October 2000
Volume 16
Number 7
Information Technology in the Consortium Setting
Some involvement with collaborative projects in academic information technology appears likely for almost all institutions of higher education. The past two decades have seen universities and colleges partner with computing hardware manufacturers, technology-transfer and business-incubator enterprises, and with the K-12 sector of education. Now a strong trend is building for strategic associations with peer institutions.
A consortium is a voluntary association in which the members retain independence of action and identity while agreeing to cooperate on selected topics. They vary in size from two or three to twenty or more. There is even a consortium of consortia -- The Association for Consortial Leadership. Some mix colleges and universities, private and public, large and small. The participating schools might be within sight of each other or spread over more than a thousand miles. Some share physical facilities and cross-enroll students. Others meet only periodically or, increasingly, over the telecommunications wire. What is driving this movement?
Over the sustained period of a strong economy and low inflation that still continues, observers of higher education have forecast that the faster-than-inflation growth of costs in academe could not continue. Indeed, the cost trend has slowed considerably in just the past few years. And over the same spread of years, the commercial world has gone through dramatic restructuring and dislocation, converting the accumulated productivity gains made possible in large part by information technology to reduce operating costs and transform entire industries. Higher education has encountered second-order effects from these developments, seeing dramatic changes in age demographics -- as continual education has become necessary in the workplace and post-graduate education virtually necessary for all knowledge-based work. But for the most part, higher ed institutions are structurally unchanged from forty or even fifty years ago.
The consortium offers the possibility of changing some aspects of how colleges and universities function without forcing substantial internal and core changes to the institutions themselves. Consortia offer the promise, if not always the reality, of cost economies of scale and scope. They also provide at least the theoretical opportunity to share and dilute risk, develop new ventures for which costs are mitigated by sharing, and the opportunity to reduce program redundancies through complementarity -- the cultivation of different specializations that are then shared among the members.
The special case for IT
As cooperative ventures, loose affiliations, and new consortia have been
formed, synergies in IT have begun to rise in the agendas of these groups. IT on
most campuses is still a function fighting for its share of nourishment; it is
the ugly duckling, late arrival, or unexpected guest (who shows no sign of going
away). It is reasonable, then, to propose that IT get special attention as a
candidate for a substantial place in the also-new realm of interinstitutional
cooperation. There is a strain of wishful thinking here, to be sure: because
re-apportioning expenditures to accommodate the costs of IT poses uncomfortable
political challenges on campus, it seems appealing to look instead off campus
for ways to feed the demand.
Several trends in technology encourage hope for this hypothesis. Standardization has greatly reduced the differences in how IT is conducted on campuses, making equipment, configurations, and practices noticeably more uniform across schools than many aspects of the academic enterprise.
The Internet and other forms of telecommunication have lessened the importance of distances and geography. While most education is still classroom-based and rooted to a common place and time, the ability to span distances and accommodate differences in time (i.e., asynchronous learning) is spurring exploration of new ways to conduct instruction and to provide mission-critical information systems, such as library IT and Internet access. Faculty and staff development, and related support services, are increasingly regarded as potential grounds for cooperative work, whether or not commuting distances accommodate in-person interactions.
More subtly, the extent to which the IT profession has been organized and unified also contributes importantly to the viability of consortial work in IT. Staff at all levels in IT probably find themselves more in accord with their colleagues on other campuses than they do with their own campus leadership and clientele. One of the oldest truisms in the IT profession is that on the home campus problems seem unique and intractable, yet colleagues encountered at meetings away from home have remarkably similar stories to tell and listen more attentively and supportively than non-IT colleagues at the home institution. IT professionals are inclined to believe that potential allies are likely to be found "outside."
Ventures that work
Some of the earliest and most fundamental successes were -- and
continue to be -- joint purchasing
alliances. During the 1980s, volume discounts on hardware purchases were the
glue for numerous new cooperative relationships among institutions. And while
the commoditization of hardware and software has lessened the unique value of
consortia for volume discounting, the practice is still worthwhile in fields
such as subscriptions to library online information services.
Shared information systems were prominent features of consortial IT at the end of the mainframe-domination and before minicomputers reigned. Many colleges arranged remote access to time-share systems before they had their own on-campus hardware. In the same era, multi-campus university systems typically developed centralized administrative computing applications. These tended to break up once it became feasible to provide sufficient compute cycles locally and to program with third-generation software tools. But there are now sporadic signs that the trend might swing back towards some degree of centralization. Library functions are increasingly moving to consortial, regional, or state-wide collaborations. In the more formally structured (and geographically proximate) consortia, calendar, course schedule, job placement, and student insurance applications are among the information systems likely to be migrated to a collective approach.
Collaborative learning via distance-bridging technologies is growing beyond the bounds of individual campuses and has been in recent years targeted by granting agencies interested in promoting cost efficiencies.
To a limited extent, research and development in technology has also been successful in the consortial setting although it is possible that the commercial potential of technology developed on campuses will prove a long-term restraint on the willingness of institutions to share R&D work.
Less amenable projects
Failures and resistances have cropped up as well and provide insight on what
is more difficult to accomplish collaboratively.
Academic curricula, which are so fundamental to determining the agenda and priorities of an institution of higher education, have proven very difficult to move into the consortial setting. The curriculum is set principally by faculty acting under the discipline/department structure, which tends to be rooted firmly in each campus. That part of IT that is tied directly to supporting the curriculum is therefore bound to be campus-centric as well. Network technology and staff technical training may escape the campus orbit sufficiently to become consortial initiatives, but courseware development support and classroom technology design, acquisition, and support are less likely prospects because of their ties to faculty and curriculum.
Administrative work processes and their related data handling have also proven highly resistant to the kinds of compromise and standardization necessary to move them into shared systems. The most notorious examples are probably in the registrar/student records functions. Colleges or universities that have tried to arrive at academic schedules identical to those of neighbors with whom they want to cooperate can testify to the difficulty of altering campus patterns and habits.
Perhaps most disappointingly for IT, cooperation in staffing has also been very difficult to advance consortially. End-user support positions are inevitably tied to direct relationships with the people they serve. Faculty and administrative staff have both insisted on near-captive relationships with IT staff. Even the work of setting up help desks and other means of end-user support had to overcome the clientele's reluctance to loosen their grip on favorite IT individuals. The proposition that a single source of some aspect of support -- statistical computing, for example -- is nearly impossible to carry out against that resistance.
Inherent problems
Every campus, even in a state system of public higher education, has its own
personality. It consists of "history,"
finance, agenda, priorities, schedule and the catch-all category normally termed "campus culture."
Each of these in its own right is sufficient to halt a cooperative venture. The
confluence and conflict of these in a multi-institutional setting is the very
heart of difficulty in the life of a consortium. Viewed from the particular
discipline of project management, it is easy to see how many constraints and
arbitrary pre-conditions come into play.
The legendary inefficiency of committees becomes magnified in consortial work. The difficulty of even convening a multi-institutional committee can be daunting and discouraging. These groups bear the additional handicap of having a lower priority in the worklife of the individuals who come to it.
There is also an inescapable tension between competitive and cooperative modes of working. "Competition" is not necessarily direct and specific among cooperating institutions. Still one often hears that cooperation entails compromises that amount to a lower standard of achievement (or a slower implementation schedule) than would be the case if the institution were acting on its own.
Another token of this "competitive" attitude could be called the "not invented here" prejudice: bringing back to campus an idea that had its origin in an off-campus meeting is often a problem. In the background, there is a strange dichotomy between everyone's easy willingness to agree to cooperation in the abstract and in general terms and the very real difficulty of making it happen on a daily basis.
Finally, consortial decision-making invariably turns on a balance between near-term and longer ranged objectives. At some point in every project there is a discussion of whet-her one or more of the participating institutions is in the position of having to decide to go along with the others because preserving the consortium for the future (when accord always seems a stronger prospect) or to resist the current project because it does not fit with the home-campus agenda or priorities. Almost nobody in these situations has the possibility of putting aside the strictly institutional portfolio and acting as a "citizen" of the consortium.
Factors for success
Nothing is more insidious in undermining the spirit of consortium than the
feeling that some members are less equal than others. Most successful consortia
find both practical and symbolic ways to support a sense of parity among the
members. Part of this effort consists of a stipulation that each member
institution is uniquely excellent, yet gracious enough to allow the others to
entertain the same thought. A good sense of humor in the delegates to these
meetings helps, as well.
External pressure, when it exists, also promotes harmony in a consortium. The rate of growth in health insurance in the near past has led many consortia to cooperate in aggregating their business so as to increase their bargaining leverage. In IT, Napster has done wonders in the past year to promote improved consultation among network managers on different campuses. But defensive banding can be counterproductive if it appears to be anti-competitive in the public view, as it did several years ago with regard to financial aid.
Timing in the affairs of a consortium takes on special weight and sensitivity. Because multi-institutional deliberations consume time and move slowly, projects are vulnerable to being undermined by impatience, particularly where the sense of urgency varies among the members. The threat to pull out of the collective effort and go alone at a faster pace is one of the most often-brandished threats in these discussions, whether used as a tactic or merely from frustration. The reverse is also true: an institution that is uncomfortable with any aspect of a project can easily bring pressure on the others by slowing down the timeline. As a result, long lead-times tend to facilitate consortial work by allowing a margin for the extra negotiation inherent in the group projects.
New initiatives are generally more promising for consortium initiatives even though these will often not be perceived to be as urgent as projects aimed at resolving present problems. The difficulty with current topics is that each institution is somewhere in the course of dealing with them already, and any joint approach to a resolution must involve hammering out the inevitable differences in current practices. It would be easier, for example, to plan ahead for how a consortium will obtain DS3 data network capacity than to coordinate how to cope with current bandwidth shortages.
By the same token, old issues are also easier to take up consortially than current issues. For example, is now the time to return to thinking about information systems that were proposed and then deemed infeasible in the past because the technology was not quite ready (example: database-to-web or gopher six or eight years ago)? Again, the key point is that where work is not presently in progress there are fewer differences to iron out.
But most importantly, and elusively, consortial action places a premium on vision. Seeing beyond the campus perimeter fence turns out to be a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The perspective required to see and enact projects among institutions is simply not the same as that needed for operation on the home campus and cannot be taken for granted in one's colleagues. The problem is likely to be that too many ideas seem right for collective action, and discovering which are in fact reasonable to pursue is hard.
While consortia are not new to higher education, their value and durability in the IT field is still a work in progress. It will be interesting to see whether IT will become less campus-centric than has been the case to date. TW
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