Engineers and Ivory Towers Copyright 1995 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ magazine, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 1995. 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 technology 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 ENGINEERS AND IVORY TOWERS by Robert C. Heterick, Jr. ABSTRACT: At the 1994 CAUSE annual conference in Orlando, Florida, CAUSE presented its ELITE Award for Exemplary Leadership and Information Technology Excellence to Robert C. Heterick, Jr. The award honors outstanding professionals in the field of information technology management in higher education. Dr. Heterick addressed nearly 2,000 information resources professionals at a special luncheon at which he was honored. This article is an elaboration of his remarks upon receiving the award. People frequently ask how a civil engineer got into the computing business. I have always wondered not how I got into but why I stayed in the business. Thirty-five years ago someone convinced me that the engineering problem I was working on for a graduate thesis could be done on something called a computer. Perhaps not unlike many another eager young graduate student, I bit. There are two things I recall about that first experience with information technology. I remember the long nights (graduate students only got access to the machine between midnight and 8:00 a.m.) programming, debugging, and waiting. The computer occupied nearly 1,000 square feet of floor space, required air conditioning that occupied about half again as much space, and had the computational power of a seriously crippled HP hand calculator. I spent nearly every night over many months laboring on that IBM 650. The other thing I clearly remember was my advisor taking home the first draft of my computational prowess one Friday evening and returning it the next Monday morning with every example problem meticulously checked by hand calculation. I clearly remember his observing that he was going to trust me that computers might someday be as facile in solving the problem as a good engineer. I suspect that it is my engineering background and some of that same sense of trust that has shaped much of my view of information technology, resources, and management. I thought I might share a couple of engineering systems principles, as they seem to me to have particular relevance to some of our current technology disputes and policy debates. 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. About the turn of the century a very clever English physicist, Clerk Maxwell, suggested a way to beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Maxwell's thought experiment was to imagine a demon at a trap door in the middle of a container filled with gas at a constant temperature and pressure. The demon would observe the molecules bouncing around and would judiciously open and close the trap door to permit the faster molecules into one side of the container and the slower into the other. Over time, one side would get hotter and the other colder, organizing the latent heat energy and thereby overturning the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Modern enterprises have introduced just such a demon into their management philosophy and organizational structure. That demon is the array of digital technologies unleashed by the integrated circuit and fiber optics. I have been convinced for the past thirty or so years that judicious use of information technology could 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. I wasn't as quick to realize that "judicious" was sometimes paradoxical and frequently meant 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 all 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 First Law of Thermodynamics (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 First 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 navigation 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 give us a taste of what opening our systems can bring. They bring, as well, a lesson in what effort will be required to maintain them. Economists have long had their own statement of the First 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, 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. This, of course, is precisely what Sir Isaac Newton did when he reduced the study of the motions of heavenly bodies to the simple interaction between the Sun and each planet. And it is why client/server systems will supplant centralized systems, and why centralized phone switches will give way to Internet-like distributed systems. We can already observe the Square Law of Complexity at work as our bureaucratic organizational structures break down under the pressure of information more widely diffused through our ivory towers. One might expect that higher education would have some advantage here, as we have never pushed the bureaucratic model as far as our colleagues in industry. However, lacking a "bottom line" or any other widely agreed-upon assessment strategies, much of this advantage will be dissipated in trying to keep our institutional constituencies focused on a common goal. We all seem to have learned early on the lesson of the First Law of Engineering--if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Upgrades to software releases to fix problems should be made only if you are experiencing the problem the upgrade was designed to fix. Such fixes generally tend to break something that was previously working. We haven't been so quick to recognize the implications of the Second Law of Engineering--if you can't fix it, feature it. How else can we account for the continuing interest in DOS and the myriad applications software whose advertising literature attempts to make virtue of its all too obvious vices? The Second Law is a call to listen to the music as well as to the words. Most of the shortcomings of a particular technology can be found in the advertising literature that attempts to extol its virtues. One sure way to predict technological futures is to closely examine the current generation's attempt to deal with systemic problems, extolling the shortcomings that the current release wasn't able to fix. I don't know who to attribute this one to, so I 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 tradeoff principle. Very clearly, the infusion of information technology into our institutions of higher education requires that we make a number of decisions that are tradeoffs. For instance, we can make our networks secure, or we can make them accessible. Trying to do both is akin to finding a guard dog that is mean enough to scare off burglars but is sufficiently docile so as to not bite the postal carrier. 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. The tradeoff is not a zero sum game. Too great a concern for privacy leads us into the First Law trap. Too little begins to stifle innovation, as it removes the reward structure. We will, no doubt, make some accommodation to this tradeoff 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. Intellectual property is a domain where technology is forcing us to reconsider some historic tradeoffs between accessibility and transaction pricing. The concept of "fair use," a mainstay in the print-based academy, won't translate well, if at all, to the online world of the Net. "Universal service" in our telecommunications networks is another arena where our institutions will be called upon to make some difficult tradeoff decisions between subsidy and innovation. Much like fair use, universal service has been defined in the context of the technology--in this case, plain old telephone service rather than print. The translation of universal service to the multi-megabit and gigabit world of the Net is neither obvious nor inexpensive. I can trace another principle back to the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who, early in this century, postulated the Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg was concerned with the simultaneous measurement of the momentum and position of a particle, but the principle has much broader application when seen as complementarity. There is a certain granularity to our knowledge of any subject. When we try to go below that level of granularity, our observations become influenced by our experimental apparatus and by ourselves. At this level, any two observers' views are complementary, each with some share of truth and neither reducible to the other. We might liken complementarity to the Parable of the Blind Men and their attempt to describe the elephant. We argue about client/server vs. mainframes, fair use vs. license, packets vs. circuits, and security vs. access as though they were religious dogma or the laws of physics. In fact, they are manifestations of complementarity. In each case we can observe that we bring many of our historic biases to the debate, all containing some element of truth, but not the whole truth. To successfully champion our view of those issues it is necessary that we take the time and make the effort to understand complementary views. The world of the Net will be unlike any that we have experienced. Attempts to simply extrapolate the world of print, or telephony, or even mainframe computing to this new world will be singularly unsuccessful. Our business is focused at the level of granularity that is at the heart of the complementarity. It is not possible to be at the leading edge of a paradigm shift without realizing that what we see is highly influenced by where we have come from. And not everyone has come by way of the same path. Our job is to lead our institutions onto unknown shores in an uncertain world. The physicist and philosopher, Arthur Eddington, said it most poetically when he observed, "We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in constructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo, it is our own." I have spent a lifetime following the footprints left by others. There are times when I notice that the footprints are deeper than usual; these are places where I didn't know enough to follow and my colleagues had to carry me. To all of them, and to all of you, thank you for showing me the way. And thank you for honoring me with the CAUSE ELITE Award. AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB HETERICK: LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING AHEAD FOR THE PROFESSION _CAUSE/EFFECT_ used the occasion of the ELITE Award to ask Bob to offer some observations about information technologies in higher education and some advice to the campus professionals who plan for and manage these resources. Q--You've been in the higher education information technology field a long time. Looking back, what stands out in your mind as most significant over the years? A--One thing that really strikes me is that it is very easy to look at the technology and predict, in the macro sense, what's going to happen in the world around us, but we always overestimate how quickly it's going to happen. We think it's going to happen in two to five years, but it's always four to ten or even twenty years before it actually comes about. At the same time, in the short term, _little_ things happen that we _didn't_ predict that totally change the trajectory of where we're going, without anyone realizing it. But then we quickly incorporate those things into the way we think about the world, and they become part of our predictive basis again. I think after a lot of years in this business that's really what strikes me more than anything else. The revolutionary changes, of course, are the personal computer and fiber optics-the silicon substrate and glass fiber that have just totally revolutionized the way we see all of these things. Q--You certainly saw the importance of networked information and the implications for higher education many years ago. A--Well, I think a lot of people have, but the problem is that people don't want to face up to some of those implications, so they don't really push the idea too much. Clearly in a networked world with multimedia available anywhere, anytime, a whole lot of things about our current institutional structures and organizations aren't sensible anymore. And who wants to be the leader of something that upsets the current paradigm? So people back away from it. I think they see what the future indications are, but they don't really want to pursue them; they're not aggressively seeking the change that they ought to bring about. Q--What do you think is the most important action that information professionals in higher education could take to help the necessary change take place? A--I think we see more clearly the implications of all this technology for the educational process than do most other people in our institutions, and we certainly need to find ways to put it in terms that those other people can understand, to have them begin to, in a collective sense, come to grips with all of these issues. We've not been very good at that. We've tended, historically, to sell the technology for technology's sake, and we've tended to not be concerned about the policy, the ethical, and the other kinds of dilemmas that come as a consequence of change. What we need is for our profession to become much more focused on interpreting this for other people in our institutions and engaging them in the debates and dilemmas that all this produces. We can be more forthright and honest with our colleagues. Q--Do you see Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative able to move that along? A--Although there are all sorts of neat things being done by people in emerging multimedia-based learning environments, none of them have translated or scaled beyond the local level. The reason for that is that we operate within the confines of a complex system of higher education; simply adding a new technology or strategy to the current system really doesn't change it. The National Learning Infrastructure Initiative is a belated recognition of the fact that we need to be thinking about building the new system of the future, with different institutional relationships, different roles for faculty and scholars, different roles for students--an entirely different way of looking at the world that supports learners rather than teachers.[1] Absent economic stress, there isn't any particular reason to change the system we have, but now we are into the middle of the first decade of a multi-decade- long period of stress, where we simply have got to get more learning at less cost--faster, cheaper, better--and we're not going to do that in the context of the teacher-centered paradigm. We're going to have to move to a learner-centered paradigm, and that means we're going to have to have an infrastructure which supports learners rather than an infrastructure that supports teachers. The NLII is an attempt to get a lot of people focused on the question of what that infrastructure is, how we build it, who participates, how we participate. Engaging the disciplinary societies in this dialogue is very important because higher education is really kind of dichotomized into two worlds that are almost orthogonal. There's the up-and-down world of the local institution--the president, vice presidents, deans, and faculty--but then there's the world of math, the world of physics, that cuts across institutions. When one focuses on the learner rather than the teacher, that orthogonal world of math and physics becomes more important, because that's the world that's going to set the standards for what it is that people should learn and how one tells whether or not they have learned whatever it is that one's attempting to inculcate in them. That's why in many senses we don't scale, because we stay in the up-and-down world, the institution, where we need to be in the orthogonal world of math, physics, sociology, or religion. Disciplinary societies are front and center as the spokesbodies for that orthogonal world. Q--What do you think is the most important agenda at the campus level? What should institutions be doing? A--I'm not sure that this is a different question than one could have asked last year, or ten years ago, or a hundred years ago. It seems to me there are two pieces to it. One is the short-term tactical questions of how we engage in some kind of continuous improvement of the process that we're in, reducing costs, improving the quality--all the things that any kind of a business, be it higher education or anything else, is always concerned about. Every now and then you come to periods in which the ultimate goal isn't going to be reached through these tactical maneuvers, when you just need a huge strategic vision, and at some point a transformation or reengineering, or repurposing process. That's normal. So I think campuses have to be dealing with both. By and large we are historically pretty good at dealing with the short-term tactical things, and in the same historical sense we've been terrible at dealing with the strategic things, but we've really not had to cope with many major strategic-issues paradigm shifts. We now have to cope with one, and it's certainly the first one since we tried to understand how to deal with the influx of GIs after World War II or since the creation of the land-grant institutions. There are very few periods in the history of the academy in the last five hundred years where there have been really quantum changes, and one could argue there haven't been any, really, since the creation of the medieval university. Now everyone agrees we're going to have one, but no one really wants to think strategically about what the implications of that are and what we do as an institution to position ourselves for that, how we make that transformation, and how we do it without just simply adding more resources to the process, but through internal re-allocations. And that's a painful process. So it's easy for people to say, "Let my successor worry about that, I'm going to worry about the little tactical problems; I'm going to do a damn good job there, and somebody else is going to worry about the big strategic issues." Well, we have to understand that that somebody else is us. As information professionals in the university, we become very important in helping define that debate and helping people understand what it's all about. Q--How do we get to be part of the debate if we aren't already? What can we say to information professionals who aren't in an influential enough position on their campus to be part of that debate? A--Well, I think this is also a classic problem. I think there are people who have a reasonable vision of the future who don't currently work in a sufficiently visible position to have a lot of obvious influence. What I'd say to them it that it just takes longer and it's harder, and you have to find people on your campus who do have that influence, convince them, and let them take the credit for your ideas. You have to let it flow through the mouths and the actions of other people rather than yourselves. Q--Were you always in the position to influence at Virginia Tech, or were you just lucky to have had a president fifteen years ago who understood the importance of planning and organizing for information resources, or did you have to do some conniving? A--Well, I think we all connive short of lying, cheating, and stealing, but we were certainly creative in the way we approached all this back then. Seriously, I would say that, looking at my colleagues who have been successful to a large degree, the characteristic that they've shared with a lot of their other colleagues who weren't as successful is that they had a pretty clear vision of the implications of the technological changes. What they did that some of their other colleagues didn't do so well was to find a way to articulate it in terms that were comprehensible to lay people in this business; they found a way to talk to the president, or the provost, or the dean, that framed these issues in a way that that dean or president or provost could process in terms of their own experiences. They simply won converts. Like any specialty, I think we tend to too much jargon--techy talk-in our attempts to impress people with our knowledge of the technical issues, and very few of the issues at this kind of macro, decision level are really technical issues. They're sociological issues, they're economic issues, and that means you need to interpret, take it out of your realm and put it in their realm, put it in a way they can understand it. Q--Do you think we're getting better at doing that? A--I think it's hard to say. More and more people are beginning to understand some of the implications of all this, but that may just be time rather than skill or expertise on our part in translating. It certainly is true that, unlike twenty-five or thirty years ago when a generation of people in positions of high influence had no knowledge of these technologies, it's increasingly the case that campus CEOs and academic officers have had a history of experience with technology, particularly in research environments where they probably have used it rather heavily in their personal research. So it's a little easier for them to grasp and understand the implications. Q--Do you think it's helpful that our associations do things like send CEOs the HEIRAlliance reports and videos that translate the technological issues into more meaningful terms for them? A--Oh, absolutely, they're useful! On the more flippant side one could argue that it's sort of Machiavellian that if you say the same thing over and over and over again, eventually people inculcate it into their own way of speaking and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, yes, I think it's important that we find the vehicles to reach technology lay people in their own world and their own way of operating and their own terminology to help them understand all this. The secret seems to be that if you keep the information sufficiently short and jargon-free people will actually look at it. 1994 CAUSE ELITE AWARD WINNER Academic, administrator, author, visionary, leader--Robert Heterick is one of the rare few in our profession who have consistently contributed effectively at many different levels. A combination of unique qualities contributes to this effectiveness. His understanding of the academy as an educator and administrator complements his knowledge and vision of the information age as an information technology professional. His insights into the economic and political environment as a scholar and analyst, combined with his knowledge of history, sociology, economics, and technology, enable him to shape plans and solutions to deal with the interplay of these forces on higher education and society. In his thirty years at Virginia Tech, Dr. Heterick served in a number of academic and administrative positions. He held professorial rank in three different colleges, chaired two departments, directed a laboratory, and from 1986 to 1991 served as vice president for information systems, responsible for a staff of over 500 and a budget of nearly $40 million. He continues to serve as chair of the Board of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, an innovative effort begun during his vice presidency at Virginia Tech to bring high bandwidth communications and Internet connectivity to the Blacksburg, Virginia, community. During his years as vice president, Virginia Tech became one of the first institutions to integrate computing, telecommunications, library, and media services into a comprehensive information resources organization. Dr. Heterick served on the CAUSE Board of Directors, both as vice chair and as chair. He was instrumental in the founding of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a cooperative effort between CAUSE, Educom, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the formation of the related Higher Education Information Resources Alliance (HEIRAlliance), with the same three organizations. When Dr. Heterick became president of Educom in 1993, he accepted a position that demanded both close attention to internal administrative and management detail and a high national leadership profile. He has dealt aggressively and effectively with the first while sustaining Educom's momentum on the national scene. Under his strong leadership, Educom is launching an exciting new initiative to create a national learning infrastructure. Through writing and speaking, Dr. Heterick gives eloquent voice to his vision. In 1988 he published A Single System Image: An Information Systems Strategy, the first CAUSE Professional Paper, considered a seminal work in the profession with its (then) revolutionary premise that a campus' information resources should appear to be delivered as if through a single system. He has authored many other books, monographs, and articles, and is a much sought after speaker in this country and abroad. Dr. Heterick has received the CAUSE ELITE Award because of the range and significance of his contributions, because of his relentless pursuit of his vision of the future, and because of his dedication to the work we do. Few others have served this profession as long, as broadly, or as well. Engineers and Ivory Towers 2r%8/ / NPO`,,7gBWord Work File D 2318TEXTMSTEXTMSWD-BtgH r,?7,79|tH/p /r// NEbO`,7f79|tHl/, NH/p /r// NEb/ / N/ / N Jeff Hansen22STR