Organizing Information Technology - Integration or Disintegration? Copyright 1992 CAUSE FROM _CAUSE/EFFECT_ VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3, FALL 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 ************************************************************************ ORGANIZING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY-- INTEGRATION OR DISINTEGRATION? by Polley Ann McClure ************************************************************************ Polley Ann McClure is currently Associate Vice President for Information Resources at Indiana University. Effective October 1, she will join the University of Virginia community as Associate Vice President and CIO and Professor of Environmental Sciences. ************************************************************************ ABSTRACT: Advancements in information technology have caused many campuses to reconsider the organization of the units that provide information services. Ranging from joint planning exercises to full vertical mergers, changes in organization structure are powerful tools administrators can employ to integrate and effectively manage information technologies. My friend and mentor, John Hackett, used to say that there was no secret formula for putting together organizations: "You just have to figure out what you want them to do and then organize the people and resources so they can accomplish the objective." Hackett's wisdom can serve information technology (IT) organizations well in these times of technology convergence, budgetary stringency, and constant change in our institutions and their environments. Structural change is a powerful managerial tool within an organization. In a single stroke it modifies the organizational patterns of resource allocation and accountability, and redistributes authority for decision- making and action. Technological change has come rapidly in the past decade, and with it has come the need to reexamine the missions of IT units in academe. Despite this, college and university administrators have been slow to reorganize their information technology units. Their reluctance is understandable in the conservative environment of the academy, yet there are substantial advantages to a more aggressive approach. Many IT organizations have recognized and acted upon the need for change. In the past five years, many institutions have moved to establish chief information officer (CIO) positions, with varying degrees of associated organizational realignment.[1] Several universities have recently merged components of their IT organizations.[2] These movements toward consolidation of leadership and implementation in IT seem to be in contrast to trends toward decentralization in other parts of our institutions. What are the forces leading us to consolidate our IT organizations? Digital technology convergence has demolished much of the basis for separately managed organizations. The missions of academic and administrative computer centers, libraries, media service units, and others have come to overlap more and more, leading to turf battles, duplication of effort, and confusion about service roles. The rivalries engendered then become active barriers to integration and significant cost sinks. Consider the following examples: * Academic and administrative computing centers and libraries now share the mission to manage and distribute electronic information. Previously, when books and journals were the libraries' domain and computer files were the computer center's domain, each organization was clear about its authority and role. * The emergence of internetworking, desktop computing, and distributed computing have created major areas of duplication between academic and administrative computing organizations, in many cases leading to conflicting recommendations, standards, and architectures within the same institution. * The development of networked, high-speed laser printers has eliminated many of the technology differences between mainframe laser printing, printing services, and the campus copy center. Should each of these organizations invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in this equipment (perhaps without even consulting each other), or could one organization perform all of these functions? How should we differentiate centrally provided printing services from those performed on departmental and personal printers? * Data and voice networks will soon find packet video traversing the same physical channels, and increasingly being integrated at higher levels. Which technology organization is in charge of this integration? If "no one" is in charge, how long will it take to realize the potential functional gains and economies of the integration? * Archives departments hold responsibility for the historical records of the institution. When these archives were populated by paper files, the distinction between the archivists' role and the computer center's role in maintaining archival computer files of administrative data was clear. So what is the difference between the role of the modern archives department and the computer center when most of the historical information is in computer files? * Media services units were responsible for audio-visual support for instruction when that was provided by slide projectors and movies. Now that audio-visual support is increasingly digital and delivered through workstations, is there a need for a separate media services center, or has this become just another computer application? Distinctive academic culture influences information resources management As we try to identify the issues related to strategies for organizing information technologies in higher education institutions, we need to keep in mind some distinctive characteristics of academe and its inherent organization of information. Colleges and universities are not organizations in the same way that many other social institutions are. The word "community" may come closer to describing the loose, networked structure that characterizes the academy. This results in part from tradition, but also from the many strong centrifugal forces at work within the institution: * The nature of academic freedom and the independence of action that arises from it * The diversity of pursuits within a single institution--from nuclear physics to music performance to the study of other cultures * The fact that professors often bear greater allegiance to the global community of scholars in their discipline than to others within their own institutions * Nearly autonomous individual faculty who finance much of their own work through individual entrepreneurial activities, particularly in research universities The information resources of an institution are widely dispersed to optimally support this diversity of purpose. We sometimes think of the library as the location of scholarly information, but the individual libraries of professors with their books, journals, notes, and reprint collections are surely the most heavily used collections on campus. Most computing centers still manage timeshared mainframe computers, but by any metric (MIPS, connect hours, mass storage, cost), the aggregate capacity of desktop and departmental computers far outstrips that of the computing center. The same centrifugal forces pulling at the fabric of the institution also pull our information resources into a potential state of incompatibility and incongruence. When technology standards are set by units with traditionally different missions, they are often proprietary and closed. The trend toward open systems in technology is helping, but even here we need an integrated approach to systems design if the entire institution is to benefit from innovations in a given technology area. Other forces, unique to technology, also push the information resource center of gravity away from the core of our institutions. Examples include declining economies of scale for computational power, increases in end-user literacy and the sophistication of user interfaces, and the trend toward distributed computing. In this climate, administrative service departments--previously the customers of computing centers--are increasingly interested in making their own technology decisions, developing their own applications, and managing the resources to deliver them. At the same time, though, technology consumers are demanding universal access to information, a "single system image," and ubiquitous network connectivity. And as student computing has increased, unforeseen uses have developed for our machines and networks. We need common standards, architectures, and policies to respond to these challenges. Two important dimensions to the organization of information technologies and resources within an institution are the degree of centralization and the degree of aggregation or complexity of those assets. The degree of centralization is the extent to which authority and responsibility are focused at a high institutional level with a broad domain, rather than being focused in individual academic units or faculty positions with limited domains. The degree of aggregation refers to the tendency (in either a central or decentralized model) to aggregate previously separate organizational units together. Among others, Davis, Kettinger, Mathezer, Muffo, and Mulhollan have elaborated on the advantages and disadvantages of centralized structures.[3] Their views, taken with the conventional wisdom about these two dimensions, suggest a basis for decisions about organizing information technologies. A greater degree of centralization can yield greater uniformity, greater efficiency where economies of scale are involved, more rapid deployment of infrastructure technologies, better access to deep expertise where it is in short supply, and potentially greater integration at the institutional level. These benefits stand in contrast to the potentially greater responsiveness and specialized focus of decentralized organizations and the related ability of the institution to provide services and resources for special groups that it could not afford to deploy universally. A greater degree of aggregation of organizations can help eliminate turf battles and speed up progress toward IT integration. If a very large organization results, however, it can become mired in bureaucracy and internal organizational inertia. Some organizational strategies for IT Colleges and universities can bring a full range of organizational strategies to bear on their IT problems. Among them are: * Creating a CIO office to centralize IT leadership * Linking the missions of existing technology units through joint strategic planning * Establishing some type of formal coordinating council * Shifting unit reporting lines to a single office (perhaps the CIO) * Redefining unit missions in light of new conditions * Simple reorganization * Full merger and vertical integration * Merger accompanied with downsizing These strategies are not mutually exclusive and can be combined in various ways, depending upon the specific problems. Take, for example, an institution that believes that it is not making rapid enough progress in key areas impacted by technology. If the reason for the slow pace is apparently not major turf wars, competing technology architectures, or severe funding limitation, creation of a CIO position might focus leadership enough to get things moving. Often, though, there is no common view of the objectives across the user departments and among the IT service units. In these cases, particularly if good will exists, the preparation of a joint strategic plan for information resources within the institution can be a powerful integrating activity, producing a clear direction for the enterprise as a whole and one in which each unit can see its role. If individual IT units have already begun to encroach upon each others' missions, more proactive steps might be required. For example, a joint coordinating council could be chartered to straighten out the areas of overlap and make sure they stay clearly defined. Or joint reporting to a single office could be employed. If it appears that the confusion over missions could be resolved once, rather than requiring ongoing attention, it might be sufficient to initiate a simple administrative redefinition or clarification of missions. When an institution needs a new emphasis requiring concentrated attention beyond that easily developed through planning and realignments of mission, reorganization is called for. This process can move sub- units across organizational boundaries and deploy them in the combinations necessary to meet the new requirements. The most powerful technique for change in IT organizations is full merger of organizations to produce an organization integrated vertically into functional sub-units. This approach is most likely to be worth its huge cost when major duplications of mission and service have developed and cannot be resolved by "softer" means. It is also useful when the cultural differences between organizations are so great that other approaches are rejected. If, in addition, the level of institutional investment in information resources must be cut back, this can be accomplished at the time of the merger. Apple Computer, Inc. recovered from a declining financial position in 1985, in part by reorganizing into a functional structure which allowed the elimination of over 1,000 positions. Structures integrated by function are, however, often too rigid for the rapidly changing environment of information technology and, after the initial benefit of merger, may contribute their own impediments to integration. A major problem with organizing information technology is the vast complexity of the current environment and the very rapid rate of change of the "things you want the organization to do." Reorganization is enormously expensive and staff hate it. Nolan and Savage have suggested a model for the "networked" organization that uses the basic functional organization structure as a resource pool from which to draw people for assignment to work groups or teams on a project-by-project basis.[4] This allows the basic organization to persist, but also allows it to respond to a diversity of short-term needs. This type of organization structure can let us "have it both ways," with many of the advantages of centralized and decentralized and aggregated and disaggregated structures. It does, however, require major changes in culture and managerial behavior. Barone describes the experience of one university with this kind of flexible organization structure.[5] A wide range of organizational changes can facilitate the integration of information technologies on campus. Most of them require a focused point of leadership for the institution (someone has to execute whatever mechanisms are employed). Certain functions, if managed centrally, can provide a concrete basis for integration. Among these are planning, policies, standards-setting, and the management of basic infrastructure technologies. Beyond this, strategies ranging from joint planning among the IT service providers to full vertical mergers can be used, depending upon the specific situations that have to be dealt with. In any of these approaches, it helps to keep in mind that organizations--even IT organizations!--are social systems, and managing their evolution is largely a "people process." Structural changes that recognize this have a head start on success. ======================================================================== Footnotes: 1 James I. Penrod, Michael G. Dolence, and Judith V. Douglas, The Chief Information Officer in Higher Education, CAUSE Professional Paper Series Number 4 (Boulder, Colo.: CAUSE, 1990); and Anne Woodsworth, Patterns and Options for Managing Information Technology on Campus (Washington, D.C.: American Library Association, 1991). 2 James D. Bruce, Deborah Heller, and Marilyn A. McMillan, "Merging Academic and Administrative Computing at MIT," in Twenty Years of Managing Change: Visions of the Future, Proceedings of the 1991 CAUSE National Conference (Boulder, Colo.: 1992), pp. 211-223; Thomas A. Gaylord, Planning and Information Resources Management: The Case for Combining University Academic and Administrative Computing (Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska, 1990); Polley Ann McClure and Jim Williams, "Metamorphosis in Computing Services at Indiana University," CAUSE/EFFECT, Spring 1992, pp. 15-25. 3 Grant J. Davis, "Accommodating Divergent Trends in Information Technology," CAUSE/EFFECT, Winter 1990, pp. 52-53; William J. Kettinger, "The Decentralization of Academic Computing: Defining Future Roles," CAUSE/EFFECT, Fall 1990, pp. 15-23; Gordon Mathezer, "Management Framework for Information Technologies," CAUSE/EFFECT, July 1985, pp. 10-21; John A. Muffo, "Decentralized Computing at the Operational Level: Some Lessons Learned," CAUSE/EFFECT, Winter 1989, pp. 42-46; and Paige Mulhollan, "Information Resource Management: Why Centralize?" in Information Technology --Can It All Fit?, CAUSE Professional Paper Series Number 2 (Boulder, Colo.: CAUSE, 1989), pp. 2-7. 4 Richard Nolan, Alex J. Pollock, and James P. Ware, "Creating the 21st Century Organization," in Stage by Stage (Lexington, Mass.: Nolan Norton and Co., 1988), pp. 1-12; and Charles M. Savage, 5th Generation Management (Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press, 1990). 5 Carole Barone, "Converging Technologies Require Flexible Organizations," CAUSE/EFFECT, December 1987, pp. 20-25. ========================================================================