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Student Demands or Strategic IT Planning?

10/1/2003

By Terry Calhoun

Why isn’t there more discussion of technology implementation in a strategic sense? It’s because the folks who are closest to the teaching and learning thing, and the scholarship and research thing, aren’t involved in the IT planning. But there is one notable exception. Early on the science and technology researchers and scholarship people bought into IT, and they’re doing a pretty good job with it. In their cases, they got rewarded for being good with IT – rewarded with things that mattered on their career path.

So, where is the reward for a faculty member to be an early adopter of IT? It wasn’t there 10 years ago, it wasn’t there 5 years ago, and it almost isn’t there at all right now. There’s a little bit of scholarly reward coming to those who specialize in the area of technology and teaching and learning, but that’s now a specialty in itself. What d'es the anthropologist, or the philosopher, or the p'et get from participating on IT planning committees?

The answer is, in terms of immediate rewards, that there often is nothing except lost time. That’s been the answer for many more decades prior to the previous one, for faculty who got stuck on other kinds of strategic planning committees, like the one about the campus master plan, or the one about developing capital for and designing the new building. These are the kinds of things that faculty run from or participate in reluctantly. Yet, their input is vital.

Even if there were rewards, being on planning committees is uncomfortable. For this one, it may mean interacting on a peer level with subject matter experts outside the academic realm. And that’s not something that many faculty are comfortable with – full-partner working relationships with experts in student services, architecture, classroom design, maybe even writing and communication. There are not a lot of historical mechanisms to let those kinds of discussions take place, and there’s rarely a shared language.

This reluctance to work with other kinds of experts, along with our inability to change the paradigm and find ways to reward academicians and subject matter experts – in short-term ways they can feel, as in the tenure process – is a significant part of what may now be fueling the relative disappearance of liberal undergraduate education. Wouldn’t it be nice if IT staffers could find mechanisms to induce those conversations and to make those activities rewarding; to create better mechanisms for engaging the faculty in planning of all kinds?
It’s nice that our CEOs and CIOs want to be early adopters, and that they think it’s worth spending money on IT. But if students already know what their education needs are, then why do we even have faculty at all?

I often hear from campus and master planners how difficult it is to work on a campus without an overall strategic or academic plan. Sometimes the physical facilities planners have to make an academic plan happen first. It sounds like IT planners are in the same boat, and that many IT plans stand out there on their own, either disconnected from a strategic or academic plan, or on a campus without one. Unless we can get faculty involved in strategic planning, and integrate IT planning in that process, then we risk moving our institutions’ directions away from traditional institutional kinds of goals and objectives.

Griffiths says that the campuses doing the best job are those with a strategic or academic plan and, within that group, those where the IT planning is fully integrated. She says that the best gains are at institutions where entire disciplinary groups of academicians are brought up to speed together on IT issues, training, and capabilities. That makes sense. Let’s hope that we see more of it!

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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