Successful Planning from the Bottom-Up Copyright CAUSE 1994. This paper was presented at the 1993 CAUSE Annual Conference held in San Diego, California, December 7-10, and is part of the conference proceedings published by CAUSE. 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, that the CAUSE copyright notice and the title and authors of the publication and its date appear, and that notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information technology in higher education. To copy or disseminate otherwise, or to republish in any form, requires written permission from CAUSE. For further information: CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301; 303449-4430; e-mail info@cause.colorado.edu Successful Planning from the Bottom-Up Eric Jacobson, Academic Computing Dolly Samson, Computer Information Systems Weber State University Ogden, Utah Abstract Most universities generate strategic computer plans from the top down, both conceptually and administratively. The process is instigated by high level administrators and begins with the general institutional mission and environment. Weber State planning goes in the opposite direction. Faculty are asked to describe their particular needs for computer and communication support and from the resulting list are abstracted common objectives and sharing procedures aiming at overall goals. This approach has produced a very practical, useable document; has evoked rapid change; and has increased cooperation across campus. The process is evolving into a potentially revolutionary departure from normal top-down management. University planning in general, and computer planning in particular, are regarded as explicit, self-conscious acts, initiated by senior administrators, derived from fundamental institutional priorities and effecting high-level policy decisions. Strategic Plans are awarded capital letters by university presidents. At Weber State University (WSU) we have experienced a different phenomenon. Without pretensions of anything more than immediate efficiency and common sense, a series of tactical decisions by faculty committees and administrators have accumulated into a document and a process which serves the institution as a strategic computer plan. "The Plan" was in effect before senior administrators knew of its existence. Comparison of the two approaches affords insights into the nature and benefits of the variety of acts which are called planning. Top-Down Planning Computer planning has generally been viewed as coming from above. In a recent paper concerning the adaptation of information technology to challenges facing higher education the authors state, "Information Technology planning needs to be integrated fully into an institution-wide strategic planning and management process ... Senior leadership needs to be involved continuously ..." (Rosser, Kunselman & Penrod, 1992.) Coughlin, in a survey of colleges and small universities, found that major computer resource and policy decisions were made by senior administrators on more than half the campuses, and by high level coordinating committees, such as a President's Council on more than 25% (1986). Faculty committees were used in less than 5% of the responding institutions. Planning can be top-down both administratively and logically. Administrative top-down procedures are rationalized by arguing that the broad participation necessary for implementation requires directives and incentives which come from the top. The first "lesson" listed as a guide to planning efforts at Rensselaer Polytechnic is "Top administrative commitment and participation are essential to obtain the cooperation of varied elements on campus and to arrive at decisions acceptable to these various groups," (Moss, 1982; p. 140). Logic based top-down planning consists of deriving computer needs from the fundamental goals of the institution. As Falduto, Golden, Beyer, Conley and Detweiler describe it, "...planning begins with the institution's mission, followed by identification of strengths and weaknesses, development of assumptions about the future, development of a vision of the future and goals consistent with the institutional mission, development of a timeline for achieving these goals, ... and a provision for assessment and feedback ...(1993, p. 19). Such logical development is meant to produce a plan which has general academic validity, which is coordinated with other components of the institution and which is adaptive to institutional challenges and opportunities. From the high level, mission-based vision successively specific sub-goals and actions are derived as the process moves down. Implementation of the plan occurs as these specific projects are finally accomplished. The recent planning effort at the University of Montana is a typical example a top-down effort. It was initiated by President George M. Dennison with the explicit goal of a "long range strategic information technology plan", (University of Montana, 1992). After some preliminary work by separate constituency groups, a single task force, representing the widest range of university interests was formed to prepare the plan. Co-chaired by the Dean of the College of Education and the Vice President for Administration and Finance, the task force included 30 people: deans, directors, students and six faculty representatives. A critical first step in the work of this group was to develop a vision with maximum temporal and institutional scope. Perceived immediate needs of particular departments were purposely deferred in the interests of achieving this fundamental encompassing vision. After six months of effort the task force produced a long range "Information Technology Plan" with six major goals for computer development and support administration. Goals are described briefly and are accompanied by few curricular, budgetary or implementation details. In true top-down spirit, various constituent groups have been filling out the Plan with these particulars over the last year.1 1 The Weber State Experience Wandering in the wilderness. By 1982 WSU had recognized the value of common goals and operational coherence in computer development, and thus the Coordinator for Academic Computing was charged with developing a campus plan. In collaboration with an ad hoc faculty committee the plan was written and disseminated in 1983. The plan was provided to all department chairs, was reviewed and blessed by the Dean's Council, and was approved by the Academic Vice President. The document, however, had no discernible effect on the campus and within three months of completion, fewer than ten people remembered that it existed. Curricular, budgetary and personnel decisions concerning computers continued to be based on departmental considerations without any institution-wide reference. A second plan was written in the following year with similar results. In hindsight these failures are easy to understand. The plan came from the Department of Academic Computing which had neither money nor authority to implement it. Coherence and coordination in computer development was effected through informal discussions between individuals and departments, sometimes expedited through Academic Computing. The written plans appeared to be of no assistance in these efforts in consensus building, and general suspicion of high-level, comprehensive planning developed. Infusion One. In 1985 a special state appropriation of $700,000 was made available for general academic computing upgrades. Instead of dividing the money among the several colleges, the president and academic vice president appointed a special faculty committee to develop recommendations for how it could be best used. This committee solicited ideas from the faculty and was overwhelmed. It was clear that the majority of faculty desires for computer support could not be met and some hard decisions would be necessary. After sometimes rancorous discussion the committee arrived at a spending plan which excluded many particular requests but which was academically valid and reasonably coherent. Although the plan had many detractors, the general opinion was that it was an effective compromise. Independence from established departmental and college administrative structures did not appear to have handicapped the process, and some felt that such independence had encouraged rational discussion over political bargaining. Infusion Two. In 1986 a large, permanent budget increase was provided for unspecified improvements in educational computing. Again the academic vice president chose to allocate the money through a faculty group, outside the regular governance structure of departments and colleges, in this case the newly established Faculty Senate Computer committee. Following the modelof a research grant board, this committee requested proposals from faculty for computer projects, with the initial expectation of simply reviewing these proposals and funding the most educationally meritorious. When the proposals arrived, however, the committee quickly realized that separate implementation of projects, as proposed, would be wasteful and ineffective. Redundancy abounded. For example, 15 departments (more than a third of the campus total) requested funding for the establishment of new personal computer labs. From one department came two separate proposals for labs from two faculty, apparently unaware of each other's requests. Several departments requested mini- computers, none of which provided additional service beyond that already available on campus. Many of the proposals were technically incomplete and unworkable. Hardware was requested with no applications software. For many projects no provision for installation, power conditioning, remodelling, system maintenance, or other essentials were made. Many good projects risked early demise, because there was no space to house them, or funds to keep them in operation, or technical expertise to maintain them. At a more subtle level, it was apparent that inappropriate hardware or software was being requested for otherwise, valuable projects. Instead of a simple reactive role of funding some projects and not others, the committee decided to get actively involved in using the money to improve computing on campus. The goal became the efficient, workable implementation of the good ideas contained in the proposals. In other words, the committee redefined its role from one of funding computers to one of implementing curriculum improvements. Proposers were asked to provide more explicit and complete descriptions of the educational value of their projects. From these discussions the committee was able to forge a coherent development strategy. Where common values could be ascertained, it was possible to propose facility sharing, e. g. a single pc facility to support history, social sciences and English for common data analysis, CAI and word-processing needs. In cases where such sharing could be agreed upon, the committee negotiated with Deans and support departments to obtain space, remodelling funds and operational support which would be necessary for success and which had not been adequately accommodated in the original proposals. The value of these larger, shared projects which helped several departments and thousands of students was easy to demonstrate to Deans, and their budgetary and personnel support greatly extended the original monetary allocation. Discussion of educational intent revealed a natural temporal ordering which allowed priority setting and valid scheduling of projects. Some curricula were not ready for the requested projects, and the committee found it possible to concentrate funds on those areas where there would be an immediate impact. And, of course, some projects did not merit funding and the focus on educational goals helped emphasize their shortcomings. Using the proposals as a starting point for discussion and negotiation, then, the committee developed its own comprehensive design intended to accomplish, as much as possible, what the faculty had desired in the first place. Through several iterations the design was discussed and refined by the original project proposers and finally adopted and implemented. Discovering a plan. The campus computer design which emerged from this allocation process became, of necessity, a long term commitment. The new VAX, the large new pc labs acquired through the allocation were major investments which would focus expenditures and activities for several years. The committee also became committed to the procedure which had been established for allocating the yearly budget: request proposals, integrate proposals into a coherent design, implement the design. Although the system was founded on academic priorities, encouraged campus- wide cooperation, reduced redundancy and moved toward long-term stability and commitment, the terms 'strategic' or 'plan' were never used. Finally, in 1990 the concept of a strategic plan for computing was explicitly introduced in a request from the President's Council. The Council sought some guiding principle for resolving the chronic, and sometimes impassioned, funding requests for student record systems, financial record systems, and academic computing. Vice presidents for Business, Student Affairs and Academic Affairs were each asked to develop long-term computing plans. Responsibility for creating the academic plan was accepted by the Faculty Senate Committee, and they approached the task by simply modifying the well-established fund allocation process. Questionnaires were sent to all faculty asking them to state their specific needs for computer support. Departments were asked to meet to discuss these questionnaires and individual responses to it to prepare departmental statements of need. These department reports were reviewed by College committees in the preparation of College reports on computer needs, which in turn were passed on to the faculty senate committee. Areas of University-wide interest, networking, mathematical and graphics processing, word-processing, computer-based-instruction and student labs, were identified in the initial survey results and groups of interested faculty were asked to develop coherent plans for meeting these needs. The completed Plan described 61 major projects in 6 general university-wide categories and within each of the 7 colleges. In addition many smaller scale projects were described within individual departments. A total of $6 million and a permanent budget increase of about $600,000 would have been necessary to fund the entire Plan, (Weber State University, 1991). Like the designs for fund allocation from earlier years the "Plan" was founded on very specific, concrete projects proposed for particular courses, educational programs or research projects, e. g. three DOS pc's with laboratory interface boards to be used by the 25 students enrolled each quarter in Psychology 343, Experimental Design. Also like the annual fund allocation designs, cooperative projects, broad goals, campus priorities were all abstracted from the specifics, rather than specified at the start. It was a bottom-up plan. Where the Plan differed from the fund allocation process was in its scope. Fund allocation designs were limited to the annual $200,000 budget at the Committee's disposal. The Plan, on the other hand, attempted to show how all computer money over three years, real and potential (and perhaps even imaginary), ought to be spent to optimize the academic program. Execution of the Plan would require budgetary support from Dean's and Department Chairs, and fund-raising support from the President and Vice Presidents, even though none of these administrators had had a direct role in the Plan's creation. Operating with the Plan. The initial Plan was adopted by the Faculty Senate in the Spring of 1991. The Plan was revised in 1993, (Weber State University, 1993) and is undergoing revision again this year. Currency through yearly revision is a goal of the Computer Committee. The Plan has been used in three arenas. First, it has been used by the Computer Committee to allocate its yearly budget. Second, deans and department chairs, voluntarily and selectively, have based their own budgetary decisions on it. Finally, it has been the key rationale in appeals for increased funding. Nearly $.5 million has been allocated by the President's Council from University contingency funds in the last two years toward Plan implementation, and an appeal for a special legislative appropriation for some aspects of the Plan is under discussion in the Board of Regents. A review of implementation during the first academic year indicated that of the 61 major Plan projects, substantial progress was made on 17, some progress was made on another 17 and no progress was made on the remaining 27. Contrast Using a top-down approach, the President of the University of Montana directs an institution-wide group with a majority of administrators to develop a strategic computer plan. Through consideration of long term trends, basic institutional options and fundamental, common purposes, this group identifies major institutional goals. And finally, implementation details for accomplishing these goals are derived by user groups. WSU moves in the opposite direction. Implementation decisions involving a single faculty group coalesce into a planning process and ultimately an explicit plan. The process arises from a set of specific faculty projects, and grows to encompass academic computer development in general. No special support, prior to plan creation, is offered by Deans, Vice Presidents or the President. Can strategic direction emerge from such informal mechanisms? How does faculty grown organization differ from that mandated by administrators? A Closer Look Top-down planning is meant to integrate computer development within fundamental institutional goals by deriving particular projects from basic, mission-derived goals. Such derivation, however, is not rule bound, or even very constrained. Consider how a reasonably high level goal, such as "Instill in students an understanding of computing and computing applications," might be translated into specific actions. A new course offered by the Computer Science Department in fundamental computer theory and architecture might be developed and equipped. The College of Business might expand its offerings in applications software: databases, spreadsheets, and so on. Each department might be encouraged and supported in the development of computer learning experiences appropriate for its field. Even with strong consensus on the higher goal, there could be deep and genuine educational disagreements on the best way to achieve it. The philosophical disputes would be exacerbated by budgetary competition and facility rivalry. Mission statements, by design, are an institution's common ground and therefore not very controversial. Disagreement increases with specificity. This problem can be attacked directly in the planning process. Arguments can be aired, disagreements resolved and specific decisions to do one thing and not another can be made--Computer Science gets the course, the other departments do not. For a plan of major scope there will be many losers as specifics are worked out and these losers may easily become disaffected from the plan and its implementation. Alternatively these disagreements can be avoided by not forcing the process into specifics, by leaving the plan at the level of broad goals meant to guide decision-making informally. Given the putative goal of increasing computer understanding, deans, curriculum committees and others would do what they could to improve students' computer concepts as opportunities arose. Vague statements of goals with little clear impact on institutional decision-making, however, can be platitudinous and irrelevant to the real needs of faculty. If the plan develops top-down administratively, that is, is encouraged and supported by the president and vice presidents then the cooperation of faculty may be more likely, but it is not certain. As a matter of fact, the top-down approach contravenes the traditional role of the faculty as masters of the academic program. Faculty are hired and tenured as independent, responsible professionals whose job it is to set curricular and research goals. Generally they have developed their own ideas about the nature of computing support for academic work and may have little patience for a planning process which they perceive to be detrimental, irrelevant or slow and bureaucratic. Beltrametti in a somewhat different computing context recently used a bottom- up approach at the University of Alberta because of the delays and staff resistance which can accompany top-down, manager-directed planning, (1993). WSU's bottom-up approach avoids some of these problems. Being based on present curricular needs as stated by the responsible faculty it has immediacy and relevance. Since the process begins, rather than terminates, with concrete project descriptions, the elapsed time from funding approval to complete implementation is very short (typically no more than six months). With the narrow, curriculum-specific focus, the projects are very low-risk. Nearly all of the projects are implemented successfully, and have immediate demonstrable academic benefits. The process is open and collegial, and therefore engenders a high level of trust among faculty. One remarkable consequence of this trust is a reduction in total funding amounts of the Plan and its precursors over the last 3 years. Apparently participants feel less inclined to exaggerate needs and pad budgets, since the real needs will be perceived and sympathetically viewed by colleagues. Decision making on funds has become concomitantly more difficult, however, since automatic rejection or trimming of bloated projects is no longer possible. The discussion of specific projects within a broad faculty forum has helped individuals discover and appreciate the work of others, and has thereby fostered cooperation and inter-departmental sharing. Software standards have been established for faculty and student use. Coordination of hypermedia projects has begun under the auspices of the Instructional Technology Office. An intra- departmental effort has been initiated to combine and upgrade UNIX systems. Five of the largest student labs have combined into a joint administration. The basic design for the universal campus network was initiated and implemented through the academic planning process. This is not to say that a miracle of selfless sharing has been wrought. There remain individualistic faculty and departments that have gone their own way. The experience at WSU, however, does show that coordinated projects aimed at general institutional goals can emerge from faculty deliberations on immediate curricular needs. Higher administrative direction is not a necessary condition for strategic thinking. A clear disadvantage of WSU's planning tactic is that its limited scope tends to discourage innovation. Departments and colleges focus on immediate, short or near-term computing needs and do not take risks to innovate for more far-reaching results. While individual faculty may design an innovative computer-related project, there is no incentive to implement a university-wide change. The collaboration and cooperation across departments and colleges fostered by the bottom-up planning process seems to encourage short-term and immediate sharing of resources. The Faculty Computer Committee chair has suggested that some portion of funding be set aside for higher risk projects, but this met with negative feedback from the Committee that specifically wanted to let individual colleges determine where the plan, and consequently the funding, would focus. The strengths of bottom-up planning are its immediacy, relevance and concreteness. A crucial condition for relevance at WSU was the budgetary allocation given directly to the Computer Committee starting in 1986. People were motivated to work at the process because it made a real difference in the accomplishment of particular projects. Probably no planning effort, up, down or sideways, can be sustained very long unless it has a clear impact on resource allocation. Given the responsibility to allocate too few funds to implement too many good ideas, the Faculty Computer Committee began to explore issues of academic priority and organizational efficiency, in other words began to plan strategically. It is similar resource allocation constraints which motivate presidents to initiate top-down planning efforts. Perhaps the logical problem of optimizing limited resources should be the key concern. Whether the problem is attacked by a president, top-down, or a faculty group, bottom-up, is less important than the logical and political quality of the solution. If the plan and its implementation improves the institution and is supported by the community then its origin is unimportant. REFERENCES Beltrametti, Monica. "Computing Services Planning, Downsizing, and Organization at the University of Alberta." CAUSE/EFFECT, Fall 1993, pp. 11-18. Coughlin, Patrick J. Computing Strategies in Small Universities and Colleges. Boulder, CO: CAUSE Publications, 1986. Falduto, Ellen F., Golden, Reid M., Beyer, William, Conley, Davis B. & Detweiler, Richard A. "Opportunistic Planning for Information Technologies: Upside-Down or Downside-Up?" CAUSE/EFFECT, Fall 1993, pp. 19-26. Moss, James, "Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute" in Campus Computing Strategies. John W. McCredie, Ed. Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1983. Rosser, James M., Kunselman, JoAn, Penrod, James I. "California State University/Los Angeles," in What Presidents Need to Know about the Integration of Information Technologies on Campus. Boulder, CO: CAUSE Exchange Library, 1992. University of Montana, Joint Information Technologies Planning Committee. Information Technology Plan for The University of Montana. 1992. Weber State University, Academic Computing Development Plan, 1991- 94. 1991. Weber State University, Academic Computer Plan, 1993-95. 1993. 1 We appreciate the assistance of James E. Todd, Vice President for Administration and Finance, University of Montana, in helping us understand the planning process used at Montana.