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Opinion
How IT Makes the Impossible Possible
9/6/2006
EDUCAUSE has completed a related survey and is putting its collective bright heads together to develop a resource that should make wonderful use of information technology to help schools all over with the increasingly-more-important need to have business continuity planning. Knowing that EDUCAUSE is taking this lead makes me feel good because (a) it always d'es a good job at what it d'es, and (b) I know it’ll use the best and most appropriate technology.At SCUP, we are conducting a related survey soon. We’re assisting a couple of professors from the University of Southern California (USC) in the replication, enhancement, and expansion of a survey they conducted in the fall of 2004 about the status of crisis planning and management in higher education. You can read a copy of the paper from Change magazine that they used to report on their findings, “How Prepared Are America's Colleges and Universities for Major Crises?”
Crisis planning and management (CPM) is essentially the top strategic level of disaster business continuity, crisis communications, disaster mitigation…whatever type of planning. It not only (a) looks at all sorts of bad things (crises) that might happen to a school (think Duke Lacrosse team, chancellors committing suicide, as well as tornados), it (b) becomes the overarching place where all of the other plans of all sorts, even crisis communications plans and the like, link together and (hopefully) become a cohesive whole. That’s the idea, anyway.
The authors conducted their first study with a small sample of provosts from large institutions and used print and mail technology. Working with us, they (and we) hope to get an even better response rate from the larger schools and to set up a nearly duplicate, but appropriately-tweaked, separate instrument for two-year colleges. It will be very interesting to see what has changed, since the first survey was conducted prior to Katrina!
The authors could not afford to repeat their initial survey on this scale, using the technology they had. SCUP had the technology already in place, as well as a strong interest in promoting integrated planning on all parts of the campus, and for all areas of change. So, we are partners, and we look forward to finding and sharing information that will help campus leaders keep the people, the place, and the reputation of their institutions intact in the face of crises.
Feels good, will do good, and could not be affordably done without technology. Yet, the technology used in it is so much a part of the infrastructure now that most people completing the survey or reading the results will not even think for a moment that it was the IT that made it possible.
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