This paper was presented at the 1997 CAUSE annual conference and is part of the conference proceedings, "The Information Profession and the Information Professional," published online by CAUSE. The paper content is the intellectual property of the author. Permission to print out copies of this paper is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and the source is acknowledged. To copy or disseminate otherwise, or to republish in any form, print or electronic, requires written permission from the author and CAUSE. For further information, contact CAUSE at 303-449-4430 or send e-mail to [email protected].

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.²
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Introduction

Strategic planning for technology is a topic that has received so much attention that it hardly seems worthy of further discussion. The CAUSE website, for example, includes dozens of articles on strategic planning as well as copies of technology plans that have been contributed by more than 80 colleges and universities. What more needs to be said? Apparently, a great deal. In an effort to investigate strategic technology planning we queried more than 150 technology officers in higher education around the country.³ The results were surprising. Roughly 10% of the our respondents indicated that they simply didn’t do strategic technology planning at all, saying that it is a frustrating, time-consuming endeavor that distracts rather than contributes to the real work of building and maintaining an adequate technology infrastructure.

Yet, the vast majority of technology officers devote a considerable amount of their time and energy engaged in strategic and financial planning. In most cases, their efforts follow the traditional model of institutional planning whereby a committee or task force gathers information, conducts interminable discussions about what the institution "really" needs, and ultimately drafts a huge document that meets with overwhelming approval by all three of the people who actually have time to read it. The relevance of the document to day-to-day operations, the quality of services, and the implementation of new initiatives is often questionable, though oddly enough few people seem to be concerned about this. There is something about the development of a strategic plan for technology that makes it eminently worthwhile despite these shortcomings. It is our contention, in this paper, that the real benefit of strategic technology planning lies with the process and not the plan. The traditional focus on the creation of a document diverts our attention from the important underlying work of building a shared vision for the role of technology within an institution. The disparity between strategic objectives and operational goals is not accidental; while the former need to be stable and comprehensive, the latter need to be agile and responsive to rapid changes in technology and users’ needs.

We believe that strategic planning for technology is not an oxymoron, yet a failure to recognize the special characteristics of technology planning can result in a great deal of wasted time, energy, and resources, leading to the type of cynicism we frequently encounter. Many technology officers, however, intuitively grasp the essence of good planning and achieve impressive results with a minimum of frustration. Our goal in this paper is to bring these underlying practices and perspectives together into an explicit — and relatively simple — model of a good planning process.

To many people, both inside and outside of information technology, the reason for technology planning seems apparent: It is to look ahead and determine what forms of hardware, software, and technical support will be required to meet the future needs of the institution. In conversations with more than 150 technology officers, however, this "obvious" goal hardly surfaced at all. Indeed, most technology officers express skepticism about anyone’s ability to accurately predict what technology will be needed more than a year or two into the future. The motivations for strategic technology planning that were actually mentioned were:

• aligning technology with other institutional priorities

• disseminating knowledge about technology needs and constraints

• building alliances with key decision-makers

• lobbying for (and obtaining) financial and other resources

• addressing existing technology needs

• keeping an eye on the leading edge

Aligning technology with other institutional priorities – Technology organizations that seem to be most successful are those whose agendas clearly serve the priorities of their institutions. Without a strategic planning process for technology, it may be difficult to identify the connection between technology initiatives and the institutional goals they support.

Disseminating knowledge about technology needs and constraints – The strategic planning process is an essential vehicle for dispensing information to the community about current operations, achievements, and constraints of the information technology enterprise. There is a likelihood that members of the community will pay greater attention to this type of information during a planning exercise because it is provided in the context of goals that are of importance to them.

Building alliances with key decision-makers – In order for a technology effort to be successful, key individuals within the community — faculty, senior officers, and others — must understand the importance of an initiative and, to some extent, "take ownership" of it. This type of understanding and endorsement is best achieved when those individuals play a role in the formulation of the initiative itself, i.e., during the planning process.

Lobbying for (and obtaining) financial and other resources – Financial resources are critical to virtually all information technology efforts. (We are, unfortunately, in a very expensive business.) Except in rare instances, the strategic planning process is the primary means by which required funding levels for technology are identified and funding commitments are obtained.

Addressing existing technology needs – Many technology officers indicate that strategic planning is often a "reactive" process for accommodating current unmet needs. This is not quite as negative as it sounds. It represents an approach to technology that relies on "proven" needs to drive future enhancements. While it does not propel institutions into technological leadership it helps them to optimize the use of scarce resources and to avoid costly mistakes. This approach is especially valuable for smaller or less wealthy institutions.

Keeping an eye on the leading edge – Some institutions, however, use strategic planning to track the leading edge in order to gain competitive advantage with respect to faculty and student recruitment, research, and other priorities. This approach is limited primarily to research universities, technical institutions, and other colleges and universities that have decided to make advanced technology a centerpiece of their institutional agenda.

As you will note, these goals have more to do with social, political, and economic concerns than they do with technological issues. This is underscored by the fact that the most common trigger for a strategic planning process is the arrival of a new chief academic or chief information officer. When responsibility for information technology falls into new hands, the need for a "strategic technology plan" suddenly becomes a top priority. Understanding the non-technological aspects of technology planning can help shed light on why so much of technology planning can be an unparalleled waste of time.

Some technology officers and a surprising number of chief academic officers⁴ believe that the technology planning fails because: "technology evolves too rapidly" or "there will never be enough resources to satisfy technology demands" or "users have no way of knowing what they will need in the future." Many of our respondents provided a different set of answers. They cited:

• failure to tie technology to institutional mission and priorities

• failure to get the right people on board

• excessive focus on technical detail

• lack of suitable leadership

Failure to tie technology to institutional mission and priorities – The number one reason technology officers cited for the failure of their strategic planning was that it was "orphaned" because it is done independently of the institutional planning process⁵. In order for technology planning to be successful the exercise must be broadly understood within the community as something that contributes to the institutional mission. More specifically, technology planning must be explicitly linked to teaching and research activities, fund-raising, recruitment, and other institutional priorities in a way that reveals the cost-benefit relationship between technological resources and the institution’s ability to pursue its goals. Too many technology planning efforts take these relationships for granted rather than making them explicit.

It's critical to remember that a plan is a statement about priorities and their implementation given our best knowledge at planning time, and that all kinds of events will cause the unfolding of history to differ from the plan.

- Greg Jackson, Assoc. Provost for Information Technology University of Chicago

Failure to get the right people on board – Each institution, at any given time, has a number of key decision-makers who can push technology plans forward or make them grind to a halt. Unless such people are brought into the technology planning process in an effective way, the process can be crippled. In some cases, however, these critical people don’t want to participate in technology planning. They may be unfamiliar with or openly hostile to technology. Focusing on outcomes (i.e., institutional benefits) rather than technical details is a key to gaining their attention and involvement. Ignoring them is not a sensible option.

Excessive focus on technical detail – For many reasons, focusing on technical details in a strategic planning process can be counter-productive. As mentioned above, it dampens the interest of vital participants; it tends to obscure, rather than illuminate genuinely "strategic" issues; and it’s relevance diminishes quickly when the planning looks at a horizon of more than a few months. The issue of whether or not to provide network access to residence halls is strategic; the decision of whether to achieve this by installing copper, fiber, or wireless transponders is not. An extraordinary amount of energy (and money) is wasted on efforts to define — sometimes to the level of specific hardware configurations — the type of technology that should inhabit desktops and conduits years into the future. There are miles and miles of dark fiber in the ground that provide silent testimony to such mistakes.

Lack of suitable leadership – Strategic planning processes can suffer as badly from too much leadership as they can from too little. Anecdotes abound of chief technology officers who assume a mantle of "techno-mysticism" and exercise near-total control over the planning process. The community is tacitly asked to trust that the information organization and its officers will "do what’s best." At the opposite end of the spectrum are technology officers who serve as little more than clerks to the planning process, allowing committees or campus communities to "vote with their feet" on new directions for technology. Suitable leadership for technology planning requires the chief technology officer to guide the process along, identify critical choice points, solicit input, and insure that personal agendas (including one’s own) do not divert the process from serving the broader needs of the community.

It appears that there are some common practices that contribute to healthy technology planning processes, regardless of the size and type of institution. The following "10-step" method is an effort to fuse these practices into a comprehensive approach. This approach should be viewed as a model — to be adapted to fit the individual needs of a campus — not as a blueprint to be rigidly followed.

A guiding principle of this method is to separate the long-term "functional" aspects of a technology strategy from the short-term "practical" aspects, while nevertheless insuring coherence between the two components. The first five steps of the method focus on the functional overview; the latter five on practical implementation.

Step 1 – Review institutional objectives – Before initiating any strategic technology to engage key people, i.e., senior officers, deans, faculty, etc., in preliminary conversations about the technology planning initiative in order to bring them into the process, identify their priorities, and solicit feedback on ways in which technology might (or might not) support the institutional objectives they consider to be most critical. This first step, while obviously vital for new technology officers, is equally important for long-time incumbents. Too often, experienced technology officers take this step for granted, only to discover that players and priorities have changed and long-standing assumptions are no longer valid. Needless to say, this type of oversight can lead to disaster.

Step 2 – Establish a framework of strategic technology objectives – In order to build a framework of strategic objectives, a broad effort must be made to survey all institutional constituencies. Typically, this involves the distribution of a survey instrument to selected "focus groups" in order to solicit information about problems, unmet needs, future goals, and so forth⁶. An exercise of this sort is likely to consume several months, hence it should be performed, ideally, at five year intervals. It is especially important to strike a balance between focusing survey questions on institutional priorities and allowing respondents sufficient latitude to express individual objectives. Above all, this type of solicitation should concentrate on strategic functional objectives rather than on technological details. The outcome should be a fairly brief annotated list of pedagogical, research, administrative, communications, or similar objectives that can be directly enhanced through the application of existing or new technologies.

I no longer believe that you must involve hundreds of people and survey every portion of the campus. An experienced and knowledgeable IT leader can develop an excellent plan with the help of small committees of major users.

- Herb Nickles, Executive Director of Information Systems, Smith College

Step 3 – Prioritize objectives – Even in a small institution, the list derived from Step 2 can be sizable. It is necessary, therefore, to identify broad points of convergence and to prioritize them according to costs and benefits. For political reasons, this step needs to be taken by an appropriate campus technology committee rather than the chief technology officer or the IT organization. Ideally, such a committee should include representation from all constituencies (i.e., faculty, students, staff, library, IT organization, etc.) as well as key financial, academic, and administrative officers. While the prioritized list should provide an explanation of how the objectives relate to wider institutional concerns — and some discussion of costs and benefits — it should be as brief as possible, a memo rather than a tome. For most institutions, the days of 80 page strategic technology plans are gone, hopefully forever. The effective horizon of the list should not be more than five years.

Step 4 – Key group review – Before the framework of strategic objectives is finalized it should be vetted among key groups — such as the institution’s senior staff — to allow critical decision-makers an opportunity to consider financial and policy ramifications of the objectives. If such groups don’t have a chance to review the objectives, substantial obstacles to their implementation may arise further down the road. In some cases, it may be necessary for these groups and the technology committee to iteratively refine the framework until consensus is achieved.

Step 5 – Disseminate strategic technology framework – The outcome of Step 4 should then be made available to the community at large. The brevity of the document should permit many forms of distribution, ranging from an article in the school newspaper to a posting on an electronic bulletin board or a campus web page.

Step 6 – Translate objectives into operational goals – In an ideal world, the entire process outlined in Steps 1 through 5 should consume no more than six months and should be repeated every five years. On an annual basis, however, the information technology organization must identify operational goals that can be used to address the strategic objectives. The initial development of these technical goals should not require broad input from the community; indeed, delegating this level of decision-making to committees or end-users is often counter-productive.

The discussions need to be managed and to take place in a context that does not have a "rah-rah" tone. I don't mean to say that advocacy is less of an issue these days, but that it needs to be more attentive to ROI and the expected value that technology adds to an activity or institutional function.

- Raney Ellis, Assoc. VP for Information Systems, University of Puget Sound

Step 7 – Discuss operational goals with key people – The annual list of operational goals developed by the IT organization should be circulated to key financial, academic, and administrative people to obtain feedback and support for changes in technology, services, procedures, policies, etc.

Step 8 – Disseminate operational goals – The list of operational goals should be made available to the community at large to insure that there is sufficient awareness of technical innovations and their strategic benefits to users.

It is important to solicit input from all campus constituencies

Step 9 – Enable continuous input – Members of the community should be invited and encouraged to express their technology needs to the IT organization on an ongoing basis. Such items should feed into annual assessments of progress towards completion of operational goals.

Step 10 – Retrospective assessment – Progress towards annual goals should be evaluated each year, prior to the development of the following year’s goals; similarly, an assessment of progress towards strategic objectives should be generated as a prelude to each five-year strategic planning exercise. As with the documents that describe objectives and operational goals, assessments should be as brief as possible, indicating targets that have been reached, as well as the reasons why targets have been missed, modified, or abandoned.

For many people, strategic technology planning is just another name for long-term financial planning. While this is a somewhat parochial view, it nonetheless underscores the central role of funding issues in technology planning. Traditionally, strategic funding requests and allocations involve many layers of authority and a substantial amount of justificatory detail, regardless of whether an institution is large or small, public or private. The amount of time it takes to analyze funding needs, gain approvals, and locate (or create) resources, is often "out of synch" with the windows of opportunity for technological innovation. Anecdotal evidence of this is plentiful. By the time an institution has dotted the last "i" and crossed the last "t" on capital funding for a campus-wide network the envisioned technology may have changed sufficiently to render the plan obsolete.

One way to address this problem is to earmark a significant amount of fungible capital resources for technology and allow it to be allocated as required. While it may not be possible to justify future technology needs in detail, good planning should permit an institution to estimate the level of financial resources that it can and should devote to technology for a period of several years. A further refinement of this approach is to create a "rapid reaction fund" as part of the annual technology operating budget. By allowing unused funds to carry forward across fiscal years, an institution can establish the type of budgetary flexibility that will allow it to maintain technical stability despite the peaks and valleys in user demand, infrastructure modification, and technology innovations.

Fungibility can also be increased with respect to staffing. Typically, institutions struggle with the choice of either outsourcing or providing internal support for technical operations. The problem of recruiting and retaining qualified staff — along with rapid changes in required skill-sets — impels many colleges and universities towards selective outsourcing, despite their apprehensions about having staff members whose primary loyalties lie outside of the institution. There is a third alternative: closed-end contracts. Recognizing that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep high-quality technical employees for more than three years, some institutions are making a virtue of necessity and designating certain positions as multi-year contract positions. While the turnover rate remains high, it occurs with far greater predictability, hence with less disruption. More importantly, it enables the institution to modify position requirements as technology and users’ needs change. It is, in some sense, a way of introducing fungibility into staffing, a concept which is largely alien to the traditions of higher education and which only makes sense in the context of a job market which is as competitive as that of high technology.

About ten years ago word started to circulate in higher education that the future of networking was going to be FDDI. Many institutions, in an effort to reduce future costs, began to pull dozens of strands of fiber into concentric rings around their campuses, into buildings, up to closets, and down to wallplates. Today there are untold miles of dark fiber lurking beneath our campuses and crowding conduits within our walls. Although FDDI has been used in many places, alternative technologies such as fast ethernet, have vastly superseded it. Much of the visionary network planning of the late 1980’s appears oddly naive in hindsight. There is an important lesson in this for technology planners: within higher education, institutions are more likely to gain competitive advantage through technology if they are best rather than first. With the pace of technological innovation being as fast as it is, being the first one on the block to adopt a new platform or strategy yields little more than a quick flash of attention; establishing an environment where technological missteps are rare, where resources are optimally deployed, and where users are continually satisfied, is far more likely to serve the strategic needs of the institution and engender lasting, rather than transitory, recognition.

Within the past few years, a growing number of colleges and universities have sought external assistance from consultants or other institutions for their strategic technology planning. Many of them, particularly smaller institutions, have felt increasingly nervous about dealing with an area whose complexity, pervasiveness, and costs seem to be rising geometrically. However, reading someone else’s strategic technology plan or, worse still, hiring a consultant to guide the strategic planning process, can divert attention and resources from the real purpose of the exercise. In order for the planning process to be effective, it must be internally managed. If outside consulting is sought, it should be done late in the planning process, primarily to sprinkle holy water on the planning document rather than to initiate the planning exercise itself. Likewise, if plans from other institutions are reviewed it should be for the sake of examining operational goals and not to acquire inspiration about global strategies.

We should recognize that, if done properly, strategic technology planning is enormously valuable for our institutions. Flying by the seat of one’s pants may be a viable approach at some places and times, but for the majority of colleges and universities deliberate, well-orchestrated strategic and operational planning processes pay for themselves many times over. Keeping our eye on process rather than documents, separating and yet linking the five-year strategic exercise and the annual operational exercise, and above all, focusing on the relationship between technical innovation and institutional objectives, will enhance the value of any strategic technology planning effort.

We are grateful to the participants of the "Strategic Planning" birds-of-a-feather session held at Snowmass by the Seminars in Academic Computing, August, 1997, and to all those technology officers who responded to our e-mail inquiries. We are especially grateful to Herb Nickles (Smith), Raney Ellis (Puget Sound), Greg Jackson (Chicago), Don Wolfe (Brown), Fritz Hibbler (Wyoming), Larry Levine (Dartmouth), John Bucher (Oberlin), Dave Small (Hamilton), and Ardoth Hassler (Georgetown) for their extremely helpful comments. And we thank Kerri Creager (Reed) for her assistance in preparation of the manuscript.

Endnotes:

¹ Questions and correspondence may be sent by e-mail to Martin Ringle at [email protected] or Daniel Updegrove at [email protected].

² The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. Copyright (c) 1993, 1995 by Columbia University Press.

³ The authors coordinated a "birds-of-a-feather" session on this topic at the August 1997 meeting of the Seminars on Academic Computing in Snowmass, Colorado. Roughly 60 people attended. In November 1997, the authors conducted an e-mail inquiry on technology planning with more than 100 technology officers.

⁴ This question was discussed by chief technology officers, librarians, faculty, presidents, chief academic officers, and board members of 31 independent colleges and universities in the Pacific Northwest in a series of meetings held during the summer and early fall 1997, sponsored by the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust.

⁵ Only half of the chief technology officers we interviewed said that they were directly involved in strategic planning for their institutions.

⁶ In very small colleges and universities, face-to-face meetings with departments (or even individuals) might be practicable. At Reed, for example, all faculty members are interviewed every five years.