April 1999

Volume 15
Number 1

Software Standards Are a Good Thing - Right?

The Story So Far: When IT Director Juan R. proposed setting a tighter standard for word processing on campus, he never imagined it would set off such an uproar. Of course, he expected a healthy debate to take place, but he thought it would soon become clear that the campus ship was already sailing briskly in that direction anyway. Back in a simpler day, there used to be a single unanimous and unquestioned choice of word processor at Division University: OldWordTool. Everyone had learned it when the first wave of OldWordTool-equipped personal computers made their dramatic appearance on faculty and staff desks over a decade ago. But since then the market winds had shifted, and now NewerProduct seemed to have gotten a foothold everywhere. Juan had proposed making the shift formal at a meeting of the IT Policy Committee, right after a group of his best support people had come into his office to tell him they were at the end of their collective rope. With so many new, inexperienced users joining the ranks, they were scrambling hard to help out everybody who got into trouble using complicated software. Couldn=t they jettison some of the older programs on the support list, particularly OldWordTool? Juan laid out the case before the IT Policy Committee, and suggested that the ITPC start a process that would give everyone on campus a chance to be heard before this important decision was made. The next newsletter from the Computer Center carried a lead article about the proposed change. That=s when the e-mail started.

Juan began to realize that he had tapped into an issue that went far beyond word processing, especially judging by the number of e-mails that began with the words, AI can=t believe....@ Like this one from Lee, a science faculty member:

AI can=t believe that you are thinking of dropping support for OldWordTool and making me learn NewerProduct. Do you have any idea how long it took me to learn how to get the charts to come out right in my lab manual?@

Juan reflected on how grateful Lee had been for guidance from the Computer Center when OldWordTool had first been introduced. She showed up for every workshop that the Center offered back then; some of them she attended two or three times. But it wasn=t just the veteran faculty who were complaining. Juan got quite a bit of mail from young faculty, too. Michael, an economist, delivered his comments in the form of an OldWordTool attachment to his mail message. That=s because his argument was sprinkled with elegant formulas that illustrated his points, and had to be formatted in OldWordTool.

AIn my department at Highflight University,@ Michael began, and Juan knew he must be worked up, because Michael assiduously avoided invoking casually the name of the prestigious school where he had done his graduate work, AOldWordTool was considered an important tool of our trade. As you know, representing complex equations is an important means of scholarly communication among economists. I hear that you can do equations in NewerProduct just fine, but I really don=t want to have to sit down and learn the intricacies again. Then there=s my dissertation, written in OldWordTool, that I am in the process of reworking into articles. And what about my students, whom I have asked to learn enough OldWordTool to write their papers?@

But the reactions that had affected Juan most were some that came in an impromptu discussion of the topic that happened over lunch. He got talking to some people from the Development Office about the standards issue in the Commons, and several other faculty and administrators came over to join their table when they overhead what they were talking about. It turned into something like a congressional committee hearing, with him playing the role of the hapless bureaucrat who had come up on the Hill to defend an unpopular policy. As the discussion got more heated and personal, one person finally hissed, AYou=re just doing this to make things easier for you and your staff, aren=t you? You don=t want to have to learn all these different programs. What do we pay you for anyway?@

A few weeks later. Juan was sitting in his office, jotting notes for his presentation to the IT Policy Committee. By now, the issue had grown to immense proportions. The initial arguments that Juan had used in proposing the new standard were so convincing to the ITPC that its members felt they were defending the very principles of rational conduct of an IT policy. Juan found himself in a strange position. He was going to urge the ITPC to reverse its stand on the word processing policy. He had thought a lot about the issues in the past weeks, and he wanted to explain to the Committee what he had come to understand. His notes laid out these ideas:

(Un)Truisms About Software Standards
All word processing programs (and spreadsheets, e-mail clients, browsers, etc) are so much alike nowadays, that it is no big deal to switch from one to another. People who believe this probably have a secretary who does all their typing for them. There are a lot of reasons why switching between programs can be a significant effort. Take word processors. Anybody who does much writing of any kind probably uses features that quickly get beyond the standard point-and-click interface and are far from standard across brands. Examples include headers and footers, tables, styles, templates, and mail merge. Then too, most people come to rely on shortcuts and conveniences that may not exist in identical ways in all word processors. Besides the learning curve for standard features, there=s the investment many people have made in setting up their own customized aids for doing their work. These may include collections of standard formats, typing abbreviations, custom word lists in a spelling checker, personal icons and menu bars, even complicated macros. While any single one of these differences may appear negligible by itself, when added together they can seem like the gently falling flakes that gradually pile up, eventually blocking the cabin door.

Every campus should have software standards. People agree with this in theory. And they expect solid standards for things like network connections and an integrated system of e-mail addresses. But when it comes to productivity software, like word processing programs, they may see things differently. People don=t feel that their word processor is strictly an institutional tool, lent to them by management to do their specific task. Productivity software has become a part of many people=s basic inventory of indispensable tools, part of how they get things done in their professional and personal lives. For many people, a word processor is an intimate kind of software, more like a prosthetic hand than a work glove.

We need campus software standards so that people can work together more easily. This is the clearest and best-founded argument for software standards. It arises out of the right kind of thinkingCweighing the mission of the institution and how best to achieve it. And it certainly seems to be self-evident that if everybody is using the same software it will be easier to collaborate on documents. The problem is that, if achieving this homogeneity requires unsettling lots of other solutions that are already in place, it may not be worth the cost. If it ain=t broke, don=t standardize it. Most of all, don=t standardize it from the top down. One key to successfully navigating this dilemma is to let any kind of standard arise out of a specific need rather than a hypothetical one. Wait until there is a strongly and widely felt conviction among a group of users that there is a problem in the first place and that they are willing to pay the price to fix it. Wait until users come to the conclusion that a software standard is part of the solution (as opposed to better conversion tools, better trained help people, a study of individual workflows, micro solutions with smaller parts of the campus, or other approaches).

We need software standards because our support staff can=t support all these different programs. Don=t go there. Rhetorically, the most inflammatory effect of this argument is to raise the specter that we are running this institution for the sake of the support people, rather than the other way around.

But there is also a substantive problem with this argument. The math itself is hard to defend. Take all the OldWordTool users and send them down Skill Mountain to the beginner slopes where they are going to have to start learning NewerProduct. What is the training and support cost of getting them back up to the same comfort level that they enjoyed with OldWordTool? Will that support effort be significantly less than the cost of continuing support for OldWordTool would have been? Remember to add into the equation the need to continue re-skilling newcomers, such as incoming first-year students and new faculty, who will likely include some who are already skilled in something besides NewerProduct.

The overload on support staff is real enough and certainly serious. But maybe there are other ways to address it. Let=s try proactive education of users, with the cooperation of supervisors (in the case of staff) and with the aid of faculty (in the case of students). Let=s analyze where most problems arise and try to provide sample solutions for those kinds of projects. Let=s provide ways for users to get help from sources other than the help desk, from on-line help, tapes, and manuals, or from user experts in their own areas.

Anybody who doesn=t go along with the new standard must be a. lazy; b. incompetent; c: disloyal to our institution. Good way to alienate any friends you might somehow have managed to retain up to this point.

We can=t afford to be buying multiple programs. In institutions not suffering acute budget meltdown, this financial argument would be seen as wildly disproportionate. Compare the cost of a single software license with its impact on personal productivity. This reason also suggests that institutional purchasing policies are playing the lead role in setting important IT policies. This seems to be taking a tactical approach to an issue that is soaked in strategic implications.

The gradual crumbling of these faux truths summarized for Juan what he had come to realize during the intense, sometimes painful, discussions with users over the past weeks. When he had first brought this issue to the ITPC, it was to ask them to take an apparently simple step, to adopt a campus standard for word processing software. Today, he would ask their cooperation in a more complex matter: developing a better model for how the Computer Center would support users.

As he thought about the impetus that had initiated the whole issue of standards, Juan began to see that the situation had gotten turned around. The pressing problem was the overload on the support people in the Computer Center, but he had jumped to a solution and tried to sell that solution to the community. Now he would take a step back and bring the original problem to the community, let them take part in identifying the solution. He would have the community discuss how to best make use of the time and skills of the people who worked in user support. What kinds of help did the users see as most important to getting their jobs done? How could this help best be provided? From there, Juan could develop a plan for letting his user support staff develop the skills they needed to meet those needs. The Computer Center would respond to the users= needs, rather than deciding what was good for everybody.

It might be that out of this community discussion would emerge the need to make some changes to campus software standards. If so, then these changes would be treated as major projects. If you considered the number of documents involved (people and offices possessed still-vital documents that dated back to the beginning of computer time), the amount of re-skilling and un-skilling that you might have to do, the deep impact that any forced change would have on people=s daily lives, it become clear that a standards change could be a major, expensive project. In fact, such a project should probably be conducted like other major projects that Division University had gotten successfully underway, like its conversion to a new AIS or its preparation for Y2K. The success of those projects was based on identifying them as major efforts with serious import for the institution, putting a project manager and steering committee in place, and getting everyone on campus involved in both decision-making and working on the project. And it hadn=t hurt that both projects had leadership from a highly placed champion.

But the more Juan reflected on these issues, the more he felt that the support crisis was quite distinct from the standards issue. One good result of all this was that Juan and his support staff had spent a lot of time recently reflecting on what they did for the user community and how they did it. They were coming to the conclusion that Division University was ready for a new support model. (There was a house rule in the Computer Center that anybody who used the word Aparadigm@ had to bring bagels for everybody the next morning.)

After all, the original style had developed when computers were new for everybody. Juan could remember helping a dean whose computer wouldn=t start because he was using letters instead of ones and zeroes to enter the required system date. It was perfectly understandable that they had fallen into a paternalistic AWe teach youCyou learn from us@ model. If they were responsible for everything their pupils did, then it was natural that they would make most of the rules. But if today=s users were more used to taking responsibility for their own productivity, then maybe Juan and his staff could ... well, relax a bit. Maybe it would be possible for everyone on campus to agree on what it was reasonable to expect when they called the help desk or walked into the Computer Center. For the Computer Center=s part, Juan knew that they still had some improvements to make in how they treated those who came to them for help.

Juan gathered up his notes and got ready to go to the Policy Committee meeting. As he passed through the support staff area on the way out, he noticed one of his most senior people looking up and down between her computer screen and a large binder that lay open on her desk. AFunny,@ Juan thought, Athat looked like an OldWordTool manual.@  LF

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