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EDUCAUSE is committed to advancing higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

The Editor
Polley Ann McClure is vice president for information technologies at Cornell University.

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In recent years, colleges and universities have experienced tremendous growth in the applications of electronic information and the technologies that support the effective manipulation, transmission, storage, and use of that information. Because the growth has been so rapid, campus leaders are often challenged to effectively manage this increasingly critical function.
Organizing and Managing Information Resources on Your Campus provides an overview of current thinking about the most important issues involved in managing information technology and services on campus. This vital resource offers information on how to plan, organize, fund, assess, and govern these strategic assets. It also compares and contrasts approaches appropriate for large versus small institutions, research versus teaching missions, and private verses public models. And the book provides a synthesis of practical advice interwoven with general background discussion.

"With change swirling around higher education, this book is very timely because it is about managing a major change agent, information resources. Leaders will find very useful advice on information, technology, and services."
― Ron Bleed, vice chancellor, information technologies, Maricopa Community Colleges

"I think I'm fairly knowledgeable (for a provost, at least!) in IT matters, and I've encountered many of the authors of chapters in this book at various national meetings. Having them write down the key parts of what they know reminds me of how much more they know than I do. I learned a lot― from each chapter― and came away convinced that it will wonderfully inform academic leaders (department chairs, center directors, deans, provosts, presidents, financial officers, and the right subset of trustees of colleges and universities) about the key issues in IT and IR. This book not only raises these issues well but also offers well-placed and useful advice on how to deal with them."
― Charles E. Phelps, provost, University of Rochester,
Rochester, New York

Aus dem Klappentext

In recent years, colleges and universities have experienced tremendous growth in the applications of electronic information and the technologies that support the effective manipulation, transmission, storage, and use of that information. Because the growth has been so rapid, campus leaders are often challenged to effectively manage this increasingly critical function.
Organizing and Managing Information Resources on Your Campus provides an overview of current thinking about the most important issues involved in managing information technology and services on campus. This vital resource offers information on how to plan, organize, fund, assess, and govern these strategic assets. It also compares and contrasts approaches appropriate for large versus small institutions, research versus teaching missions, and private verses public models. And the book provides a synthesis of practical advice interwoven with general background discussion.

"With change swirling around higher education, this book is very timely because it is about managing a major change agent, information resources. Leaders will find very useful advice on information, technology, and services."
— Ron Bleed, vice chancellor, information technologies, Maricopa Community Colleges

"I think I'm fairly knowledgeable (for a provost, at least!) in IT matters, and I've encountered many of the authors of chapters in this book at various national meetings. Having them write down the key parts of what they know reminds me of how much more they know than I do. I learned a lot— from each chapter— and came away convinced that it will wonderfully inform academic leaders (department chairs, center directors, deans, provosts, presidents, financial officers, and the right subset of trustees of colleges and universities) about the key issues in IT and IR. This book not only raises these issues well but also offers well-placed and useful advice on how to deal with them."
— Charles E. Phelps, provost, University of Rochester,
Rochester, New York

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Educause Leadership Strategies, Volume 7, Organizing & Managing Information Resources on Your Campus

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Polley Ann McClure

In 1989, Brian Hawkins, who edited and introduced the book Organizing and Managing Information Resources on Campus (part of the Educom Strategies Series on Information Technology), and Ken King, who wrote the book's concluding remarks, both clearly saw higher education as being in the midst of a revolution. Citing the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Hawkins summarized the observation this way: "Higher education no longer merely anticipates a revolution in computer use; the revolution is under way" (p. 1).

Now, nearly fifteen years later, the turbulence of the computer revolution is subsiding. The revolution is not over by a long shot, but information technology (IT) has found its way into every aspect of higher education institutions, and we are beginning to deal with it as a "grown-up" instead of as the unruly youngster Hawkins and his contemporaries described in 1989.

The purpose of this book is to take a new look at the role of IT in higher education from the perspective of trying to be good managers of this major institutional resource. We will find ourselves addressing some of the same old questions, some of which will have new answers and some the same old answers. In addition, some new questions have arisen, and some old ones have grown in importance. In grappling with both old and new questions, IT managers must take into account the tradition and culture of higher education as a social institution. Higher education is the environment within which the IT function has evolved and currently operates. This environment has shaped structures and practices, and it determines ways of thinking about future options. At the same time, all the other elements of colleges and universities are adapting to and being changed by IT. Some environmental influences and adaptations are common throughout higher education; others are particular to individual institutions. In this book, we think about the management of IT in this dynamic frame of reference, examining ways in which higher education, both generally and specifically, has shaped the present and will shape the future for our IT practices.

The Influence of Higher Education's Decentralized Structure

One significant characteristic of higher education in general is its stable self-protecting structure, as Clark Kerr (1980, p. 9) points out: "Taking, as a starting point, 1530, when the Lutheran Church was founded, some 66 institutions that existed then still exist today in the Western World in recognizable form: the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and 62 universities.... They have experienced wars, revolutions, depressions, and industrial transformations, and have come out less changed than almost any other segment of their societies."

Higher education institutions exhibit this persistence because of their political and economic isolation and because it is part of their mission to transcend social change, which they exist to analyze, record, communicate, and interpret (Bowen, 2001). Persistence results also from the nature of the structure of higher education, which has been described as loosely coupled anarchy. While this kind of structure contributes to an institution's survival, it also contributes to its inability to evolve quickly-to the frustration of many change agents. It is difficult for a relatively new and dynamic element such as IT to invade and find a comfortable place within a structure so resistant to change.

Calling higher education institutions loosely coupled is another way of saying that their subunits are highly independent. While some outside observers exhort these institutions to behave more like businesses and exhibit the directedness of corporations, the management options within the IT function are defined by the reality that institutions of higher learning run themselves more as communities of autonomous members than as hierarchical bodies. Individual colleges, even individual professors, often operate as autonomous elements, optimizing their own performance with little regard for that of other units within the institution. From one campus to another, internal economies may vary along a continuum from more centrally planned to highly entrepreneurial, but all are characterized by a concentration of economic power at the periphery. Indeed, institutional goals and priorities arise more often from the individual faculty, departments, schools, and colleges than from the president's office.

Consequently, institutional decision-making processes rely on broad representation and consensus rather than managerial prerogative. This approach to management, which is key to higher education institutions' success as creative and critical engines of ideas, does present challenges when it comes to deploying an institutional enterprise IT infrastructure.

The degree of centralization at any given institution is a fairly intractable, highly significant attribute to take into account in designing effective IT management strategies. For example, if only a small number of people can authorize practices for IT, decision making is relatively straightforward. The larger the number of individuals involved (the more decentralized the environment), the more complex the decision-making process is. Along the same lines, greater centralization usually corresponds to easier, less expensive deployment of information systems supporting administrative processes, because these processes are generally more coherent and more widely understood and because the network itself is generally more coherent (less fragmented) than in highly decentralized environments.

In general, between the decentralized nature of higher education and the distributed nature of today's desktop computing, higher education institutions are battling powerful centrifugal forces. These forces work against true enterprise standards and the efficiencies they could yield. One of higher education's most important challenges is to develop specific mechanisms to resist the excessively disruptive effects of these forces.

The Influence of Financial Architecture

Another important environmental variable for IT managers is an institution's financial architecture. Two main types of models have emerged: the responsibility-centered model and the centrally planned model.

If the institution operates under a relatively responsibility-centered economy, in which constituent units have both income and expenditure responsibility (often referred to as "each tub on its own bottom"), the central IT function will tend toward fee-based services, and in many cases the constituent units will have greater autonomy in deciding how to provision themselves with IT services. Fee-based services often leave the door open for free choice, which can lead to greater heterogeneity and complexity.

If the institution operates more as a centrally planned economy with most funds coming into the central administration, which then allocates funds among units, IT services are more likely to be perceived as free goods. In this situation, it is easier to deploy standards, which can lead to a generally more...