IT Leadership

A combination of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) “movement” and the rise of widely-used, highly-effective third party communication systems (eg – Gmail over whatever your company/institution is using) has created what I see as a conflict about whether to support people that you’d call either early adopters or ones that have gone off on his or her own and away from standardized systems.

First, some general definitions and stuff.  BYOD has arisen mostly because incredibly powerful computing devices have hit the mainstream.  Tons of people have smart phones (though the actual % is lower than you might think – recent surveys indicate that a solid 30-40% of cell phone users have, at most, “feature” phones with keyboards or some other extra feature for faster texting, but no web browsing or anything like that.  Many others just have flip phones for regular calling).  Lots of people have tablets.  And laptop ownership went past 75% a long time ago.  So with all of these devices already in our pockets and bags, we have to start considering the ramifications of so much computing and productivity power being brought to our campuses and work places, rather than being provided by.  A computer lab might need to be only half the size of just 2 years ago, with empty desk space being far more useful for students and their own laptops, etc.

Even though AOL first offered its own e-mail system a very, very long time ago (I was on AOL starting in 1994-1995, and I remember it had not yet purchased Compuserv), the massive shift to yahoo and google for personal e-mail also causes an issue.  In the same way that we have to consider that users have their own devices which they prefer to use over the ones we provide, we must also be aware that one’s well-established gmail account might supersede the benefits of an organizational e-mail system (or calendar system, or chat system, etc).  Yes, for work purposes there is the issue of separating official from personal e-mail but the lines get more and more blurred, even for employees, as adoption of these other tools gets higher and higher.  Investment into one’s personal gmail account gets so high that his or her identity is based on that account, not the name.edu or company.com one.

We have faculty at Santa Clara Law – people who are scholars associated with an academic institution – who use their gmail accounts with gmail.com suffixes over their scu.edu accounts.  I recently worked with a few marketing folks that asked me to contact them on their yahoo and gmail accounts instead of their company ones, because it was faster (and easier to get to one their phones, etc).

A lot of the two movements go hand-in-hand.  Because it’s so easy to connect an Android phone or iPhone to gmail, people prefer to have that account when “on the go.”  As they are more and more mobile, more of their e-mail goes to those “non-sanctioned” accounts.  As more goes there, less goes to the official one.  And so on.

As we look towards a shift to a new e-mail and calendaring (and collaboration) toolset at Santa Clara University, those faculty that switched over to gmail will in fact be left “out in the cold.”  They are using the “commercial” version of gmail, and we’ll be using the “educational” version of either Google or Microsoft’s cloud-based solutions.  Even if we go with Google, there is no migration option from a personal, commercial account to an institutional, Apps for Education one.

So…in a way, we are punishing those that adopted these highly-productive tools (gmail, gchat, etc), potentially a side-effect of early adoption of highly-capable devices (smartphones, tablets).  We are penalizing early-adopters.

Yet we rely on early adopters to push the envelope, to ask the questions that those only one standard-deviation away from the mean have not yet considered, and to help motivate and inspire us to do more and be more creative.

How do we resolve this conflict?  Do we create an environment that encourages early adoption?  Many times it is these individuals that help instructional technologists (or just plain technologists) try new things and work out the bugs.  But what happens when we switch to a standard that leaves them out in the cold?  What safety nets do we provide?  If none, then do we risk fragmentation (aside from dissatisfaction, of course)?

As part of “Project 2012,” the team established an explicit expectation that we all operated as a unified team, and that we were all accountable and dependent on each other.  This may seem like something every team should have, but the point was to explicitly state – and collectively agree – that we would operate in this manner from now on, and to acknowledge that team success depended on team cohesion.

Rather than a traditional org chart of any kind – even a very flat one of manager (me) and then the rest of the staff reporting up – we are formed more in the shape of a 7-sided polygon.  Not only is each point connected to a neighboring point, but also to everyone other point.  It’s like a 7-point web, really (but a polygon is easier to visualize when I’m describing it to others).  We are all the same level.  Each position is empowered to act individually to the benefit of the team.  Each position has internal and external responsibilities.  The Classrooms and Media Production Manager, for instance, has the internal operational responsibilities of updating our classrooms, the internal programmatic responsibility of researching new educational technology that can be used by faculty in those rooms, and the external responsibility to interface with university Media Services.  Law Tech is dependent on the Classrooms Manager to keep up with Media Services such that we are effectively never surprised.  The Classrooms Manager is dependent on Law Tech to support efforts made while collaborating with Media Services, provide input, etc.

The polygon is actually also a great management tool.  It may seem that the team is decentralized but, because the dependencies are emphasized so heavily, one can never go too far without running into a checkpoint with another team member.  One can have an idea about a classroom technology, talk to other schools that have used it, and talk to the manufacturer.  But once a reseller is contacted, a dependency on the budget manager (me) comes into play.  Even before that, dependencies on Operations to make sure the new technology will fit our overall maintenance system or on the Help Desk to make sure the technology can be supported arise.  Each person on the other end – me as budget manager, Operations for maintenance and Help Desk for support – depends on the Classrooms Manager to check in with us at the appropriate points.  Failure to do so is letting us down.

In an ideal world, the polygon empowers individuals, improves communications, and leads to overall team improvements in creativity, collaboration, and performance.  At the least, it allows me to expect more from the team (and myself – this isn’t always easy for me to navigate, either) and react to deviations from the polygon approach as appropriate.  So I’m not giving up all responsibility – far from it.  I am asking each team member to step up (and of course I am putting myself in the mix at the exact same level, which I think is a good part of a team-based operation).

As today is my first back from paternity leave, having put in the polygon – at least conceptually – proved to be very comforting as I shifted all of my attention to my family.  I knew things would not go perfectly (and truth be told I’m still sifting through stuff now) but I also knew that, when in doubt, the team could “go to the polygon” and ask more of each other, and have more asked of them.

We’ll see how the next few weeks go as I switch back to a more regular schedule.

A number of years ago (7?), a colleague of mine at Stanford – Carlos Seligo – introduced the concept of “Orchids and Weeds.”  He meant it jokingly at the time, but it has stuck with me ever since.

Basically, there are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to technology, support, and adoption.  There are orchids, which are elegant, beautiful and perfectly aligned with needs but require an incredible amount of attention and resources to get running and properly supported.  It is unlikely that support will become more efficient over time.  Weeds, on the other hand, spring up organically and often as ancillary to something else.  They germinate quickly and soon adoption is very high and usage has proliferated.  Weeds might even be used in ways never originally intended.

An example of an orchid might be the Sakai Learning Management System, which has been developed by universities, for universities, but is quite a beast to implement and manage.  Perhaps even some of the major Microsoft products – Sharepoint comes to mind – would be orchids, too.  They can be ridiculously powerful if done right, but needs a lot of resources to get there.  The two “big” weeds would be e-mail and SMS text messaging. SMS is in particular is a great example.  Originally designed so that cell company employees could report coverage outages and other problems, it has become the primary way for many people to communicate (I send about 2000 texts a month and yet use fewer than 400 minutes).

It is important to note that there is nothing inherently bad about an orchid.  By definition, it is beautiful, elegant, and a perfect solution for the job.  It offers very high value and probably commands a high price (the amount of effort users are willing to expend to access the service).  But the cost is also extremely high.  So the overall value-cost gap (or V-C “wedge” as we’d say in my Capstone MBA course) is smaller than, say, text messaging.

But if the fundamental basis for maintaining a service portfolio is value, orchids are just fine.  You just have to pick and choose the right ones.  And that means a strong rubric for getting rid of the useless orchids (just pretty, but not the right fit) from the truly wonderful ones.

Basing services on value provision is pretty simple.  Well, actual “value” is hard to quantify, even in the business world where there is a number for everything.  But if you start with price – again, the expense of time/effort/distance traveled/hoops jumped through/etc that a user is willing to take on in order to use the service – then you can get an idea of value.  Value is always the same or higher than price (unless you have one seriously messed up measurement system).  If you put something somewhere (physical location of a high-end lab, a web service behind so many clicks of the mouse, etc) and people are still rushing in droves to use it, then the price is probably quite a bit lower than value.  Whether the price is too low is unclear, but it’s not like you’re going to disassemble that lab and move it farther away from the dorms or put even more clicks in front of the web service.  Bottom line – value is high, and it can be gauged if not measured exactly.

So once you have that, you just roll out services that are high value or high V-C.  The value could be high in an absolute sense, in which case cost is not an issue (striking a deal with a cloud-based backup company where the student pays and you get all the kudos but none of the liability).  Or it could be high in a relative sense (buying a bigger SAN for $75000 to do multiple redundant backups of faculty and staff data, on-site, in exchange for peace of mind to those users.  cost and value are high).  But if something is low in value, just don’t bother with it.  Because if it’s not of value to anyone, why are you wasting resources on it?  Worst case scenario, cost is HIGHER than value, and you’re just burning resources for nothing.

Ideally, you go low cast and high value – look for weeds.  Get as many of these as you can because they require low overhead but adoption will be high.  I’m not sure people will “value” it the same way they would with other things but they will surely use the service.  Align your staff to take advantage of these.  Have fewer staff managing more weeds – the ratio will be different.

Then go looking for orchids.  You will probably need project management staff just to test them, then a much lower staff:service ratio to maintain them.  But if you figure out the right potential orchids during testing, then deploy the best 2-5 or so and it’ll be worth it.

I loathe the phrase “do more with less.”  I abhor it.  I loathe and abhor very, very few things in life, and I reserve those venomous verbs for rare occasions.  Yet I both loathe and abhor the phrase and the idea behind the notion of “doing more with less” as a management tool or concept.

The idea that any organization – whether it be an entire institution, a school, a department, or even a single project team – should be expected to provide, say, 125% output with less than 100% resources is utterly absurd.  When this is used during times of economic crisis – which is what we’re looking at right now in higher education – the philosophy can be something of a necessary evil.  When budgets are tight then almost any project will have less than 100% of funding.  When hiring freezes occur then existing staff are spread more thinly across projects.  Resources – both dollars and staff – must be at less than 100% in such a situation.  And at least for the short-term the same set of services must persist.  There simply isn’t enough time to retool an entire department, help desk, or other operation in the face of a sudden budget crunch.  Dollars per capita (DPC) goes down because it has to, at least for now.

But this cannot become standard, ongoing policy.  Service portfolios must be reviewed, staff must be rearranged, and overall operations must be reorganized to accommodate the new monetary restrictions.  Only those services that can be offered at the same, pre-crunch level should remain, and overall DPC should be restored.  This has to happen, or everything and everyone suffers.

So “more with less” cannot work as a long-term response to budgetary constraints.

As a general inspirational philosophy, however, it can have some kind of meaning.  ”More” and “less” are relative terms.  Provided that there is not the expectation that we somehow work 125% time (in the perhaps utopian world where everyone works to capacity and capability, no one can work more than 100% of what he or she is capable), doing “more” simply means to provide some additional quality with the work we do.  For me, I use value to customer as the yardstick.  How much value are we offering to our students/staff/faculty (or some subset – residential students?  just the financial aid office?) with our services?  How can we provide “more” value by doing X instead of Y?  Or perhaps by doing a new version of X?

Similarly, “less” just means using a lower quantity of available resources.  It does not and should not mean that there are fewer resources, in an absolute sense, with which to provide the same value.  Just in a relative sense.  In other words, using “less” is all about efficiency.  How can we provide value in a manner that consume less time, less dollars, or both?

Ideally, how can we provide more value, more efficiently than we are doing now?

Taking the value concept further, it is quite possible that there are extremely high value products and/or services that are actually extremely costly in terms of resources.  In a perfect world we offer huge value at a low cost – a major streamlining of workflows for a specific office using open source software that is easy to install and maintain.  But if the value boost is high enough – providing a toolkit that makes Santa Clara Law students “twice” as useful to law firms than students from other schools – then cost becomes less of an issue.  Maybe that toolkit involves building multiple web-based software tools and purchasing, installing, and maintaining a very expensive piece of software that provides practical training.  Maybe it’s worth it.  Maybe not.  But it is a possibility one should consider.  The “more” value part should be the first consideration, with the “less” resources – efficiency – part coming next.  Hopefully if we offer this huge value, high cost solution, at least whatever resources we are expending are the absolute lowest amount required because we are very efficient.

Now – my preferred way of approaching this concept, the only way in which I am truly comfortable espousing anything along the lines of “more” and “less” is to:

“provide more value with more resources, using less resources and being more efficient, all within the same or less amount of time.”

Now, that’s awfully long-winded, but that’s also the history major in me.  It is, however, important that all of these points be included.

Provide more value:  covered above, but again the key thing is that we first want to provide value.  If the customers don’t get the value then we shouldn’t offer it.

With more resources: if I’m asking you to find a way to provide more value, then I’m going to give you a bigger pool of resources – staff and money – to help shape things.  To help form the project at the outset.  Start with loose reins, then bring them in when you are underway and need control.

Using less resources and being more efficient: Of course, it is not acceptable long-term to add services to our portfolio that consume resources disproportionate to the value being provided.  At the least, when pilot leads to production, the service should be streamlined and using fewer resources than all other alternatives.

All within the same or less amount of time: This is key.  We all work 100%.  For most people, that means 40 hours per week.  So what I want is for my staff to do all of this, develop new projects that provide more value, etc, all still within those 40 hours per week.

Of course, if you’re being efficient, then what is really happening is that whereas you provided X amount of value during those 40 hours, you are now providing, say, 1.5X or even 2X in the same amount of time.  The entire department is better at providing more value, and over time we do more with more while using less.