Murphy, that clever pessimist, once observed that, left to themselves,
things always go from bad to worse. This, of course, is just a
restatement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law
has to do with entropy--the measure of the unavailability of useful
energy in a system when the system is left to fend for itself.
Information technology can provide the means for an
organization to get at its latent intellectual energy and improve the
effectiveness of any operation--some, of course, more than others.
This is sometimes paradoxical as it frequently means making major
changes to business process--in some cases, causing us to question
and even make major changes to the business we are in.
By and large, we have made most of the simple changes our
current ivory tower model is likely to accept. The big task in front of
us is to lead our educational enterprises in the difficult work of
making major changes in core business process--teaching and
learning. To capture more of the latent energy of our educational
institutions we will need to seriously reconsider our mission and
reengineer our processes.
We see one of those paradoxes clearly these days as computing
centers rapidly disappear, displaced by networked environments of
distributed technology. Actually, that shouldn't surprise us too much.
The Law of Conservation of Energy observes that the amount of
energy in a closed system is constant. The easiest way to make a
system vibrant and robust is to connect it to even larger systems,
permitting the import and export of information and energy between
them. To take full advantage of the energy unleashed by our
technological networks we will need to create institutional networks
on a scale heretofore unimaginable.
One of the corollaries of the Conservation Law presaged the
Second Law by observing that the potential energy of a system tends
to a minimum. We clearly observe this in our networked information
world where, absent good navigational tools, the value of the Net is
quickly dissipated in anarchy and its potential rapidly declines to a
minimum. The World Wide Web and its Mosaic-like clients offer us a
taste of what opening our systems can bring. They bring, as well, a
lesson in what degree of effort will be required to maintain them.
Economists have long had their own statement of the
Conservation Law--there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. As we
struggle with the cost of growing and maintaining these networked
ivory towers we will find ourselves increasingly directed by the
invisible hand of a marketplace. This will be a difficult transition for
an enterprise that is one of the last hold-outs of public good socialism
and an enterprise that has been used to near monopoly control of a
geographically contained service area. We will all find ourselves
competing with Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, Cambridge, Oxford, and
the other historic national and international institutions.
One might observe that networks of distributed intelligence
were bound to win out over centralized systems. We have long been
aware of the Square Law of Complexity--the complexity of a system
increases at least as fast as the square of the number of tightly
coupled components. It is this Law that helps us understand why we
can't build hugely complex centralized software systems, and why
distributing the intelligence decouples the relations, thereby
reducing the intellectual and computational labor necessary to
understand and to build them. It is why client-server systems will
supplant centralized systems and why centralized phone switches
will give way to Internet-like distributed systems.
I don't know who to attribute this one to, so I will call it The
Law of The Woods. In golf, the conventional wisdom goes, the woods
are full of long hitters. You can hit it long or you can hit it straight,
but you can't consistently hit it long and straight. It is a trade-off
principle. Very clearly, the infusion of information technology into
our institutions of higher education requires that we make a number
of decisions that require trade-offs.
For instance, we can make our networks secure or we can make
them accessible. While it may seem obvious that we should favor
access over security, without security there will be no digital cash,
few useful pieces of intellectual property on the net, and precious
little privacy as well. We will, no doubt, make some accommodation
to this trade-off that will create further disintermediation of the
transaction process. Not only will the mediation of individuals in
many transactions be foregone, but perhaps whole industries of
mediators that have grown up in our industrial society will be
displaced as well. These are sobering thoughts in higher education
where our current paradigm has our faculty and our librarians, in
fact, our institutions playing the role of intermediaries in the
learning process.
Robert C. Heterick is president of Educom. heterick@educom.edu