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Features
Special Series: Technology >> Part 1: Strategy/Mission/Vision
5/5/2005
www.nacubo.org), asserts that senior leaders must be involved with the president in developing IT strategies because of their capacity to allocate resources, determine policy, and approve procedures. Without task force input—without discussion and agreement on IT purchases, implementation dates, upgrade forecasts, and monitoring strategies—the president will be the author of an uncoordinated technical strategy that will fall short of institutional goals. Condition IV: Technology should integrate not duplicate. High-tech gadgets and streamlined procedures are in demand by students who require immediate results and fingertip control. Leaders must support and guide IT departments in the complex task of blending various stitches of information into a seamless, instantaneous bond between student and schedule. IT departments must keep pace with student expectations by implementing technologies that bypass, not replicate, existing service capabilities. Online registration is one example of how streamlining can go wrong. If course descriptions, class assignments, degree audits, and registration processes are not integrated, students cannot quickly develop optimum schedules. The result: students leafing through course catalogs, calling counselors to confirm degree requirements, plugging selections into computers, paying at the financial aid office—they may as well be standing in registration lines. |
Condition V: Technology should improve flexibility and reduce complexity. You can think of a high-tech system as your best friend: It is there when you need it, ever responsive to your personal needs. Or you can see it as an insidious, unfathomable, unreliable distraction that fails when you need it most. Neither perspective is always true, but the latter in even small doses could ruin the credibility of a tech system and undermine large time and money investments.
Presidents, like students, parents, alumni, staff, faculty, and administrators, have experienced the frustration of making demands on a computer ill-equipped to respond quickly, accurately, or at all. Increasing the flexibility of systems and minimizing complexity for users make for tedious work for the IT professional: In building a user-friendly system, he must forsake basic design for a comprehensive system that anticipates various, sometimes contradictory, uses by variously able users. Regardless of the difficulty of the task, the president must set the invaluable expertise of the IT professional to designing a system for users that by its efficient nature at the user level will meet the needs and enhance the productivity of the institution.
Condition VI: Efficient and effective use of technology requires changes to structure, processes, policies, and delivery of services. William F. Massy, president of the Jackson Hole Higher Education Group and professor emeritus at Stanford University
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