Generating Academic Support for Information Systems Copyright 1990 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 1990. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its dateappear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301, 303-449-4430, e-mail info@CAUSE.colorado.edu GENERATING ACADEMIC SUPPORT FOR INFORMATION SYSTEMS by Paul Davenport ************************************************************************ Paul Davenport is President of the University of Alberta, Canada. He was formerly Professor of Economics and Vice Principal for Planning and Computer Services at McGill University, Quebec, Canada. In the latter position, he was responsible for institutional relations with Quebec government agencies, internal planning at McGill, and administrative and academic computing. Dr. Davenport's research in economics has centered on the theory of economic growth, the analysis of the productivity slowdown in Canada during the last two decades, and federal-provincial fiscal arrangements in Canada. ************************************************************************ ABSTRACT: This article describes a current dilemma on many college and university campuses: the desire to decrease and/or distribute central Information Systems (IS) resources concurrent with the emerging desire to pursue development of mission-critical systems that will require increased central IS support. The author outlines a number of areas in which such increased support is needed and describes the need for IS leadership, offering specific steps that can be taken to provide such leadership. Directors of Information Systems (IS) at many colleges and universities have faced a difficult dilemma in recent years, caused by declining budgets and rising expectations. A confusing signal seems to be coming from the academic leadership at these institutions. On the one hand, the academics seem convinced that the days of centralized IS are waning rapidly and that, as the institution switches to microcomputers and local area networks, it should be possible to reduce substantially the size of the IS staff. The case for cutting the IS establishment is strengthened by the need to cut overall budgets; in many universities, real resources available per student have fallen by 10 or 20 percent over the last decade. Alongside the request for downsizing, however, comes a contradictory message: the academic leadership is discovering an increasing number of areas where the pursuit of academic objectives requires more support by IS professionals. Indeed, the understanding among the academic leadership in most colleges and universities of the need for IS services is significantly greater now than it was five years ago. Thus, many IS directors find themselves in a difficult environment. Which message should they listen to -- that calling for budget cuts and staff reductions, or the urgent request for more support for academic initiatives? These inconsistent signals can lead to a growing feeling of insecurity and demoralization in the IS shop. The way out of this dilemma will come, in part, through leadership of the IS staff itself, especially the leadership of the chief information systems officer. The academic messages are often contradictory, which is not surprising. Professors, departmental chairs, and deans see only bits and pieces of the IS story; they cannot be expected without strong central leadership to understand the tradeoffs involved in reducing the IS budget and maintaining and expanding essential IS services. Indeed, there are a number of exciting challenges before us in the academic environment, and if they are met successfully they will greatly strengthen support for IS among the academic staff. Growing Criticism The problems of aging systems, inadequate staffing, and seemingly endless lists of high-priority but unfinished (or even unstarted) development projects are all too common to IS management in both the public and private sectors. Winning the hearts and minds of the academic leadership, especially in a large university, can be difficult for several reasons. * Apart from the use of IS in student records and payroll, many professors have little or no idea of what administrative computing consists, and tend to view spending on administrative systems as a necessary evil (like snow removal) or even a frill serving a particular interest group, i.e., IS[1] * As the microcomputer has appeared in the majority of academic offices, deans and chairs have found themselves with large unsupported costs for maintenance, software, and personnel needed for the micros under their jurisdiction. This often leads them to suggest transfers of resources from central computing to faculty budgets at the very moment when the demand for central IS services is rising. * Micros remove the mysteries of computing associated with mainframes ten or twenty years ago, and deans and chairs are increasingly saying, "Transfer all the resources to us, and we'll do the job of IS on micros" -- even in cases when such a transfer would greatly increase total costs or not allow for the provision of essential services. The difficulties of IS in this context have been exacerbated by three other factors, one external to IS and the other two internal. The external factor is the severe reduction in real institutional resources available per student over the last decade.[2] The result of such cuts in spending has often been the failure to keep up to date in such areas as building maintenance, scientific equipment for instruction, and IS. The effect of declining overall budgets on IS is compounded by an understandable skepticism among many academic leaders toward suggestions that technology, and in particular computing technology, can solve their day-to-day problems. A second problem for IS is the growing load of maintenance in most computing shops. The maintenance problem is not generally well understood by faculty involved in research computing, where programs tend to be used for limited periods and then replaced. Administrative systems, such as payroll and student records, tend to last forever and must be adapted to periodic changes in campus policies, so that the maintenance load grows steadily. The existence of new tools to confront this problem, such as computer-aided software engineering (CASE) technology, often complicates the life of an IS director, because senior management may believe mistakenly that all one needs to do is purchase a few such tools and the project backlog will magically disappear. The heavy investment required before such tools become productive, and the fact that they tend to shift the commitment of resources to the early stages of the systems development life cycle (while significantly reducing maintenance costs down the line), is not well understood.[3] A third factor in current IS difficulties is the failure of IS staff themselves to explain why adequate IS funding is vital to the academic mission of the institution. Too often in the past, the leadership on the IS side, from the top down, have been overly involved in the technical side of expanding administrative systems, and have reacted with indifference or impatience when outsiders not technically competent in IS have challenged their budgets and staffing. The hard times of the last decade have taught us in IS that we have no prior claim to any resources at all, and that in the future, explaining the academic need for a particular system will be as important as actually writing the system itself. It is vital in such discussions that IS staff stress the limitations and uncertainty of the advice they can give; precisely because there are so many options and uncertainties in large systems, IS staff need to seek maximum involvement in designing systems from the ultimate users. Attitudes of superiority or omniscience have no place on either side of such discussions. As recalled by Robert F. Goheen in a book published upon his retirement as president of Princeton University: A friend of mine was fond of saying, "If you want to persuade someone to your view, you can't afford to be more than 85 per cent right." It must be the awareness of human fallibility we all carry within us that makes the man without error so obnoxious to most of us[4] In this context, the IS experience parallels that of the institution as a whole: over the past decade university administrations have devoted more and more resources to making a case for the importance of adequate funding for higher education, as they realized that the days are long past when public and private funding would be increased simply because the universities asked for it. The question so often put by the academic leadership is, "Why should we invest in high-quality IS services?" This is a local example of the larger question often put put by the public, "Why should we invest in high-quality universities?" Just as the ability to answer the latter question and to explain the vital role of universities in modern society has become increasingly important in the selection of senior academic administrators, so too should the ability to communicate with academic administrators, and to demonstrate support for the academic mission, be a vital part of the profile of the director and senior staff of IS. The Growing Demand for IS Support by Academic Administrators If the message received from the academic leadership were consistently one of the need for downsizing IS, most directors of IS would willingly respond. After all, academic departments experience cycles of growth and decline (e.g., physics, law, engineering), so why should IS be insulated from the internal marketplace of supply and demand? If the need for IS services were demonstrably falling, IS directors would in most cases have no trouble in transferring their staff to other units in the institution which could make better use of them. The problem here is that in the midst of declining budgets and decentralized computing, we are also finding a growing number of areas where IS support is vital to the achievement of academic goals[5] Below are listed a number of areas, from admissions to research grants, in which pressure for greater IS support is coming on many campuses directly from the academic leadership, including the provost, academic vice presidents, deans, and chairs of academic departments. Some institutions already have sophisticated systems in many or all of these areas. Others find themselves pressured to catch up with these leaders in the IS area. In many cases, the pressures have been increased by financial difficulties over the past decade, as academic leaders seek to compete with their sister institutions in such areas as admissions, faculty recruitment, and services to students, without increasing overall costs. Admissions The very rapid increase of student numbers in universities in the 1960s and 1970s has given way to much slower growth in the 1980s and the early 1990s. The result has been a more aggressive competition among institutions for highly-qualified applicants. The interest in attracting the best students to a particular institution is widely shared among the academic leadership. All become impatient when they learn that an excellent applicant has received a tardy or uncertain response from the admissions office. The problem often turns out to be the failure of a hard-working admissions staff, which is simply buried in paper and entirely dependent on paper files, to respond to even simple questions concerning whether or not a particular letter of reference has been received, or whether an applicant's dossier is complete. Although much useful work in the admissions office can be done on micros (e.g., the generation of various form letters), central IS support is usually vital for automation of admissions because of the desire of all involved to tie admissions records into the existing mainframe-based student record system. Ideally, one would like a student record system that tracks a student from her application for admission to her alumni status for use in fund- raising. Since an institution's prestige and reputation is in large part a function of the quality of students it attracts, IS staff are in a position to remove an important bottleneck to the progress of the institution. Student aid and student fees Part of the effort to attract outstanding students at the undergraduate and graduate levels is the allocation of scholarships and other student aid to promising applicants. Without proper systems support, this can be a difficult task. Lacking current information on who has accepted and who has declined recent scholarship offers, and on the number of scholarships from prior years which have recently been renewed, those responsible for managing the scholarship funds often have to delay decisions on new allocations, thereby missing the chance to attract outstanding students. The difficulties increase when more than one office is able to offer scholarship assistance to a particular student. An on-line query system, which enables those involved to see exactly a student's current admission, scholarship, and fee status, can greatly improve efficiency. Such a system can also help in facilitating the registration process, particularly when registration is tied to a prior payment of fees, and fees are in some cases automatically paid from scholarships, while in other cases the payment of scholarships requires the prior payment of fees. Moreover, the efficiency of admissions offices and student aid offices is greatly increased when those involved have access to a standard, reliable annual report, indicating who was admitted, who received financial support, and how scholarship students admitted in previous years are performing in various departments and colleges. The requirements are increasingly sought by the deans and chairs who want to see standardized data not only for their own units, but for all departments in the institution. Degree audit and touch-tone registration In many institutions one result of the budget cuts of the last decade has been an increase in the administrative load which the average professor is expected to carry. The clerical tasks of student advising are an example of such administrative work. Faculty in many universities find themselves with long lines of students outside their offices at registration time. So great is the volume that faculty time is devoted almost entirely to filling in forms, with little opportunity for any real academic advising, a situation which creates frustration for both students and professors. The response at many institutions to this problem has been to use degree-audit and touch-tone registration systems to remove from the professor the burden of the mechanical parts of registration, so that she has more time to advise the student in depth on broader academic issues. Such advising need not be concentrated at registration time. In a well-functioning system, the student assumes a greater responsibility for the registration process, and for assuring, through the degree-audit system, that the requirements for particular majors and minors are in fact being fulfilled. At campuses without degree audit and touch-tone registration, there is growing pressure from the grassroots -- from professors and departmental chairs -- to institute such systems in order to reduce the clerical burden on academic staff. Timetabling and room scheduling The budget cuts of the last decade have put tremendous pressure on university space, not only because it is often necessary to fit more students and more classes into a given overall space, but also because the rapid growth of research at many universities has required increases in research space that come partly at the expense of classrooms. Moreover, at many universities there is growing pressure to increase the size of instructional laboratories, including computer laboratories, which again cuts into classroom areas. As chairs, deans, and vice presidents wrestle with the problem of how to shoe-horn more activities into a given space, the need for centralized coordination of timetabling and room scheduling, with associated systems support, has become increasingly evident, even at universities with a tradition of decentralized responsibility in these areas. If 80 percent of the large classes in the university are held between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., or if a large class in college A has no room, even though a suitable classroom under the control of college B is two-thirds empty at the same hour, space is not being used efficiently. Not only is good systems support required in the longer term planning of timetabling and room scheduling, but it is also vital to the rapid decisions which must be made at the start of each term, as rooms are shuffled from course to course and school to school to meet unexpectedly large or small classes. Alumni and development support Part of the response to financial difficulties in most universities has been an increased effort to encourage private giving, both from alumni and other donors. At some universities during the past decade, the involvement of the academic leadership of the institution, including deans and department chairs, has increased remarkably. Once the preserve of a select group of professionals on campus, alumni and development work is now becoming of direct interest to academic administrators, who see their own goals in research and teaching as dependent upon specific fund-raising initiatives. The systems support necessary for broader participation in development activities, and for reaching out on a more personal level to the institution's alumni, is often woefully inadequate. Deans and department chairs often see clearly that the success of their efforts in fund-raising depend directly on centralized IS support. Records on academic staff One of the spinoffs of a good system for research grants is comparable data on grants per professor across the various departments and faculties. The goal of many academic administrators is an up-to-date file on each professor, indicating for recent years courses taught, the number of students in each course, publications, research grants, graduate students supervised, and so on. Those involved in making decisions on promotion, tenure, and merit allocations are often required to justify their decisions in an environment where their only real support is stacks of individual curriculum vitas and departmental annual reports. Departmental chairs, deans, and academic vice presidents feel an increasing need for a standardized file to assist in the evaluation of teaching and research by their academic staff. In such a system, as in all systems dealing with students and faculty, the protection of privacy is vital. Research grant budgets In many university departments today, the research grants budget is greater than the ordinary operating budget, and in some cases the average research grant of professors may be twice or more the average professional salary. This can create an important administrative burden for the most productive researchers, who are responsible for large budgets funding graduate students, technicians, equipment, and materials. They find themselves frustrated by accounting systems that were designed for very different purposes, involving substantial delays in the provision of information. They are increasingly calling for on- line access to their budgets, so that they can spend more time researching and less time trying to figure out what they can spend this month. A similar request is increasingly received from department chairs and deans, who need to make important decisions on expenditures during the year, and who require easy access to up-to-date information on their operating budgets. In many cases a particular person or activity is funded from both research funds and ordinary operating funds, and again the need for an on-line system is vital for those who must control such expenditures. In many of the above areas, academic users want not only up-to-date access to data, but also to be able to manipulate the data themselves, to be able to use it for decision-making purposes. Joe Wyatt, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, has said that institutions of higher education are increasingly dependent "on the prompt availability of critical information in a form usable by decision makers at various levels in the organization." The need to be able to manipulate the data oneself has been explained by Carol Barone, vice president of information systems and computing at Syracuse University: "Our clients want information faster and want to do more with it. They want to analyze it themselves so they can make better decisions."[6] In particular, the executive academic leadership needs access to information from university databases in order to establish appropriate strategic directions for the university and plan accordingly. Undoubtedly there are many other examples of support systems which are desired by our academic leadership, but I think the above listing gives a good indication of the nature of the needs. What is striking about these systems is that in each case the pressure to introduce them is coming not from IS and other professionals on the staff, but from professors and academics in administrative positions. The Need for IS Leadership Let's return to the dilemma initially described. In the midst of increasing questioning of the size of IS budgets and staffing numbers come persistent requests from the academic leadership of the university for new systems and dramatic improvements in existing systems. One response IS staff can make to these contradictory messages is to read into the questioning of the IS budget and staff size a lack of confidence in the IS organization. A more thoughtful and appropriate response, however, is for IS to conclude that the messages are contradictory precisely because the academic leadership has a vital need for IS guidance, and in many cases IS leadership, on the issues involved. Although deans and chairs may express a need for the various systems described earlier, from admissions to research grants support, they cannot be expected to know the effort required to bring each system into place, the interaction among the systems, nor the various possibilities for scheduling the order of the introduction of the systems. Nor can they know in which cases a relatively minor enhancement to an existing system will bring great benefits, as opposed to cases where the early scrapping of an existing system is highly desirable. This kind of positive response by the IS group is not only vital to the efficient use of data by the university, but is also essential to the prestige and morale of the IS group.[7] A positive response by IS allows the creation of an interface between the IS group and the academic leadership, based on two considerations: (1) the university's fundamental objectives are those of high-quality teaching and research, and the definition of these objectives takes place within the academic sphere, with the IS group having the role of supporting those objectives; (2) in the support of overall university objectives, the IS group brings special knowledge and abilities which are not generally available elsewhere in the university, and which thus require close coordination between leadership in the IS and academic spheres. This cooperation and coordination does not imply a static conception of the best vehicle for delivering IS service. Over the next decade many institutions may decide that they can best support their academic objectives through the decentralization of IS staff, moving most of them into individual user departments. The IS leadership needs to make it abundantly clear to their academic colleagues that if this is the policy decided upon by the institution, those in IS will carry it out as efficiently as possible. The need for leadership starts at the top of the IS ranks, involving the vice president responsible for IS, any responsible associate vice president, and the director of IS. It is of no consequence whether the vice president or the associate vice president are from the academic ranks or not; what is vital is that they accept the difficult responsibility of ensuring that the academic/IS interface is a mutually supportive and successful one, and that they ensure that senior IS staff understand the importance of communicating what they do and why they do it to academics at all levels of the institution.[8] Such an IS strategy of openness should involve a number of initiatives. Open the books and the process Key academics need to be involved in IS priority committees and in IS planning generally, with as much access as they need to data on costs, projects, etc. IS staff need to demonstrate clearly the difference between systems that have to be modified (e.g., because the tax authorities will throw you in jail if they are not), those that are urgent, and those that are just highly desirable, and to explain why there are so few resources that can be devoted to the second two categories. Key academic users should not only be involved in the decision-making process but also should be included in systems development projects and have input into the design of the systems. Give priority to academic objectives IS needs to show consistently that the goal of all administrative systems is to support the essential academic objectives of the institution. Whether dealing with updates to student records, degree audit, telephone registration, research grant accounting, or payroll, IS management should be able to show that all their work provides important services to students and academic staff, and that the academic progress of the institution would be seriously compromised if such work were discontinued. Support decentralization, even if the short-term benefits are doubtful It is important that chairs and deans have the opportunity to experiment with their own small systems, and indeed to make mistakes. IS should provide easy downloading services, expert support for microcomputer applications programming (at an appropriate fee), and advice to those seeking to manipulate administrative data on their own PCs. Similarly, ownership of micros and associated hardware and software should be assigned to individual academic units and not to the central computing center. Ownership involves a budget for purchase and maintenance, choice of technology, and responsibility for operations and supervision. While central advice, with IS input, is vital here, learning from trial and error on small projects is a very effective way to increase the understanding in the academic community of the vital role played by IS in achieving academic objectives. Already, learning by doing is producing changed attitudes. Many academic staff who took responsibility several years ago for departmental computing laboratories are now finding that demands in time and money for maintenance of such labs is overwhelming their ordinary teaching and research, and are trying to shift that responsibility back to the central computing center. Give users data access Giving users direct access to databases allows them to transfer the raw numerical data into usable information, which Dennis Jones defines thus: "Information consists of data that have been combined and given a form in which they convey to the recipient user some useful knowledge." Often the most efficient way to find the right form for particular users is to give them the data, and let them experiment with different forms themselves. Information required for weekly decisions may not be helpful when a five-year perspective is required. In Jones' words:[9] There are significant conceptual differences between data and information. The need for information is a function not only of use, but of user and context. Information needed to support strategic decision making is different in significant ways from that which supports operational management. Conclusion Colleges and universities faced with declining real resources per student will, if they are well run, avoid uniform reductions in the budgets of all departments, and instead try to protect what is vital and excellent while eliminating that which is unrelated to the central academic mission of teaching and research. IS shops have found themselves in the doubly uncomfortable position of not having done their homework in terms of relating their projects to the central mission of the institution, and in requiring additional resources to meet user expectations at a time when overall budgets are in decline. The premium in this context is on senior management, from the vice president on down, who can explain with reference to particular academic projects and goals why the maintenance or even enlargement of IS staff is vital to the overall goals of the institution. At the level of the IS director and senior staff, this means that while technical skills are as important as ever, they need to be supplemented with the ability to explain to professors, chairs, and deans what is being done and why it is important. ************************************************************************ This article was adapted for CAUSE/EFFECT from a presentation made by the author at CUMREC '89 in Boston. ======================================================================== 1 In the corporate world there seem to be regular cycles with regard to views on the appropriate side of central IS, with bouts of decentralization alternating with re-centralization. Eighteen months ago, the trend in many companies seemed to be for a smaller central staff. See Susan Kerr, "IS Trims Down," Datamation, 1 October 1988, pp. 46-49. 2 In the Quebec university system, for example, where I spent 16 years at McGill University, this reduction was estimated at between 20 and 25 percent between 1978 and 1988. 3 Gordon Shields, "Second Chance for Escape?," Computerworld, 6 June 1988, pp. S1-S4. I am grateful to my former colleague John Bates for pointing out this difference between administrative systems and most research programs with regard to maintenance. 4 Robert F. Goheen, The Human Nature of a University (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 55. 5 The increased understanding of the importance of administrative systems is often accompanied by a renewed interest in central computing for research purposes. Academics are increasingly interested in improving academic computing services as a means of attracting and retaining outstanding faculty in particular disciplines. See Glenn Rifkin, "It's a Computer-Based Contest to Win the Best and Brightest," Computerworld, 9 January 1989, pp. 43-45. 6 The Wyatt and Barone quotes are from P. Cinelli, "No Rest in Administration," Computerworld, 9 January 1989, pp. 45-46. 7 Feedback on the importance of IS work to the overall institution mission is vital to IS morale in a period when market forces are dictating more moderate salary increases and slower promotions, quite apart from the budgetary difficulties faced by many universities. See J. D. Couger, "Motivating IS Personnel," Datamation, 15 September 1988, pp. 59-64. 8 It is fair to point out that in some universities the vice presidents responsible for information systems do not have the same clout as other vice presidents. The same situation exists in the private sector, where chief information officers (CIOs) often have trouble making their voices heard. See R. E. Carlyle, "CIO: Misfit or Misnomer?," Datamation, 1 August 1988, pp. 50-53. 9 Dennis P. Jones, Data and Information for Executive Decisions in Higher Education (Boulder, Colo.: National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, 1982), p. 47. The definition of information is on p. 7. ======================================================================== Generating Academic Support for Information Systems