July 2003
Volume 19
Number 7
What Does "Strategic Planning" Mean For Campus IT Today?
On several occasions during a typical year, the CIO is asked whether the college or university has a strategic plan for information technology. Almost everyone tries to answer yes, or at least that some suitable plan is in development. Surveys, accreditations, job candidates, vendors, and sometimes auditors or trustees ask the question. “No” is never a good answer, but “yes” is for most campuses something short of accurate.
The term “strategic” crossed over from the business world into academe at some time in the 1980s. Every institution needed to have a strategic plan. Not far behind was the need for an IT strategic plan. Over most of the time since these plans came into vogue, they have been the product of big, long, exhausting processes that mobilized many people to participate and resulted in very large documents with even greater stacks of supporting addenda. When well done, they have been very useful. In nearly all cases the participants walked away hoping several years, at least, would roll by before they needed to return to the process. Gradually, strategic planning has evolved into a more sustainable activity, less disruptive to the normal work of institutions and more selective in scope of topics covered. Strategic vision, guidelines, and sets of objectives are now typically expected in all levels of planning. But still the question keeps coming back, “Do you have a Strategic Plan?”
So, what does “strategic” mean today for information technology in the academic setting? At a minimum, it seems to mean big, important, and expensive. Under that definition fit a good number of defensive and reluctant conceptions of planning for IT. Necessity, as opposed to choice, is no doubt still a good motivation to raise information technology to a high level of concern. It is true that at bottom most colleges and universities approach IT with the intention of investing enough resources in it and paying enough attention to it to avoid trouble, usually expressed as worry about competitive disadvantage. Where this view prevails, the question driving planning efforts is something like, “How much of this do we really need to do?” Almost invariably today, the answer is “Quite a lot. More than we had hoped.” But as in diplomatic and military affairs, “strategic” plans are in fact often responses to uncertainty, worry, and perceptions of threat. Few institutions actually treat investment in IT as an end in itself; most feel they have no choice but to commit the resources needed to prevent the ill effects of failing to meet expectations.
Still, IT has become undeniably a core concern everywhere. The level of expenditure it absorbs gives it that status automatically. The percentage of institutional budget devoted to it has probably doubled on average in the past fifteen years. IT staff sizes increased over that interval, equipment and network reached every corner of the campus, and in just the past few years funding for routine replacement of the equipment stock has been built into most budgets. Those accomplishments, each the product of years of effort – and sometimes strife – testify to the arrival of IT as a fixture on campus, a reality that is well established. if not entirely welcome.
Despite its now permanent place on campus, IT is rarely planned to support the major, current objectives of colleges and universities. Wordsmiths can draw connections between IT plans and institutional mission statements or very general propositions, such as recruiting excellent students and faculty. How IT might be aligned to meet pressing, immediate needs such as funding shortfalls, space shortages, or personnel costs is a question not yet taken seriously except in the context of potential spending cuts to free resources to address those other needs.
Truly strategic
CIOs have an important opportunity to shift strategic thinking towards
ways in which existing strengths in IT might contribute to solving the
institution’s other problems. But this line of thinking requires first
moving away from the rationale that has supported the growth of IT up
until now. In most workplaces other than education, information technology
has enabled workforce reductions. Education is one of the last places
still clinging to essentially the same labor-intensive methods it has
always had.
Faced with funding shortages due to the sluggish national economy, most campuses are recognizing that efficiencies they have realized in many areas of their operations in recent years are going to fall short of sufficient to fill the gap between revenues and current levels of expense; only staff reductions can make up that difference. Until now, the IT community has been relatively reserved about how technology might be used to tackle core matters such as staffing levels and the ways in which instruction and administration are carried out.
As long as the contrast between business as usual and elective changes to the institution seemed too drastic for comfort, IT has stayed short of its strategic potential – its ability to affect other core needs. But if involuntary changes, such as substantial reductions in personnel, become unavoidable, then IT planners will need to become more assertive about how computer simulation software can cut the need for sciences laboratories, web-based instruction can lessen the number of in-class hours (and therefore numbers of classrooms) and faculty count, and network-based services can reduce administrative staff numbers. Information technology was built up as an add-on to institutional capabilities and cost structure. As it becomes a truly strategic asset, it will most likely be called upon to play roles that fewest of its most enthusiastic boosters contemplated.
Comprehensive
Another characteristic of truly strategic planning is comprehensiveness.
Tactical plans set and meet objectives; strategic plans link multiple
objectives, giving them the benefit of resources and focused effort. IT
planning tends to cover a wide terrain, enhancing the ERP, adding a few
high-tech classrooms each year, adding a staff position at a helpdesk, and
putting in few wireless zones. No amount of budget narrative can make that
list of projects into a comprehensive plan if in fact the only thread
connecting them is that they are sponsored by the IT department – or
strung together as responses to the needs of special interests among the
constituents.
A truly comprehensive plan would have a stronger unifying theme, such as an effort to put more technology directly into the hands of students, and would ensure that each component of the plan carried out that underlying rationale. That same list of projects might then have these particular characteristics: web-based self-help extensions to the ERP, classrooms with tablet computers for all students, a helpdesk specialist for student computing issues during evening hours, and wireless zones in student gathering places. That plan rises to the level of strategy because it focuses on an objective strong enough to subordinate or defer unrelated needs. IT planning has generally taken the path of trying to make some headway on a range of projects whose only real, common ground is that they all draw on IT resources and come under the same administrative authority. During relatively good economic times, scattershot planning seems sufficient – and politically expedient. In harder times, IT planners will be more successful in getting plans adopted by striving for cohesiveness and focusing on a need (or theme) the institution recognizes as being worth scarce resources.
Strategic plans also tend to be multi-year in scope, with projects spanning two or more years in some cases. The tyranny of the annual budget has let too many IT organizations lapse into defectively short planning cycles. It is too easy to let uncertainty about funding levels in upcoming years discourage the multi-year framework for needs that can in fact only be met in that span. For example, a project to strengthen custom and ad hoc data extraction/reporting from the ERP and that might involve development of a large data mart and widespread development of skills in report-writing would place such heavy demand on IT programming staff that it could not be carried out in as single year. The value of the objective would have to be very high to warrant such a sustained effort, and multi-year staging would be a sign of that level of commitment. Of course, every multi-year plan closes out opportunities for shorter projects, but selectivity and prioritization are signs of the steadfastness that characterizes strategic thinking. The test of that resolve comes each year, as the budget cycle re-opens discussions of plans.
Transforming
Transformation is another hallmark of strategic thinking: plans that
actually result in noteworthy changes. Few opportunities to affect an
academic institution dramatically come about in the normal run of
planning, strategic or otherwise. Most transformational change in IT has
been gradual and even reluctant.
Few institutions set out originally to equip every individual with a computer and a network connection, yet that is now the standard. And while the costs have been real and substantial, the benefits have been much softer and the transformation of the academic workplace somewhat hollow. The problem is that there was not a sufficiently strategic rationale for what turned out to be a huge investment: productivity gains have been haphazard and even largely unrealized; workflow and work methods too often have remained what they were before.
Students, on the other hand, have substantially transformed their experience of higher education through the uses they have made of the Internet and the campus networks. They have done much to dismantle the ivory tower for themselves, staying connected to the outside world in ways the institution hardly recognizes and availing themselves of academic resources often beyond the awareness of their teachers. From the simple proposition that students would benefit from being connected to networks, they have made changes that have caught colleges and universities by surprise. Even now, with better knowledge of the students’ use of networks, IT planners have not yet figured out the strategy to build on the transformation of students’ information usage.
Thinking strategically sometimes means making sense of what has occurred regardless of plans or intentions. The challenge in those cases is to consolidate gains and, sometimes, to cut losses. The evolution of cell phones has, for example, largely ended the auxiliary business of selling phone service to students. There was no plan to change technologies, let alone the business model for telecommunications – it just happened. The need for strategic planning comes now that the business is collapsing, and the plan might be to get out of the telephone business. On the other hand, if hand-held computing devices should become popular with students, colleges and universities will have the opportunity to cut their investment in traditional microcomputers (which have mysteriously resisted the cost curve followed by most electronic devices), replacing $1,600 devices with $300 units. The IT profession was slow to recognize the transformation PCs made in the computing environment; it should not repeat that mistake with whatever supplants the PC.
Visionary
Finally, strategic planning is about vision. There is the vision that is
visual acuity – the ability to see accurately and at a distance. This is
the skill of forecasting. And there is the vision that is the work of
imagination – looking at reality and figuring out ways to change it.
Apart from expecting campus leaders to have good vision, the institution
needs to organize its planning discussions to promote envisioning as a
collective activity. To this end, the original configuration of strategic
planning as a gathering of many people to the task is still important.
Extending the metaphor: the sharpest eyes will discover possibilities that
others can then exploit.
Institutions of higher education have been lukewarm about strategic planning, largely because they move slowly – changing only gradually – and yet are impatient with the extended work that strategic planning requires and the number of people that need to divert time from routine tasks. But information technology has never needed strategic thinking and planning more than it does now. The easy ride is over. Institutions will begin asking what they can expect from so much money already invested on hopes, intuition, and a few audacious plans. TW
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