just different, rather than better or not: the culture is heavily oriented to face-to-face and telephone interaction, even though it’s a widely distributed organization where most people are at their desks most of the time. There’s remarkably little email, and surprisingly little use of workstation-based videoconferencing. People dress a bit differently (a maitre d’ told me, “that’s not a Washington tie”).

But differences notwithstanding, mostly things feel much the same as they did at EDUCAUSE, UChicago, and MIT.

Where I work is generally happy, people talk to one another, gossip a bit, have pizza on Thursdays, complain about the quality of coffee, and are in and out a lot. It’s not an operational group, and so there’s not the bustle that comes with that, but it’s definitely busy (especially with everyone around me working on the Comcast/Time Warner merger). The place is teamly, in that people work with one another based on what’s right substantively, and rarely appeal to authority to reach decisions. Who trusts whom seems at least as important as who outranks whom, or whose boss is more powerful. Conversely, it’s often hard to figure out exactly how to get something done, and lots of effort goes into following interpersonal networks. That’s all very familiar.

I’d never realized how much like a research university a modern corporation can be. Where I work is NBCUniversal, which is the overarching corporate umbrella (“Old Main”, “Mass Hall”, “Building 10”, “California Hall”, “Boulder”) for 18 other companies including news, entertainment, Universal Studios, theme parks, the Golf Channel, Telemundo (which are remarkably like schools and departments in their varied autonomy).

Meanwhile NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast—think “System Central Office”. Sure, these are all corporate entities, and they have concrete metrics by which to measure success: revenue, profit, subscribers, viewership, market share. But the relationships among organizations, activities, and outcomes aren’t as coherent and unitary as I’d expected.

Dark or Green?

So, am I on the dark side, or have I left it behind for greener pastures? Curiously, I hear both from my friends and colleagues in higher education: Some of them think my move is interesting and logical, some think it odd and disappointing. Curioser still, I hear both from my new colleagues in the industry: Some think I was lucky to have worked all those decades in higher education, while others think I’m lucky to have escaped. None of those views seems quite right, and none seems quite wrong.

The point, I suppose, is that simple judgments like “dark” and “greener” underrepresent the complexity of organizational and individual value, effectiveness, and life. Broad-brush characterizations, especially characterizations embodying the ecological fallacy, “…the impulse to apply group or societal level characteristics onto individuals within that group,” do none of us any good.

It’s so easy to fall into the ecological-fallacy trap; so important, if we’re to make collective progress, not to.

Comments or questions? Write me: greg@gjackson.us

(The quote is from Charles Ess & Fay Sudweeks, Culture, technology, communication: towards an intercultural global village, SUNY Press 2001, p 90. Everything in this post, and for that matter all my posts, represents my own views, not those of my current or past employers, or of anyone else.)

3|5|2014 11:44a est

Looking into the near-term future—say, between now and 2020—we in higher education have to address two big challenges, both involving IT. Neither admits easy progress. But if we don’t address them, we’ll find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place.

• The first challenge, the rock, is to deliver high-quality, effective e-learning and curriculum at scale. We know how to do part of that, but key pieces are missing, and it’s not clear how will find them.
• The second challenge, the hard place, is to recognize that enterprise cloud services and personal devices will make campus-based IT operations the last rather than the first resort. This means everything about our IT base, from infrastructure through support, will be changing just as we need to rely on it.

“But wait,” I can hear my generation of IT leaders (and maybe the next) say, “aren’t we already meeting those challenges?”

If we compare today’s e-learning and enterprise IT with that of the recent past, those leaders might rightly suggest, immense change is evident:

• Learning management systems, electronic reserves, video jukeboxes, collaboration environments, streamed and recorded video lectures, online tutors—none were common even in 2000, and they’re commonplace today.
• Commercial administrative systems, virtualized servers, corporate-style email, web front ends—ditto.

That’s progress and achievement we all recognize, applaud, and celebrate. But that progress and achievement overcame past challenges. We can’t rest on our laurels.

We’re not yet meeting the two broad future challenges, I believe, because in each case fundamental and hard-to-predict change lies ahead. The progress we’ve made so far, however progressive and effective, won’t steer us between the rock of e-learning and the hard place of enterprise IT.

The fundamental change that lies ahead for e-learning
is the the transition from campus-based to distance education

Back in the 1990s, Cliff Adelman, then at the US Department of Education, did a pioneering study of student “swirl,” that is, students moving through several institutions, perhaps with work intervals along the way,before earning degrees.

“The proportion of undergraduate students attending more than one institution,” he wrote, “swelled from 40 percent to 54 percent … during the 1970s and 1980s, with even more dramatic increases in the proportion of students attending more than two institutions.” Adelman predicted that “…we will easily surpass a 60 percent multi-institutional attendance rate by the year 2000.”

Moving from campus to campus for classes is one step; taking classes at home is the next. And so distance education, long constrained by the slow pace and awkward pedagogy of correspondence courses, has come into its own. At first it was relegated to “nontraditional” or “experimental” institutions—Empire State College, Western Governors University, UNext/Cardean (a cautionary tale for another day), Kaplan. Then it went mainstream.

At first this didn’t work: fathom.com, for example, a collaboration among several first-tier research universities led by Columbia, found no market for its high-quality online offerings. (Its Executive Director has just written a thoughtful essay on MOOCs, drawing on her fathom.com experience.)

Today, though, a great many traditional colleges and universities successfully bring instruction and degree programs to distant students. Within the recent past these traditional institutions have expanded into non-degree efforts like OpenCourseWare and to broadcast efforts like the MOOC-based Coursera and edX. In 2008, 3.7% of students took all their coursework through distance education, and 20.4% took at least one class that way.

Learning management systems, electronic reserves, video jukeboxes, collaboration environments, streamed and recorded video lectures, online tutors, the innovations that helped us overcome past challenges—little of that progress was designed for swirling students who do not set foot on campus.

We know how to deliver effective instruction to motivated students at a distance. Among policy issues we have yet to resolve, we don’t yet know how to

• confirm their identity,
• assess their readiness,
• guide their progress,
• measure their achievement,
• standardize course content,
• construct and validate curriculum across diverse campuses, or
• certify degree attainment

in this imminent world. Those aren’t just IT problems, of course. But solving them will almost certainly challenge IT.

The fundamental change that lies ahead for enterprise technologies
is the transition from campus IT to cloud and personal IT

The locus of control over all three principal elements of campus IT—servers and services, networks, and end-user devices and applications—is shifting rapidly from the institution to customers and third parties.

As recently as ten years ago, most campus IT services, everything from administrative systems through messaging and telephone systems to research technologies, were provided by campus entities using campus-based facilities, sometimes centralized and sometimes not. The same was true for the wired and then wireless networks that provided access to services, and for the desktop and laptop computers faculty, students, and staff used.

Today shared services are migrating rapidly to servers and systems that reside physically and organizationally elsewhere—the “cloud”—and the same is happening for dedicated services such as research computing. It’s also happening for networks, as carrier-provided cellular technologies compete with campus-provided wired and WiFi networking, and for end-user devices, as highly mobile personal tablets and phones supplant desktop and laptop computers.

As I wrote in an earlier post about “Enterprise IT,” the scale of enterprise infrastructure and services within IT and the shift in their locus of control have major implications for and the organizations that have provided it. Campus IT organizations grew up around locally-designed services running on campus-owned equipment managed by internal staff. Organization, staffing, and even funding models ensued accordingly. Even in academic computing and user support, “heavy metal” experience was valued highly. The shifting locus of control makes other skills at least as valuable: the ability to negotiate with suppliers, to engage effectively with customers (indeed, to think of them as “customers” rather than “users”), to manage spending and investments under constraint, to explain.

To be sure, IT organizations still require highly skilled technical staff, for example to fine-tune high-performance computing and networking, to ensure that information is kept secure, to integrate systems efficiently, and to identify and authenticate individuals remotely. But these technologies differ greatly from traditional heavy metal, and so must enterprise IT.

The rock, IT, and the hard place

In the long run, it seems to me that the campus IT organization must evolve rapidly to center on seven core activities.

Two of those are substantive:

• making sure that researchers have the technologies they need, and
• making sure that teaching and learning benefit from the best thinking about IT applications and effectiveness.

Four others are more general:

• negotiating and overseeing relationships with outside providers;
• specifying or doing what is necessary for robust integration among outside and internal services;
• striking the right personal/institutional balance between security and privacy for networks, systems, and data; and last but not least
• providing support to customers (both individuals and partner entities).

The seventh core activity, which should diminish over time, is

• operating and supporting legacy systems.

Creative, energetic, competent staff are sine qua non for achieving that kind of forward-looking organization. It’s very hard to do good IT without good, dedicated people, and those are increasingly difficult to find and keep. Not least, this is because colleges and universities compete poorly with the stock options, pay, glitz, and technology the private sector can offer. Therein lies another challenge: promoting loyalty and high morale among staff who know they could be making more elsewhere.

To the extent the rock of e-learning and the hard place of enterprise IT frame our future, we not only need to rethink our organizations and what they do; we also need to rethink how we prepare, promote, and choose leaders for higher-education leaders on campus and elsewhere—the topic, fortuitously, of a recent ECAR report, and of widespread rethinking within EDUCAUSE.

We’ve been through this before, and risen to the challenge.

• Starting around 1980, minicomputers and then personal computers brought IT out of the data center and into every corner of higher education, changing data center, IT organization, and campus in ways we could not even imagine.
• Then in the 1990s campus, regional, and national networks connected everything, with similarly widespread consequences.

We can rise to the challenges again, too, but only if we understand their timing and the transformative implications.

In oversimplified caricature, many colleges and universities have traditionally staffed the line, management, and leadership layers of their IT enterprise thus:

Students with some affinity for technology (perhaps their major, perhaps work-study, perhaps just a side interest) have approached graduation not quite sure what they should do next. They’ve had some contact with the institution’s IT organizations, perhaps having worked for some part of them or perhaps having criticized their services. Whatever the reason, working for an institutional IT organization has seemed a useful way to pay the rent while figuring out what to do next, and it’s been a good deal for the IT organizations because recent graduates are usually pretty clever, know the institution well, learn fast, and are willing to work hard for relatively meager pay.

Moreover, and partly compensating for low pay, the technologies being used and considered in higher education often have been more advanced than those out in business, so sticking around has been a good way to be at the cutting edge technologically, and college and universities have tended to value and reward autonomy, curiosity, and creativity.

Within four or five years of graduation, most staff who come straight into the IT organization have figured out that it’s time to move on. Sometimes a romantic relationship has turned their attention to life plans and long-term earnings, sometimes ambition has taken more focused shape and so they seek a steeper career path, sometimes their interests have sharpened and readied them for graduate school — but in any case, they have left the campus IT organization for other pastures after a few good, productive years, and have been replaced by a new crop of recent graduates.

But a few individuals have found that working in higher education suits their particular hierarchy of needs (to adapt and somewhat distort Maslow). For them, IT work in higher education has yielded several desiderata (remember I’m still caricaturing here): there’s been job security, a stimulating academic environment, a relatively flat organization that offers considerable responsibility and flexibility, and an opportunity to work with and across state-of-the-art (and sometimes even more advanced) technologies. Benefits have been pretty good, even though pay hasn’t and there have been no stock options. Individuals to whom this mix appeals have stayed in campus IT, rising to middle-management levels, sometimes getting degrees in the process, and sometimes, as they have moved into #3 or #2 positions, even moving to other campuses as opportunities present themselves.

Higher-education IT leaders — that is, CIOs, the heads of major decentralized IT organizations, and in some cases the #2s within large central organizations — typically have come from one of two sources. Some have come from within higher-education IT organizations, sometimes the institution’s own but more typically, since a given institution usually has more leadership-ready middle managers than it has available leadership positions, another institution’s. (Whereas insiders once tended to be heavy-metal computer-center directors,  more recently they have come from academic technologies or networking.) Other leaders have come from faculty ranks, often (but not exclusively) in computer science or other technically-oriented disciplines. Occasionally some come from other sources, such as consulting firms or even technology vendors, or even from administration elsewhere in higher education.

The traditional approach staffs IT organizations with well educated, generally clever individuals highly attuned to the institution’s culture and needs. They are willing and able to tackle complex IT projects involving messy integration among different technologies. Those individuals also cost less that comparable ones would if hired from outside. Expected turnover among line staff notwithstanding, they are loyal to the institution even in the face of financial and management challenges.

But the traditional model also tilts IT organizations toward idiosyncrasy and patchwork rather than coherent architecture and efficiency-driven implementation. It often works against the adoption of effective management techniques, and it can promote hostility toward businesslike approaches to procurement and integration and indeed the entire commercial IT marketplace. All of this has been known, but in general institutions have continued to believe that the advantages of the traditional model outweigh its shortcomings.

I saw Moneyball in early October. I liked it mostly because it’s highly entertaining, it’s a good story, it’s well written, acted, directed, and produced, and it involves both applied statistical analysis (which is my training) and baseball (my son’s passion, and mine when the Red Sox are in the playoffs). I also liked it because its focus — dramatic change in how one staffs baseball teams — led me to think about college and university IT staffing. (And yes, I know my principles list says that “all sports analogies mislead”, but never mind.)

In one early scene, the Oakland A’s scouting staff explains to Brad Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, that choosing players depends on intuition honed by decades of experience with how the game is played, and that the approach Beane is proposing — choosing them based on how games are won rather than on intuition — is dangerous and foolhardy. Later, Arliss Howard’s character, the Red Sox owner John Henry, explains that whenever one goes against long tradition all hell breaks loose, and whoever pioneers or even advocates that change is likely to get bloodied.

So now I’ll move from oversimplification and caricature to speculation. To believe in the continued validity of the traditional staffing model may be to emulate the scouts in Moneyball. But to abandon the model is risky, since it’s not clear how higher-education IT can maintain its viability in a more “businesslike” model based on externally defined architectures, service models, and metrics. After all, Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s still haven’t won the World Series.

The Beane-like critique of the traditional model isn’t that the advantage/shortcoming balance has shifted, but rather that it depends on several key assumptions whose future validity is questionable. To cite four interrelated ones:

• With the increasing sophistication of mobile devices and cloud-based services, the locus of technological innovation has shifted away from colleges and universities. Recent graduates who want to be in the thick of things while figuring out their life plans have much better options than staying on campus — they can intern at big technology firms, or join startups, or even start their own small businesses. In short, there is now competition for young graduates interested IT but unsure of their long-term plans.
• As campuses have outsourced or standardized much of their IT, jobs that once included development and integration responsibility have evolved into operations, support, and maintenance — which are important, but not very interesting intellectually, and which provide little career development.  Increased outsourcing has exacerbated this, and so has increased reliance on business-based metrics for things like user support and business-based architectures for things like authentication and systems integration.
• College and university IT departments could once offset this intellectual narrowing because technology prices were dropping faster than available funds, and the resulting financial cushion could be dedicated to providing staff with resources and flexibility to go beyond their specific jobs (okay, maybe what I mean is letting staff buy gadgets and play with them). But tightened attention to productivity and resource constraints have large eliminated the offsetting toys and flexibility. So IT jobs in colleges and universities have lost much of their nonpecuniary attractiveness, without any commensurate increase in compensation. Because of this, line staff are less likely to choose careers in college or university IT, and without this source of replenishment the higher-education IT management layer is aging.
• As IT has become pervasively important to higher education, so responsibility for its strategic direction has broadened. As strategic direction has broadened, so senior leadership jobs, including the CIO’s, have evolved away from hierarchical control and toward collaboration and influence. (I’ve written about this elsewhere.) At the same time, increasing attention to business-like norms and metrics has required that IT leaders possess a somewhat different skillset than usually emerges from gradual promotion within college and university IT organizations or faculty experience. This has disrupted the supply chain for college and university IT leadership, as a highly fragmented group of headhunter firms competes to identify and recruit nontraditional candidates.

I think we’re already seeing dramatic change resulting from all this. The most obvious change is rapid standardization around commercial standards to enable outsourcing — which is appealing not only intrinsically, but because it reduces dependence on an institution’s own staff. (On the minus side, it also tends to emphasize proprietary commercial rather than open-source or open-standards approaches.) I also sense much greater interest in hiring from outside higher education, both at the line and management levels, and a concomitant reappraisal of compensation levels. That, combined with flat or shrinking resources, is eliminating positions, and the elimination of positions is promoting even more rapid standardization and outsourcing.

On the plus side, this is making college and university IT departments much more efficient and businesslike. On the minus side, higher education IT organizations may be losing their ability to innovate. This is yet another instance of the difficult choice facing us in higher-education IT: Is IT simply an important, central element of educational, research, and administrative infrastructure, or is IT also the vehicle for fundamental change in how higher education works? (In Moneyball, the choice is between player recruitment as a mechanism for generating runs, and as a mechanism for exciting fans. Sure, Red Sox fans want to win. But were they more avid before or after the Curse ended with Bill James’s help?)

If it’s the latter, we need to make sure we’re equipped to enable that — something that neither the traditional model nor the evolving “businesslike” model really does.

“There are two possible solutions,” Hercule Poirot says to the assembled suspects in Murder on the Orient Express (that’s p. 304 in the Kindle edition, but the 1974 movie starring Albert Finney is way better than the book, and it and the book are both much better than the abominable 2011 PBS version with David Suchet). “I shall put them both before you,” Poirot continues, “…to judge which solution is the right one.”

So it is for the future role, organization, and leadership of higher-education IT. There are two possible solutions. There’s a reasonably straightforward projection how the role of IT in higher education will evolve into the mid-range future, but there’s also a more complicated one. The first assumes institutional continuity and evolutionary change. The second doesn’t.

IT Domains

How does IT serve higher education? Let me count the ways:

1. Infrastructure for the transfer and storage of pedagogical, bibliographic, research, operational, and administrative information, in close synergy with other physical infrastructure such as plumbing, wiring, buildings, sensors, controls, roads, and vehicles. This includes not only hardware such as processors, storage, networking, and end-user devices, but also basic functionality such as database management and hosting (or virtualizing) servers.
2. Administrative systems that manage, analyze, and display the information students, faculty, and staff need to manage their own work and that of their departments. This includes identity management, authentication, and other so-called “middleware” through which institutions define their communities.
3. Pedagogical applications students and faculty need to enable teaching and learning, including tools for data analysis, bibliography, simulation, writing, multimedia, presentations, discussion, and guidance.
4. Research tools faculty and students need to advance knowledge, including some tools that also serve pedagogy plus a broad array of devices and systems to measure, gather, simulate, manage, share, distill, analyze, display, and otherwise bring data to bear on scholarly questions.
5. Community services to support interaction and collaboration, including systems for messaging, collaboration, broadcasting, and socialization both within campuses and across their boundaries.

“…A Suit of Wagon Lit Uniform…and a Pass Key…”

The straightforward projection, analogous to Poirot’s simpler solution (an unknown stranger committed the crime, and escaped undetected), stems from projections how institutions themselves might address each of the IT domains as new services and devices become available, especially cloud-based services and consumer-based end-user devices. The core assumptions are that the important loci of decisions are intra-institutional, and that institutions make their own choices to maximize local benefit (or, in the economic terms I mentioned in an earlier post, to maximize their individual utility.)

Most current thinking in this vein goes something like this:

• We will outsource generic services, platforms, and storage, and perhaps
• consolidate and standardize support for core applications and
• leave users on their own insofar as commercial devices such as phones and tablets are concerned, but
• we must for the foreseeable future continue to have administrative systems securely dedicated and configured for our unique institutional needs, and similarly
• we must maintain control over our pedagogical applications and research tools since they help distinguish us from the competition.

Evolution based on this thinking entails dramatic shrinkage in data-center facilities, as virtualized servers housed in or provided by commercial or collective entities replace campus-based hosting of major systems. It entails several key administrative and community-service systems being replaced by standard commercial offerings — for example, the replacement of expense-reimbursement systems by commercial products such as Concur, of dedicated payroll systems by commercial services such as ADP, and of campus messaging, calendaring, and even document-management systems by more general services such as Google’s or Microsoft’s. Finally, thinking like this typically drives consolidation and standardization of user support, bringing departmental support entities into alignment if not under the authority of central IT, and standardizing requirements and services to reduce response times and staff costs.

How might higher-education IT evolve if this is how things go? In particular, what effects would it have on IT organization, and leadership?

One clear consequence of such straightforward evolution is a continuing need for central guidance and management across essentially the current array of IT domains. As I tried to suggest in a recent article, the nature of that guidance and management would change, in that control would give way to collaboration and influence. But institutions would retain responsibility for IT functions, and it would remain important for important systems to be managed or procured centrally for the general good. Although the skills required of the “chief information officer” would be different, CIOs would still be necessary, and most cross-institutional efforts would be mediated through them. Many of those cross-institutional efforts would involve coordinated action of various kinds, ranging from similar approaches to vendors through collective procurement to joint development.

We’d still need Brads.

“Say What You Like, Trial by Jury is a Sound System…”

If we think about the future unconventionally (as Poirot does in his second solution — spoiler in the last section below!), a somewhat more radical, extra-institutional projection emerges. What if Accenture, McKinsey, and Bain are right, and IT contributes very little to the distinctiveness of institutions — in which case colleges and universities have no business doing IT idiosyncratically or even individually?

In that case,

• we will outsource almost all IT infrastructure, applications, services, and support, either to collective enterprises or to commercial providers, and therefore
• we will not need data centers or staff, including server administrators, programmers, and administrative-systems technical staff, so that
• the role of institutional IT will be largely to provide only highly tailored support for research and instruction, which means that
• in most cases means there will be little to be gained from centralizing IT,
• it will make sense for academic departments to do their own IT, and
• we can rely on individual business units to negotiate appropriate administrative systems and services, and so
• the balance will shift from centralized to decentralized IT organization and staffing.

What if we’re right that mobility, broadband, cloud services, and distance learning are maturing to the point where they can transform education, so that we have simultaneous and similarly radical change on the academic front?

Despite changes in technology and economics, and some organizational evolution, higher education remains largely hierarchical. Vertically-organized colleges and universities grant degrees based on curricula largely determined internally, curricula largely comprise courses offered by the institution, institutions hire their own faculty to teach their own courses, and students enroll as degree candidates in a particular institution to take the courses that institution offers and thereby earn degrees. As Jim March used to point out, higher education today (well, okay, twenty years ago, when I worked with him at Stanford) is pretty similar to its origins: groups sitting around on rocks talking about books they’ve read.

It’s never been that simple, of course. Most students take some of their coursework from other institutions, some transfer from one to another, and since the 1960s there have been examples of network-based teaching. But the model has been remarkably robust across time and borders. It depends critically on the metaphor of the “campus”, the idea that students will be in one place for their studies.

Mobility, broadband, and the cloud redefine “campus” in ways that call the entire model into question, and thereby may transform higher education. A series of challenges lies ahead on this path. If we tackle and overcome these challenges, higher education, perhaps even including its role in research, could change in very fundamental ways.

The first challenge, which is already being widely addressed in colleges, universities, and other entities, is distance education: how to deliver instruction and promote learning effectively at a distance. Some efforts to address this challenge involve extrapolating from current models (many community colleges, “laptop colleges”, and for-profit institutions are examples of this), some involve recycling existing materials (Open CourseWare, and to a large extent the Khan Academy), and some involve experimenting with radically different approaches such as game-based simulation. There has already been considerable success with effective distance education, and more seems likely in the near future.

As it becomes feasible to teach and learn at a distance, so that students can be “located” on several “campuses” at once, students will have no reason to take all their coursework from a single institution. A question arises: If coursework comes from different “campuses”, who defines curriculum? Standardizing curriculum, as is already done in some professional graduate programs, is one way to achieve address this problem — that is, we may define curriculum extra-institutionally, “above the campus”. Such standardization requires cross-institutional collaboration, oversight from professional associations or guilds, and/or government regulation. None of this works very well today, in part because such standardization threatens institutional autonomy and distinctiveness. But effective distance teaching and learning may impel change.

As courses relate to curricula without depending on a particular institution, it becomes possible to imagine divorcing the offering of courses from the awarding of degrees. In this radical, no-longer-vertical future, some institutions might simply sell instruction and other learning resources, while others might concentrate on admitting students to candidacy, vetting their choices of and progress through coursework offered by other institutions, and awarding degrees. (Of course, some might try to continue both instructing and certifying.) To manage all this, it will clearly be necessary to gather, hold, and appraise student records in some shared or central fashion.

To the extent this projection is valid, not only does the role of IT within institutions change, but the very role of institutions in higher education changes. It remains important that local support be available to support the IT components of distinctive coursework, and of course to support research, but almost everything else — administrative and community services, infrastructure, general support — becomes either so standardized and/or outsourced as to require no institutional support, or becomes an activity for higher education generally rather than colleges or universities individually. In the extreme case, the typical institution really doesn’t need a central IT organization.

In this scenario, individual colleges and universities don’t need Brads.

“…What Should We Tell the Yugo-Slavian Police?”

Poirot’s second solution to the Ratchett murder (everyone including the butler did it) requires astonishing and improbable synchronicity among a large number of widely dispersed individuals. That’s fine for a mystery novel, but rarely works out in real life.

I therefore don’t suggest that the radical scenario I sketched above will come to pass. As many scholars of higher education have pointed out, colleges and universities are organized and designed to resist change. So long as society entrusts higher education to colleges and universities and other entities like them, we are likely to see evolutionary rather than radical change. So my extreme scenario, perhaps absurd on its face, seeks to only to suggest that we would do well to think well beyond institutional boundaries as we promote IT in higher education and consider its transformative potential.

And more: if we’re serious about the potentially transformative role of mobility, broadband, and the cloud in higher education, we need to consider not only what IT might change but also what effects that change will have on IT itself — and especially on its role within colleges and universities and across higher education.

A few nights ago, at a meeting of IT people from a subset of research universities, dinner conversation turned to why IT people work in higher education. If you do IT in higher education, everyone pretty much agreed, it’s not to get rich. Rather, you’re driven by some combination of four reasons.

1. IT jobs in higher education have tended to entail a complicated, challenging, and rewarding set of challenges. IT organizations in colleges and universities tend to be relatively small, and tend to involve teamwork across domains that might otherwise be separate. There’s not the neat division between, say, technical and support staff that one might find elsewhere, and so there has been ample opportunity to grow along various dimensions.
2. IT jobs in higher education have generally involved a certain amount of flexibility. One spends most of one’s time on one’s job, but it’s been commonplace for a certain fraction of time – perhaps as much as 20% — to be essentially the staffer’s to allocate. Much of that time has gone to experimenting with new technologies, or ways to use old technologies, or even to thinking about things not strictly technological. In the aggregate, much of that “uncommitted” time has gone to innovation, some successful and some not. But the opportunity to spend time on activities that are not strictly part of job descriptions, with part of that involving experimentation and innovation, has enabled IT organizations in higher education to be sources of administrative, educational, research, and technological progress.
3. IT in higher education has usually provided good job security. Absent failure to produce or malfeasance, IT staff in education could reasonably assume that they would have jobs so long as they continued to perform well.
4. This one’s somewhat different from the other three reasons. IT jobs in higher education have been an interesting and useful way station for recent graduates with abundant energy and skill but little sense of career or personal-development paths. For many IT staff, the job is not an end in itself, but rather a reasonable way to work for a few years while figuring out what to do next – be that graduate school, marriage and family, relocation, a more remunerative job, or whatever. That is, part of what appeals is working where one recently got – or is soon getting – a degree.

For reasons good and bad, the reasons to work in higher-education IT work have eroded, without commensurate offsets such as better pay. This has had little effect on those who work in higher-education IT for reason #4. So long as economic downturns have affected the corporate and .com worlds more than colleges and universities, it also has had little effect on those who work for #1-3. Since the economy has been on a bit of a roller coaster for some years, we’ve thus seen little erosion of IT staffing in higher education.

But as financial strictures settle firmly into higher education, this is changing. There have been greater compartmentalization of tasks, tighter accounting for time and effort, and layoffs unrelated to performance. These directly undercut reasons #1 through #3 for working in higher-education IT, and they’re beginning to have effects on staffing.

What many perceive is a key shift in the higher-education IT workforce: fewer young staff stick around to rise through the ranks, and loss rates do not reverse with age as they once did. The staff-by-age distribution is becoming bimodal, and whereas the left-hand mode is staying put or moving left – that is, staff who leave are leaving sooner – the right-hand mode, starved for replenishment from the middle, is moving right. As a result, higher-education IT organizations are increasingly starved for middle management, and as a second-order consequence they are decreasingly able to fill leadership positions from within. We therefore see more middle-management and leadership hires from the corporate sector.

Those new hires, unaccustomed to reasons #1-4, are likely to magnify rather than counteract the changes that underlay their hiring. The result, if we can avoid a vicious circle, is that non-pecuniary reasons for working in higher-education IT will give way to pecuniary ones. IT staff in colleges and universities will have more focused, less flexible, and less secure jobs, but they will be paid more to do them. If productivity under the new regime grows sufficiently to offset higher IT payrolls (which may mean that staffing levels decline), then the evolution can succeed. If it doesn’t, then increased spending will fail to yield commensurate progress.

Let’s assume, for the moment, that the evolution is both desirable and successful. What issues might we need to address? Here are five for starters:

1. Whether we like it or not, colleges and universities operate with cultures that are very different from corporate cultures. If staff are hired from the latter, then we need to find effective ways to quickly give them an understanding of the former. This doesn’t mean that outside hires must go native, accepting their new culture as gospel, but rather than they must understand the status quo if they are to change it.
2. If pay does become a dominant reason for people to work in higher-education IT, then colleges and universities must adopt modern approaches to compensation: bonuses for effective work, putting some compensation formally at risk, direct connections between performance reviews and compensation, benefits suited to staff needs, and most important compensation levels that truly compare favorably with the outside market.
3. Even if we successfully integrate and compensate staff from outside higher education, inevitably staff turnover will be higher than it has been in the past: that’s another attribute of corporate IT cultures. This means that college and university IT organizations can no longer rely on long-term employees as the repositories of accumulated experience. Rather, they must adopt formal mechanisms for reaching, making, and recording decisions, for documenting implementation and change, and generally for ensuring that wisdom survives turnover.
4. Idiosyncrasy, long the hallmark of higher-education IT and in many cases the guarantor of continued employment, will give way to standardization. The default for decisions whether to outsource will no longer be “no”. The burden of proof will shift to those opposing outsourcing, and there will be increased scrutiny of “we’ve always done it this way” arguments.
5. Partly as a result of #4, possibilities for inter-institutional collaboration and joint procurement should expand. In some cases this will lead logically to joint-development efforts, especially where higher education has unique needs (for example, student systems, learning-management systems, and many research applications). In other cases it will lead logically to demand aggregation, especially where higher-education needs are consistent, they resemble those outside the academy, and they yield no competitive advantage (for example, email systems or cloud-based storage).

Many of those currently preparing to become leaders within higher-education IT are ill prepared to address issues like these. Many of those who come from outside to take leadership positions in higher-education IT do not understand why issues like these are hard to address in higher education. The solution, as with many of the changes we face, is serious, deep-thinking professional development: places where those rising or jumping into college or university IT leadership can learn what the future is bringing and how to address it. These can be didactic, like EDUCAUSE’s management and leadership institutes, or collaborative, like the Common Solutions Group, the Council of Liberal Arts Colleges, the League for Innovation, and other entities where peers gather to share experiences and best practices.

In the past we’ve built leaders informally, by drawing them from those who have been with us for a long time. As that pool dries up, we need to think differently.

Remember Attack Plan R? That’s the one that enabled Brigadier General Ripper to bypass General Turgidson and the rest of the Air Force chain of command, sending his bombers on an unauthorized mission to attack the Soviet Union. As a result of Plan R and two missed communications – the Soviets’ failure to announce the Doomsday Device and an encrypted radio’s failure to recall Major Kong’s B-52 – General Ripper ended the world and protected our precious bodily fluids, Colonel Mandrake’s best efforts notwithstanding.

Fortunately, we’re talking about Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, Slim Pickens, and Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and not an actual event. But it’s a classic illustration why control of key technologies is important, and it’s the introduction to my theme for today: we’re losing control of key technologies, which is important and has implications for how campus IT leaders do their jobs. We can afford to lose control; we can’t afford to lose influence.

Here’s how IT was on most campuses until about ten years ago:

• There were a bunch of central applications: a financial system, a student-registration system, some web servers, maybe an instructional-management system, and then some more basic central facilities such as email and shared file storage.
• Those applications and services were all managed by college or university employees – usually in the central IT shop, but sometimes in academic or administrative units – and they ran on mainframes or servers owned and operated likewise.
• Students, faculty, and staff used the central applications from desktop and laptop computers. Amazing as it seems today, students often obtained their computers from the campus computer reseller or bookstore, or at least followed the institution’s advice if they bought them elsewhere. Faculty and staff computers were very typically purchased by the college or university and assigned to users. In all three cases, a great deal of the software on users’ computers was procured, configured, and/or installed by college or university staff.
• Personal computers and workstations connected to central applications and services over the campus network. The campus network, mostly wired but increasingly wireless, was provided and managed by the central IT organization, or in some cases by academic units.
• Campus telephony consisted primarily of office, dormitory, and “public” telephone sets connected to a campus telephone exchange, which was either operated by campus staff or operated by an outside vendor under contract to the campus.

Notice the dominant feature of that list: all the key elements of campus information technology were provided, controlled, or at least strongly guided by the college or university, either through its central IT organization or through academic or administrative units.

There were exceptions to campus control over information technology, to be sure. The World Wide Web was already a major source of academic information. Although some academic material on the web came from campus servers, most of it didn’t. There were also many services available over the web, but most campus use of these was for personal rather than campus purposes (banking, for example, and travel planning). Most campus libraries relied heavily on outside services, some accessible through the Web and some through other client/server mechanisms. And many researchers, especially in physics and other computationally-intensive disciplines, routinely used shared computational resources located in research centers or on other campuses. Regardless,  a decade ago central or departmental campus IT organizations controlled most campus IT.

Now fast forward to the present, when things are quite different. The first difference is complexity. For example, I described my own IT environment in a post a few weeks ago:

I started typing this using Windows Live Writer (Microsoft) on the Windows 7 (Microsoft, but a different part) computer (Dell) that is connected to the network (Comcast, Motorola, Cisco) in my home office, and it’ll be stored on my network hard drive (Seagate) and eventually be posted using the blog service (WordPress) on the hosting service (HostMonster) where my website and blog reside. I’ll keep track of blog readers using an analytic service (Google), and when I’m traveling I might correct typos in the post using another blog editor (BlogPress) on my iPhone (Apple) communicating over cellular (AT&T) or WiFi (could be anyone) circuits. Much of today’s IT is like this: it involves user-owned technologies like computers and phones combined in complicated ways with cloud-based services from outside providers. We’re always partly in the cloud, and partly on the ground, partly in control and partly at the mercy of providers.

Mélanges like this are pretty much the norm these days. And not just when people are working from home as I often do: the same is increasingly true at the office, for faculty and staff, and in class and dorms, for students. It’s true even of the facilities and services we might still think of as institutional: administrative systems and core services, for example.

The mélanges are complex, as I already pointed out, but their complexity goes beyond technical integration. That’s the second difference between the past and the present: not only does IT involve a lot of interrelated yet distinct pieces, but the pieces typically come from outside providers – the cloud, in the current usage. Those outside providers operate outside campus control.

Group the items I listed in my ten-years-ago list above into four categories: servers and data centers, central services and applications, personal computers and workstations, and the networks that interconnect them. Now consider how IT is on today’s campus:

• Instead of buying new servers and housing them in campus buildings, campuses increasingly create servers within virtualization environments, house those environments in off-campus facilities perhaps provided by commercial hosting firms, and use the hosting firm’s infrastructure rather than their own.
• A rapidly growing fraction of central services is outsourced, which means not only that servers are off campus and proprietary, but that the applications and services are being administered by outside firms.
• Although most campuses still operate wired and wireless networks, users increasingly reach “campus” services through smartphones, tablets, web-enabled televisions, and portable computers whose default connectivity is provided by telephone companies or by commercial network providers.
• Those smartphones, tablets, and televisions, and even many of the portable computers, are chosen, procured, configured, and maintained individual users, not by the institution.

This migration from institutional to external or personal control is what we mean by “cloud services”. That is, the key change is not the location of servers, the architecture of applications, the management of networks, or the procurement of personal computers. Rather, it is our willingness to give up authority over IT resources, to trade control for economy of scale and cost containment. It’s Attack Plan R.

The tradeoff has at least four important consequences. Three of these have received widespread attention, and I won’t delve into them here: ceding control to the cloud

• can introduce very real security, privacy, and legal risks,
• can undercut long-established mechanisms designed to produce effective user support at minimal cost, and
• can restructure IT costs and funding mechanisms.

I want to focus here on the fourth consequence. Ceding control to the cloud necessarily entails a fundamental shift in the role of central and departmental IT organizations. This shift requires CIOs and IT staff to change their ways if they are to continue being effective – being Rippers, Kongs, or Turgidsons won’t work any more.

Most important, cloud-driven loss of campus control over the IT environment means that organizational and management models based on ownership, faith, authority, and hierarchy – however benevolent, inclusive, and open – will give way to models based on persuasion, negotiation, contracting, and assessment. It will become relatively less important for CIOs to be skilled at managing large organizations, and more important for them to know how to define, specify, and measure costs and results and to negotiate intramural agreements and extramural contracts consistently. Cost-effective use of cloud services also requires standardization, since nothing drives costs up and vendors away quite so quickly as idiosyncrasy. Migration to the cloud thus requires that CIOs understand emerging standards, especially for database schemas, security models, virtualization, system interfaces, and on and on. It requires that CIOs understand that strength lies in numbers – especially in campuses banding together to procure services rather than in departures from the norm, however innovative.

Almost as important, much of what campuses now achieve through regulation they will need to achieve through persuasion – policy will give way to pedagogy as the dominant mechanism for guiding users and units. I serve on the operations advisory committee for a federal agency. To ensure data and program integrity, the agency’s IT organization wanted to revise policies to regulate staff use of personal computers and small mobile devices to do their work from home or while traveling. It became rapidly clear, as the advisory committee reacted to this, that although it was perfectly possible to write policies governing the use of personal and mobile devices, most of those policies would be ignored unless the agency mounted a major educational campaign. Then it became clear that if there were a major educational campaign, this would minimize the need for policy changes. This is the kind of transition we can imagine in higher education: we need to help users to do the right thing, not just tell them.

On occasion I’ve described my core management approaches as “bribery” and “conspiracy”. This meant that as CIO my job was was to make what was best for the university also be what was most appealing to individuals (that’s “bribery”), and that figuring out what was best for the university required discussion, collaboration, and agreement among a broad array of IT and non-IT campus leaders (“conspiracy”). As control gives way to the cloud for campus IT, these two approaches become equally relevant to vendor relations and inter-institutional joint action. We who provide information technology to higher education need to work together to ensure that as we lose control over IT resources we don’t also lose influence.

This is the third and final of my ruminations on this topic. Some years ago, about halfway through my UChicago CIOship, I wrote this:

…it is bad news when a dean at my university not only knows who I am and what I do, but doesn’t like it. Suppose the dean wants to buy nonstandard equipment through a nonstandard channel. On the university’s behalf, I object to those choices; I also believe that the entire purchase is unnecessary because the equipment would allow the dean’s school to duplicate existing services that the university provides centrally. The dean responds by arguing that the interests of individual schools should outweigh collective university interests, and that having a chief information officer — that’s me — serves no useful purpose. To the dean, my job seems to consist entirely of interfering in school affairs.

I quoted this passage from “A CIO’s Question: Will You Still Need Me When I’m 64?, a 2002 opinion piece in the Chronicle, in an EDUCAUSE presentation because it had gotten me in trouble. Although it was based on a particular dean in one institution, a different dean at a different institution thought it was about him, and wasn’t happy. The lesson I drew from that — that specificity is sometimes better than generality, and that readers identify with abstracted characters — remains important.

But that’s not my theme today. Rather, I want to revisit the arguments I made in “A CIO’s Question…”, and see how their validity has evolved. My core argument was that it remains important for colleges and universities to have a Chief Information Officer or CIO. By “CIO” I meant not necessarily someone with that exact title, but rather someone providing central, comprehensive leadership for the institution’s information-technology activities and policies.

Technologies have a lifecycle. Initial implementation often requires central initiative and guidance. In due course, however, many technologies mature sufficiently to no longer require central oversight. For example, “most colleges and universities now have pervasive networks,” I wrote, “accessible to everyone everywhere. Users interact directly with administrative and academic systems. E-mail, instant messaging, and cellphones are everyday tools. Information technology is a utility like electric power, available consistently and pervasively across most of higher education” — and therefore requiring crisp operational management rather than high-level leadership. I cited other examples of areas no longer requiring central attention: the promotion of instructional technologies, and the support of local computer users (more on that in my recent post “Help! I need somebody.“)

Yet there remain at least four good, interlinked reasons for colleges and universities to have CIOs, I wrote: properly integrating central systems, securing economies of scale in operations and procurement, promulgating and accepting standards to enable those first two, and advocating for strategic applications of IT across the institution’s academic and administrative domains.

These seem valid justifications for the CIO role today. Yet one hears challenges to traditional CIOship: distributing responsibility for IT across diverse separate entities, downgrading the role and importance of the CIO, and managing what remains of central IT as merely one utility among many.

It’s important to parse these trends carefully. What appears to be coherent movement in the wrong direction may actually be discrete movement in several right directions. Moreover, although it remains important that there be central leadership for institutional IT, it may no longer be important — or even feasible — that there be central control. (More on the demise of control in an upcoming post.)

As technologies mature, they enable decentralization. As the strategic importance of IT increases, it becomes dangerous for an institution to entrust it to a single individual, especially if that individual speaks the language of technology rather than the language of higher education, or if that individual is organizationally and geographically isolated. And a large fraction of IT is indeed a critical utility, one whose failure can jeopardize the institution, and so much of IT must be managed as such.

What appears to be the downgrading of IT may instead be an evolving recognition — however imperfect — of its increasing importance. Then again, it may be the downgrading of IT, or the political dilution of a CIO’s perceived power. We need to understand which is which: to think about the evolving CIO role thoughtfully rather than simplistically, rather than focus on its scope of authority, its precise location in organization charts, or its title and reporting line.

The challenge for a CIO is to ensure that his or her institution uses IT to its maximum long-term benefit. To achieve that, it’s important to hold onto what’s important in one’s particular institutional and technological context, while letting go of what isn’t.

This post, in somewhat modified and expanded form, appears as “Shrinking CIO?” in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (January/February 2011)