Teams, Dreams, and Investment in People


Copyright 1992 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 
1992. 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 date appear,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


                  TEAMS, DREAMS, AND INVESTMENT IN PEOPLE
                           by Brian L. Hawkins

ABSTRACT: At the 1991 CAUSE National Conference, CAUSE presented the 
second annual ELITE Award for Exemplary Leadership and Information 
Technology Excellence to honor an outstanding professional in the field 
of information technology management in higher education. Recipient 
Brian L. Hawkins addressed more than 1,000 information technology 
administrators during a luncheon at which he was honored. This article 
is a record of his remarks on that occasion.


I thank all of you for the honor of receiving the 1991 ELITE Award, and
I especially wish to express my gratitude to the selection committee,
the CAUSE board and officers, and the staff of CAUSE who have made this
moment so special for me. I also thank Information Associates for their
support of this award, and the scholarship which has been so generously
given in my name. I would like to designate that this award go to the
scholarship fund of Brown's sister institution, Tougaloo College, a
historically black institution in Tougaloo, Mississippi.

But most of all, I would like to loosely paraphrase Daryl Royal,
the former coach of the University of Texas football team, and "thank
the team that brung me here." Teams make the difference--people working
together to achieve a goal. I believe that premise very deeply. Yet
there is a striking irony here: I am being honored as an individual, but
I know that success in this business is not an individual achievement.
Therefore, with all due respect to CAUSE and to the selection committee,
I accept this award not as an individual, but as the captain of the
great teams I have had the opportunity of leading, both at Brown and at
Drexel. It is with them clearly in mind that I gratefully accept this
award.

I was told early in my academic career that a good scholar isn't
really creative, but merely selective, stealing good ideas from the very
best. In that tradition, I would like to make three points, stolen from
a Russian dissident, from two giants of the musical stage, and from the
book of Galatians.

The power of networks and teams

I believe that if we look to the East, we will find some important
lessons which are pertinent to us in the management of information
resources. The parables which can be drawn from the dramatic changes in
Eastern Europe seem worth exploration. For those of us who have never
known anything but the cold war, these past two years have been
astonishing. The Berlin Wall crumbled, a move toward democracy is
clearly established, a coup to overthrow Gorbachev failed, and now not
just Russia, but Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and the Ukraine, have all
declared independence. It clearly is a world in a state of rapid change.

One story related to these changes, which hasn't gotten much media
play, is the role of electronic networks in the revolution. As the coup
took place last summer, the leaders of that attempted overthrow took
control of the television and radio stations, as well as the print
media. However, they either forgot or did not know how to control
electronic data networks. The people used a two-year-old network called
Relcom to distribute information to remote republics, to post
information from the West, to reproduce these news updates to the people
via leaflets (since the mass media were being controlled), and to
communicate among themselves, coordinating the resistance to the coup.
Vadim Antonov, one of the builders of the Soviet network, and one of the
leaders of this effort who used the network to fight the coup, said,
"Computer communications are more democratic by nature than mass media
like TV or newspapers, simply because they don't belong to a single
entity. There's no central authority over the network. We realized it
was the only chance for us to survive." While television stations and
major media were muzzled, and while radio reception was jammed in some
parts of the country, the computer network stayed intact.

I think there are several lessons to be learned here. First of
all, democratization of information is now present in a manner
heretofore unimaginable, and yet whether this democratization will
continue in the Soviet Union--or in the United States--is not clear.
Antonov suggested that because there is no central authority over the
network, free flow of information was possible during the coup. But this
lack of central authority is probably a function of time, not of the
nature of the beast. In the United States, we received some good news
last week, as the NREN bill was passed before Congress recessed. The
good news is that the federal government will help jump-start this
important effort, but while we are thankful for this support, we also
have to be mindful of the fact that this support creates the beginning
of a potential central authority. We must regulate and monitor our own
behavior on the networks, and define policies as to what is acceptable
and unacceptable network traffic, if we are to avoid the imposition of
rules and definitions which are dictated from this central authority in
our own network environment--if we are to avoid the interference that
Jesse Helms imposed upon the National Endowment of the Arts that I fear
might emerge within the networking environment from such an authority.

The second possible lesson from the Soviet network experience of
last summer is that this interdependence and connectedness was critical
to this group achieving its goals. As Antonov and his brave colleagues
demonstrated, it is the interconnectedness, the interdependency, and the
networking that creates a fabric that can't be easily torn. This is the
essence of any organization or of any team, understanding and using the
interconnectedness that binds the parts together. Yet, more recent
historical events suggest that some of that lesson may have already been
lost. The new emerging independent republics are flexing their
nationalistic pride. Their new and separate flags may give these
entities that sense of pride, but their ultimate success--in feeding
their people, in developing economies, in longer term survival--will 
come from working together, from developing interdependencies in new 
unions.

This phenomenon has implications for those of us managing
information resources on our campuses. Although we may have separate
flags--calling ourselves librarians, administrative computing, academic
computing, media services, and so forth--those individual identities are
of less importance than creating new interdependencies in a changing
world. As in the Soviet Union, different cultures have been woven
together, each with its own strong historical identity, but their longer
term success is in interdependency and teamwork. Acting in isolation
subverts the survival of all. We have much to figure out in the
management of information resources in higher education.

It is teamwork that makes the difference. Not too long ago I was
interviewing a job candidate, who asked me what I was ultimately looking
for in the position he was applying for. After thinking about it for a
moment, I told him I was not looking for someone who would lead in
individual scoring, but rather I wanted someone who would lead in
assists. It is this interconnectivity, this recognition of the greater
set of objectives, and this recognition of "team" for which all of us
must actively strive.

"You gotta have a dream"

The second point that I would like to make is plagiarized freely
from Rodgers and Hammerstein's wonderful musical, South Pacific. You may
recall the rich character in that play, Bloody Mary, who sang, "You
gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a
dream come true?" I believe this maxim is imperative for any leader--to
have a dream, to articulate that dream, and to share that dream with
others. Father Hesburgh, the long-time president of Notre Dame, implied
this process in suggesting that the three basic things a successful
college or university president must do are to define and articulate his
or her goals, toclarify those goals, and to reemphasize those goals.

My dream is that we truly achieve an environment of integrated
information resources, one in which all aspects of information services,
information technology, and information provision work in harmony in an
electronic as well as physical manner. The dream to which I ascribe is
an environment in which there is a more egalitarian access to the
information resources for all campuses and all scholars. This
democratization of access means that public access to computers is
essential to avoid further dividing our country in terms of haves and
have nots. It means that we have to stop the elitism of judging our
institutions on the criterion of who owns the most books in their
libraries. As we move to access models of information, we need to focus
on strategies which allow the collections of Harvard and Berkeley to be
available in all 3,400 colleges and universities in this country,
creating an elitism not of resource accumulation, but rather on the
output of the processing of a more equally shared set of inputs.

Invest in others

My final point is stolen from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians
(6:7): "What you sow, so shall you reap." This principle, which I would
like to emphasize, implies the need for investment in others. As a
profession we need to do more to develop future leaders in this field. I
ended up in this field serendipitously, and yet that is not uncommon if
you look at career development in information technology management in
higher education. As a group, a weakness we have is that we don't have
well defined ways to develop others. For all of the reasons that I have
already defined, interdependence is essential, thus calling for
generalists as leaders. We need boot camps; we need to promote mentoring
programs; we need more professional development programs. CAUSE has set
an example for professional organizations in emphasizing professional
development, but more needs to be done to fill the need and demand for
leaders in this changing field. This isn't just a responsibility of a
professional organization; it is the responsibility of each of us to
develop those around us--to take the time to teach, to share, and to
develop our subordinates and colleagues.

I have shared with you a number of quotes that have particular
significance to me. Any success that I may have had, and any advice that
I may have for others, can be crystallized by focusing on these three
ingredients--teams, dreams, and investment in others.

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