The Information Age, the People Factor, and the Enlightened IS Manager Copyright 1994 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 1994. 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 Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu THE INFORMATION AGE, THE PEOPLE FACTOR, AND THE ENLIGHTENED IS MANAGER by Ellen F. Falduto, Kenneth C. Blythe, and Polley Ann McClure "Thank you for the effort and time invested in my new tool of production. Now all that I have to do is learn how to use the #@$ thing!" When the CIO of a liberal arts college received this thank- you e-mail note, she was intrigued. First, she was intrigued by the fact that the author was looking at his PC as a tool of production, as an important part of his work. Second, though written in jest, the exasperation in the second sentence confirmed that the technology was only as useful as the training that went along with it. This anecdote illustrates the fact that people are important, and that supporting people in the use of information technology is as important as the technology itself. All too often our focus as IT professionals, both in our day-to-day work and in our discussions in our professional forums and associations, has been on technology itself--identifying appropriate technologies, building infrastructures, maintaining infrastructures, upgrading infrastructures, keeping pace with technology. We are reengineering our campuses. When we are not concerned with the technology itself, we are concerned with justifying our institutions' investments in it--defending our budgets, identifying outcomes, demonstrating cost effectiveness, and convincing senior administrators that IT is important. While we have been attending to technology and resource issues associated with it, another focus area has exploded on the scene: people. In our attending to technology and reengineering our campuses, we have overlooked our greatest opportunity--to leverage these investments by developing the skills of the people who use the technology. The people factor Higher education is a "people industry." In the 1990s, our institutions find themselves focused more on people--total quality management, campus-wide strategic planning, and students as customers are all people issues. Yet even though we may not explicitly recognize the "people factor," history, research, reactions to and outcomes of our technology implementations to date all point to the "people factor" as the critical component of a successful technology implementation. A few years ago, Richard Nolan told CAUSE conference attendees that it took major proportions of human capital to achieve significant productivity gains in agrarian and industrial societies.[1] Three years ago a study at the MIT Sloan School of Management concluded that the best automobile assembly plants were those that invested in both technology and people improvements together.[2] And a recent study of faculty, students, and staff at liberal arts colleges found that successful IT implementations emphasized not just the technology, but people-based considerations and services such as users' characteristics, user access, user support and training, educational uses, and usefulness of the technology.[3] The productivity paradox may well be explained by the fact that it is faster and easier to install technology than to restructure our work and reculture our organizations. Technology on our campuses has had a major impact on our people: faculties, students, and staff. In a collection of case studies from colleges and universities across the United States, Brian Hawkins observed that the introduction of technology on campuses has resulted in fear, trauma, anger, frustration, and excitement among those to whom it has been introduced.[4] Some faculty fear that technology- based instruction may limit their control of the teaching- learning process,[5] while others simply consider technology "dehumanizing."[6] The proliferation of electronic discussion lists and software for workgroups compels people to change how they work together. To counter these impacts, some colleges and universities have put together programs that include technology in classrooms, technology support centers to create educational materials, faculty development programs, equipment for faculty, and technical support. The changing context of our society and the nature of work also directs us towards addressing people issues as a strategy to survive and grow in the 1990s. The proliferation of information-age jobs that are generally low paying, of short duration, and without career paths, is a dramatic departure from what some of us and our parents knew. Today's workers must be trained and re-trained, and higher education must educate students for multifaceted careers. Our students are not only more diverse and unlike those for whom we built our institutions and programs, they are arriving on our campuses equipped for the information age; they are computer literate and multimedia "cultured." Our institutions flourish in a truly global and multicultural environment, where technology plays a significant role in facilitating communication and information exchange. Our new challenge If people are the most critical resource in transitioning to the information age, then our challenge is employing this resource effectively. What does this mean for IT managers? Does it mean that we must also be human resources managers? Of course it does. IT managers must become champions for people investments--both within our IT organizations and throughout our institutions. Meeting this challenge requires institution-wide leadership. This includes not only technology users (faculty, students, staff) but also technology providers--our own staff. The strategies we employ must go beyond merely providing user support services and the traditional incentives for staff members. These strategies must also ensure that the application of technology is congruent with the values and strategic goals of our institutions. Among these strategies: We are going to have to envision and strive for "a new employee" who can be productive in the information age. This new employee will have enhanced knowledge skills and will be productive in an entirely new way--using information technology tools to access, synthesize, and effectively communicate information within and beyond organizational and national boundaries in order to be productive. This new employee will work in an environment that will likely prove to be "more humane" than any in the past,[7] an environment that is nurturing, supportive, and offers growth opportunities for all, especially those in lower/entry-level jobs. However, as different as this society will appear to be from the older agrarian and industrial societies, there will be a continuity with the past. Higher education's role will continue to be clear: above all else it will continue to prepare students and those who need retraining to lead fulfilled lives; second, it will be a model for cultivating this new type of employee, leading the way in developing its own employees into knowledge workers. These knowledge workers will be created, they will not just happen. IT will have to take a leadership role by providing the support services that enable the knowledge worker to learn and be productive. We must search for new business models that better utilize "intellectual" capital. With the proliferation of knowledge workers, investments will have to shift from brick, mortar, mechanical, and scientific capital to intellectual capital and basic investment in information technology infrastructure. To benefit from this investment, new partnerships will have to be established between IT organizations, users, other institutions, and corporations. People must be brought together electronically in a multicultural, global community. Identifying these new business models requires the initiative and leadership of senior administrators and the support of IT managers. We must strive to transform our institutions from the "mass production" focus on learning to a client- oriented focus. In many respects, higher education is centered on what Robert Reich has termed a "mass production" model of education.[8] In an attempt to be more cost-effective and productive, our past actions have led us to build bigger institutions because we thought they were more efficient, required less energy and administration, reduced staff, increased the quality of faculty, enhanced teaching and professional responsibilities, and responded better to the needs of students, society, and government regulation. Clearly, the signs now indicate that students are not getting the value they should from their education, and higher education needs to adopt a different strategy. Higher education needs to become more "client oriented," through higher quality, technology-assisted, place-independent instruction and "high-tech, high-touch" student services. IT managers must become partners with other administrators to achieve this institutional transformation. We must collaborate and empower. It is the nature of higher education, more than most any other organization, to collaborate. We see evidence of this all around our campuses in total quality management and continuous quality improvement programs, self-directed work teams, and other innovative organization styles. Each of these is based on the principle of empowerment, and each has served to flatten organizational structures. IT managers must extend their influence to develop these organizational styles to empower people throughout their institutions. Technology tools exist on our campuses (listservs and other workgroup software) that are making cross-organizational, cross-institutional, national, and global collaboration as commonplace as the traditional hierarchical communication. In spite of this, many of us have not made the transformation to new, flatter organizations. We must restructure our IT operations to be more multi- dimensional and integrated. IT professionals must develop a greater understanding of the role of people and technology. Our staff members must become "system integrators" rather than programmers, analysts, network specialists; they need to be "producers" rather than computer operators, telephone operators, print shop operators. In their new roles, these staff members should become partners with faculty, staff, and students. The traditional model of providing users only technical support, policy, and direction is no longer relevant. Users are now becoming proficient with technology, including information retrieval, processing, and communication. Now we must learn how to empower people to learn, use, and innovate through technology. In addition, the changing nature of IT jobs means we must retrain and redeploy our long-standing workers to work collaboratively with people across our institutions. We must develop career paths for IT professionals and paraprofessionals that provide new development opportunities and growth. Just as we are providing development opportunities for knowledge workers, we must provide the same types of opportunities for the IT professionals and paraprofessionals who support them. Before we can credibly put programs in place for our institutions as a whole, we must have programs for our own staff. It is our responsibility to educate and train throughout. In "information age" organizations, career paths are less hierarchical than they used to be, and career advancement may well come from movement among institutions rather than vertically within a single institution. The new IT organizations that result will depart from traditional organizations for technology professionals. In redesigning these organizations, we must provide for challenge, incentives, rewards, and career growth through professional development. We must make a much stronger case for investing in human capital. Of equal importance to information technology investments are people investments. Information technology without good people services could be, in actuality, a reverse benefit--a drain on the institution--and as suggested by the MIT study, we could actually be worse off after automation than before. As information technology managers, we control the technologies that can transform our institutions in the 1990s. To use these technologies responsibly, however, we can no longer avoid the people factor. We must spend a lot more of our limited time and resources on people. The investment in people is required to make learning--the overall purpose of our institutions--easier and more productive. In short, we need an investment plan for people development so that information technology is more relevant to knowledge seekers. Beyond our institutions In taking leadership and meeting this challenge now, higher education can accomplish its fundamental purpose: to prepare individuals who can contribute significantly to society. The individuals we train, whether in the classroom or in educational support functions within our institutions, are the "new knowledge workers" in business, government, and K- 12 education. The successful strategies we adopt will be taught and replicated by other organizations. Such leadership is beneficial for higher education in three ways. First, higher education would lead rather than follow, taking the initiative rather than reacting to public criticism. This is important for our credibility as we face repeated criticism and calls for accountability from our stakeholders. Society expects higher education to transform itself as industrial organizations do; society is losing its tolerance for continued tuition increases and declining quality. Second, as a major player in education, higher education stands to benefit tremendously as a "re-education" provider for managers, professionals, and other workers outside the academy who are faced with the same challenges of "the new worker" and the information age. Third, higher education can lead by example. We are blessed with the information infrastructure today to be at the forefront of the new horizontal (flat) organizational paradigm; national, state, and local governments need desperately to have the same infrastructure to share information and ideas, and to brainstorm problems--to do the kinds of things that higher education takes for granted. Let's jump on it! Indeed, the people factor has broader implications than user support and training. Adding the people factor means redefining the "IT implementation equation": a successful implementation is a function of the appropriate balance of technology, resources, and people. It will no longer suffice to focus on the technology as an end unto itself--we must also focus on how the technology impacts our institutions and how investments in people can achieve institutional goals in light of the information age. ======================================================================== Footnotes: 1 Richard L. Nolan, "Too Many Executives Today Just Don't Get It!" CAUSE/EFFECT, Winter 1990, pp. 5-11. 2 Michael Scott Morton, ed., The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 3 Ellen F. Falduto, Implementing technology in the liberal arts: What really matters, unpublished dissertation, Seton Hall University. 4 Brian L. Hawkins, ed. Organizing and Managing Information Resources on Campus (McKinney, Texas: Academic Computing Publications, Inc., 1989). 5 C. K. Knapper, "Information Technology and Instruction," in B. S. Sheehan, Information Technology: Innovations and Applications, New Directions in Institutional Research Series (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1982), pp. 44-58. 6 D. N. Layton, ed., Integrated Planning for Campus Information Systems: A series of conferences for undergraduate institutions sponsored by OCLC and the Association of American Colleges (Dublin, Ohio: OCLC, 1989). 7 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980). 8 Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). ============================================================ Ellen F. Falduto is Chief Information and Planning Officer at Hartwick College, responsible for college-wide planning relating to educational program, facilities, operations, and resources, as well as coordinating the College's strategic initiatives. Kenneth C. Blythe is Director, Office of Administrative Systems, at Penn State, responsible for the University's student and business information systems, and for managing the University's telecommunications network. Polley Ann McClure is Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia, where she has overall leadership responsibility for information technology at the University and directs the information technology and communications organization. ************************************************************************ 03/30/94 (MEH) The Information Age, the People Factor, and the Enlightened IS Manager