Critical Factors in Academic IT Planning

CAUSE 98

Paul J. Kobulnicky
Director of Libraries
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06268
[email protected]

Abstract

This work is derived from an academic information technology planning process undertaken at the University of Connecticut which resulted in a much clearer understanding of the role of technology and technology planning within the larger management of the university�s academic mission. Key components identified during this process exist in all institutions and are too frequently overlooked in action-oriented IT agendas. Fundamental to this analysis is the concept that an increased adoption of information technology is a strategy towards a larger vision and not an objective in an of itself. This presentation focuses on the importance of academic planning at the university, school and department level and the associated issues of academic leadership, sustainable funding models, analysis of productivity, the importance of communication, and of faculty motivation.

Introduction:

Information technology is one of the hottest topics on college and university campuses today largely because of vexing issues that continue to be unresolved and because of issues that receive significant media attention. We talk about the need for presidents, chancellors and provosts to wisely provide the proper campus context for technology to bloom and for our universities to be leaders in the use of technology, preparing our students to go forth as technologically sophisticated graduates. We talk about the large and accelerating costs of technology as we debate the intellectual pay-back of that investment. We talk about strong, focused IT leadership coming from key individuals with titles such as chief information officer and we cringe at the salaries necessary to attract suitable candidates for such positions � if they can be attracted at all. We talk about the difficulty in retaining and recruiting staff with strong technical knowledge and skills to make our transformations work. We talk about the need to replace massive legacy systems with new, client/server systems, implemented just in time for the next millennium. We talk about mandatory student ownership of computers and the need to provide optimal infrastructure and support services for such sweeping requirements. We talk about the coming move to technology-enabled distance / anytime, anyplace learning programs yet we ask whether technology actually improves learning. And we talk about how early adopters are showing us the way to move to new learning models through technology with little evidence that the work of early adopters has led to large-scale transformations. However, we talk about all of these issues in isolation or in mix-and-match pairings with technology as the issue rather than as an enabling tool. We seldom discuss the future of effective teaching, learning, research, and service and just how technology can be utilized as a strategic tool to enhance the success of those activities.

This paints a picture of an academy that has not yet come to grips with the decisions it should and must make about technology. We have all seen academic IT strategic plans: a vision statement followed by a series of largely IT centric objectives which usually have some basis in the "build it and they will come" popular philosophy. We concentrate on creating "enabling environments" and on letting "a thousand flowers bloom." We follow the classic path of supporting early adopters and hoping that some common practice will flow from their individual and unique successes - an ironically poor methodology for research institutions. If we are to begin to make progress in transforming our institutions through the use of information technology then we must create environments where investments in information technology are derived from a more comprehensive plan for achieving academic excellence.

For information technology to be effective in significantly transforming higher education, it must be seen as merely one parameter, albeit an important parameter, within a more comprehensive academic planning process. In expanding upon this thesis, I will begin by outlining what was a rather typical process of leading a technology planning effort at the University of Connecticut. This planning process was directed toward academic information technology but it is easily extendible to the broader higher education information technology milieu.

The University of Connecticut

I will briefly describe the University of Connecticut�s process but only to point out what I know to be universal within many other such processes. The University of Connecticut�s process led my colleagues and I to an awareness of the following issues: the importance of academic planning at the university, school and department levels; the qualities of leadership that are needed for IT investments to be effective; the characterizations of sustainable funding models; factors of productivity as related to both workloads and cost recovery; the importance of communication; and the critical issue of faculty incentives. By looking at these issues it becomes clear that if we are to plan IT investments wisely, we must begin to put the academic cart before technology�s horse.

The University of Connecticut began a strategic Academic IT planning process in the Spring of 1997. This planning effort was preceded by several other significant planning efforts. The University promulgated a broad strategic plan (Beyond 2000: Change http://vm.uconn.edu/~www2000/strapl.html) in 1994, with several significant task forces coming from that broader plan. The task forces directed the University�s attention to the topics of: resource allocation, program assessment, the undergraduate experience, research, the regional campuses, outreach, and multiculturalism. It is important to note that the need for the University to develop a strategic position on the role of technology in the future of the institution was not mentioned in the original strategic report nor was it mentioned with any clarity or importance in any of the subsequent task force reports. With the University�s strategic plan providing no sense of the level of technological investment expected but with university leaders touting the University as a technological leader in our state and with technology itself exerting inexorable, external pressure on the University for continued investment and reinvestment, confusion and waste seemed expected. In this environment, and with a sense that the university was not making optimal use of technology, two planning efforts were undertaken.

In the late Fall of 1996 an MIS planning team was set up to investigate ways to improve the University�s MIS environment. From this effort, plans were initiated to begin a conversion of legacy administrative systems to contemporary client-server systems and a parallel effort was begun to pilot a data-warehouse environment. In the Spring of 1997, a strategic planning committee was formed to consider the coordination and improvement of Academic Information Technology (AIT). From the position of Director of Libraries, I was asked to chair this committee. The AIT planning committee was a large, representative group, populated mostly by teaching faculty. It was from the work of this committee and through an analysis of the committee�s vision statement, that critical issues in IT planning began to emerge. We knew of many other IT planning processes in higher education and how the plans that resulted made changes that did little to transform their institutions. We wanted to avoid the same fate.

The vision statement (University of Connecticut AIT Final Report at www.uc2000.uconn.edu/aitrpt12.htm ) that we crafted was similar to many others in higher education. It reads as follows:

The vision statement is rather straight forward and not dissimilar to many others that exist in higher education. What led us to new insights was our collective analysis of where the University of Connecticut was with respect to the vision and what supported and inhibited us from attaining that vision.

We knew that the leadership of academic information technology planning and implementation processes was in the hands of technologists while the leadership of the planning and implementation of academic programs was in the hands of deans and department chairpersons. While faculty were often involved in both planning processes, and while technology may have had a role in both arenas, these planning efforts were separate and were most likely working toward different outcomes. The faculty who served on the AIT planning committee all reported that the discussions of the fundamental roles of technology in which the AIT committee were engaged were not occurring at the school and departmental levels. Furthermore, the committee members felt that coordination between academic and technological planning processes was essential to the success of both processes. From these general committee observations, it is possible to derive some of the most important, and all too often missing, roles of institutional leadership with respect to technology.

Leadership

Presidents and provosts must either set their own visions for the future of the University or they must advocate for a more collectively developed vision. In either case, they must enable the University to establish a clear understanding of the degree of investment in information technology. The purpose of such an understanding is to address transformation and/or spending. The academic leader must articulate the degree of transformation expected in the university�s basic mission and the role that modern telecommunications and information technologies should play in that transformation. Said in a different way, the effective integration of information technology requires process analysis and process re-engineering to enable technology to replace human labor. It is not in the typical university�s culture to consider what we do in teaching, research and service as a "process" let alone to analyze it or reengineer it. If we are to analyze and reengineer our academic processes as we must, the pressure to do so must come from the university�s most senior leadership. The issue of leadership can also (or alternatively) be pointed to the more simple matter of spending. Academic leadership can articulate a position that the institution will operate in rather traditional ways but will invest scarce resources to provide a technically rich support environment.

The expectations and responsibilities of technology leadership are also changing. The movement in higher education to a chief information officer model recognizes that the institution, if it is to be successful, must begin to think about the strategic issues of technology as a transformative tool, and of the potential for technology to enable transformation. In addition, the new IT leader must be able to recognize that new technologies are designed to integrate functions and the result of such integration is the need for a much higher degree of cooperation and collaboration than ever before. Most importantly, the new IT leader must be able to communicate and coordinate the transformative and integrative potential of IT to academic leaders to enable informed academic planning. This contrasts with the older more managerial models of IT leadership where the focus of leadership has been on the selection and implementation of particular technologies to provide an innovative yet robust technological environment. While selection and implementation of technologies are still important they now must be accomplished in a manner that is driven by academic priorities rather than by advances in technology for its own sake.

The historical development of IT in the academy has been one of individual adoption and development. Whether through research uses of technology or through experimentation in instruction, most advances have been led by scholars and faculty working as individuals. The reader should use his or her own experience to consider how few national and regional meetings on the use of technology in the academy are attended by academic deans and department chairs in their official capacity. If these individuals attend at all, it is typically because he or she either has a personal interest in technology as a teacher or scholar, or because he or she has an associated IT administrative responsibility within his or her institution. Information technology leadership at the dean or department head level for the purposes of transforming schools or programs is under-developed in higher education and is one of the chief reasons that universities are still in an "experimental" mode with respect to IT enabled transformations. If we are indeed to be effective in a strategic use of information technology, the transformation of the university must be led by academic leaders at all levels and must be strategically informed and supported by IT leadership. The involvement of academic leaders is critical given their role in budget and resource allocation decisions.

Sustainable Funding Models.

Higher education has struggled, and continues to struggle, to provide stable and predictable funding streams for technology. Institutions have instituted student fees, sought external gifts and soft money, and increased their deferred maintenance levels to keep up with the increasing demands for IT funding. Central IT has seen demand for services skyrocket out of control with little proportional increase in budget support. Deans and division heads have been unable to increase their consumption share of central IT services and have struggled to keep up with replacement costs let alone with the funds needed for new services in their units. Most university budgeting schemes create enough ambiguity about budget responsibilities for infrastructure and overhead (see for example most university telephone cost-recovery schemes) that few understand who is ultimately responsible for what IT costs. There is too much budgetary ambiguity in an area so critical to the strategic future of the institution. If we are to be successful in moving our organizations forward with technology then we must have a firm understanding of what costs are needed for what services and from which budgets those costs will be covered.

As IT services become an integral part of each institution’s operation, so must they become a part of each institution’s budget plan. One of the very first issues that must be identified is the set of goods and services that will be provided centrally and the rules or standards for consumption of those central resources. The institution must have a control mechanism for "free" goods and the control mechanism should be designed to further the strategic interests of the institution as a whole. The funding of central services must accurately reflect the extent to which their services must perform to properly enable the academic and academic support services to perform their mission and must reflect proper growth into the future. Central services are then funded off the top and other units are left to independently fund the remaining services. In constructing this central services model, it is clear that the rules of the game must be known and that central services growth must be carefully planned so as to permit effective planning at the operational unit level.

With IT becoming more ubiquitous in all university functions, spending on IT at the local level is bound to grow. Increasingly, schools and departments will entirely fund their own hardware, software, systems support and user support. Academic units will also directly fund instructional support personnel. In fact, as we move into the future and as IT is more fully integrated into a business-like plan for each academic unit, costs that are direct to that unit and contribute to the cost-revenue picture of that unit will be funded by that unit. It is well known that the budgets of most academic units are heavily dominated by faculty salaries. However, academic units must increasingly consider the dynamic relationship among costs, revenues, salaries and investments in technology.

Productivity

In the for-profit sector, the metric for measuring success in the implementation of IT is simple. It is either increasing corporate profit or decreasing corporate loss through increased revenues or decreased costs. In the not-for-profit sector, IT must be viewed in a largely analogous manner. Technology investments must be seen as a way to maintain or enhance the value of the enterprise in its community, within budget. For higher education this means the community feels it is getting good value from the institution in instruction, research and/or service relative to the institution’s budget (an issue causing some current concern). Not-for-profit budgets still often look much like corporate budgets with variable income streams and the generation of a certain amount of return on investment. In this respect we can look at decreased costs or increased revenues. However, colleges and universities are also service industries where service ethics are so strong that anything that improves services or improves the community’s estimation of the quality of service seems justified, no matter what the cost. Because of this, higher education tends to argue for increased budgets to implement technology rather than look for ways in which productivity gains can either lower costs or increase income.

In higher education, there are several models for addressing productivity gains through information technology. The implementation of IT can lower costs, especially on the business support side. IT can theoretically lower costs on the academic side but great care has to be taken not to lower quality. There has been too little investigation of how academic use of technology can lower costs and retain or increase quality. The creation of an IT-rich environment can increase the perceived or real value of the educational experience by providing technology skills training along with academic learning. In the private institution setting this can lead to a decision to raise tuition to cover the costs of the technology-rich experience that might be highly sought after by students (see for example the actions of Wake Forest University.) In the public institution setting this might lead to increased governmental support by agencies that recognize the value added to graduates of such a program. However, seldom have causal relationships between revenues and technology expenditures been addressed in such a straightforward manner.

Productivity gains through the use of information technology require that the processes that are affected be analyzed so that productivity gains or service improvements are, more often than not, expected results rather than unforeseen windfalls. Productivity gains through IT investment often demand standardized processes within which technology can be applied in a predictable manner. Standardization in the delivery of teaching and learning is not a common occurrence in higher education. To find ways to successfully transform teaching, learning, research and service through technology, the academy must engage faculty in significant discussions about the core competencies of faculty and which work that faculty now do might be better done by others and/or by technology. Motivating faculty to view their work in the academy differently is a significant issue.

Faculty Motivation

Higher education faculty are straining to find the time and energy that they need to do all that is asked of them. As most R1 universities insist that resource revenues increase or remain high despite an increasingly competitive funding environment, faculty, especially those in grant driven research disciplines, report spending up to 40% of their time just writing grant proposals. The requirement to renew the social relevance of the academy to the community has increased the demand for outreach activities. New, student-centered learning programs require not only more innovative preparation than before but more individualized attention to each student. Increased institutional income is related to increased enrollments yet increased enrollments require increased sections of courses offered. New initiatives for distance learning require vastly different kinds of preparation and delivery. Most importantly, early adopters of IT in instruction and learning report enormous overhead in course preparation. How is a faculty member to cope let alone be motivated?

Motivation of faculty is directly related to prestige. Whether through research as the primary grantor of prestige or through teaching or service, faculty can be motivated if it is clear that the action that they are being asked to take on will directly or indirectly add to their prestige within their peer community. Faculty can be motivated by the potential for increased prestige in two fundamental ways. The first, more consistent with current practice,is that they can be given more resources to support their independent scholarship. The primary resource that they can be given is their own time, either directly through reduced teaching and service commitments or indirectly through assistance. They can also be given, among other things, space, advanced equipment, travel support or access to highly skilled and specialized assistants. It should be noted that all of these fall under the rubric of the total resource pool of the greater institution. Faculty can also be motivated by prestige when they are an active part of a larger, groundbreaking effort in either teaching, research and/or outreach. Increasingly, and related to rewards, outreach often has the effect of granting the faculty members both the prestige of the general community and also market rewards for his/her expertise.

Information technology and faculty motivation come together in some very obvious ways. The most obvious is that since technology has the public’s eye, innovative uses of technology in either teaching, research or service provide an easy pathway to recognition and prestige. This has been the path that higher education has taken for the past 40 years. It has been effective but it has been effective in what has generally been a period of increasing resources, where the added costs of technological innovation could be found within the margins of budgetary increases. In a period of steady or decreasing resources, the costs of technological support for individual activity to gain prestige must be measured against other opportunity costs. Technology can be made to pay for itself and gain prestige for the faculty if it is used to: generate additional research income because of the advanced nature of the use of technology; generate greater tuition revenues per student; or enable the teaching of greater numbers of tuition paying students with the same expenditure of faculty resources. The key issue in all of these models is that as long as resources are limited, the motivation of faculty is a question of the decisions to be made on the allocation of resources. In fact, if one looks at an advanced integration of information technology and the factors of leadership, allocation of resources, productivity and faculty motivation, one looks at the nature and quality of academic planning in higher education.

Academic Planning

One of the interesting issues of technology planning on university campuses is that such planning has primarily focused on the technology itself. Traditional technology planning processes have made assumptions about the future of teaching, research, service and the business of higher education and then have moved on to create technologically rich environments that can support as many options derived from the academic assumptions as possible. We have planned from the position of not knowing where changes in teaching, research and service will take us and planned to be as well prepared to support change when and where it occurs … just in case rather than just in time. While some factors of change are external to higher education and not under its control, much is controllable with proper planning. Planning in higher education has not often been carried out to identify, either in instruction, research or service, desirable markets or strategies to most effectively compete in those markets. We do not evaluate total costs to get an academic product to market and to compare those costs to potential revenue streams under various scenarios. Most importantly, we have not yet begun to think about the costs and benefits of information technology in our academic business plans.

Controversy over the pedagogical benefits of information technology still fills the news. It is difficult to find conclusive evidence that the use of technology is correlated at all with success in learning. That lack of correlation forces some in the academy to question the wisdom of the significant expenditures we make in IT. It certainly makes it difficult to understand whether there can or should be any return generated on that investment, return in the form of increased tuition revenues or increased governmental support. We are in this position because higher education has not yet learned how to plan to use technology in a deterministic way to either consciously improve the learning process or to engage in pilots that test the use of technology. If our investments in information technology are going to pay dividends on which we can rely, we must craft our academic planning process to more closely address the issues of the costs of technology investments and resource allocation to academic units.

We must start by having the faculty in their departmental or school planning efforts, consider where in their academic processes information technology investments can either reduce our costs, increase our market share or increase the value of our product so as to generate an increase in revenues. Technology has too often been viewed by faculty as they view office and laboratory space - as an entitlement or as a by-product of status or even research funding. Technology is seldom seen by faculty as an investment in them or in their departments and if it is, it is not with the expectation that such an investment should generate an expected return. That must change and it must change through active discussions led by academic, not technological, leaders.

We must also consider what has been happening over the past twenty years to the percentage of the university budgets devoted to information technology. University-wide investments in IT infrastructure and system-wide staffing must be costs that come off the top of the institution’s budget. If those costs increase from year to year more quickly than the institution’s budget, then we have the net result of decreases to school and departmental budgets. Proper academic planning must be both top down with respect to strategic directions and broad resource distribution and also, and very importantly, bottom up with respect to the manner in which individual actions can and will work to yield the greatest return on the investments of the academy’s greatest strength, its human resources. Academic planning processes in which faculty recognize how their programs can be strengthened with investments in IT and how those investments can leverage their own time and effort are most likely to succeed.

Summary

Universities are now moving into an era where their strength in human resources and associated intellectual capital can be leveraged as much as possible. Leadership in higher education must set more focused strategic directions for their institutions and set expectations for the level of IT investment in the overall institution. IT leadership must provide a new level of assistance to academic leaders on evaluating the potential for IT to improve the competitiveness of the university as well as its schools, departments and individual students, faculty and staff. IT investments should be such that all costs are identified and budgeted on a regular basis and that, to the degree possible, costs are borne by the units that receive the income from those investments. Investments in IT should be designed to decrease costs, increase income or redirect human resource utilization to free faculty to derive greater prestige for themselves and their institution. Finally, academic planning on our campuses must become more resource driven, with IT seen as an investment opportunity with expected returns.