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Interview
In Search of Good Governance
An interview with Jack McCredie
9/12/2007
Since his retirement in 2005, UC Berkeley's Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO Emeritus John W. (Jack) McCredie has devoted much of his professional energy to studying, writing about, and speaking about IT governance and leadership in higher education. Currently an ECAR senior fellow, he is leading Educause's study of IT governance to be released in early 2008. CT asked McCredie for his perspectives on IT governance issues.
In your career, you've had a strong emphasis on the study of IT governance. How did you become interested in IT governance? Large universities are usually highly decentralized organizations in which departments and individual faculty members have a great deal of autonomy. The same is true of many smaller colleges. At the University of California, Berkeley we observed that because of our highly decentralized structure, it was often difficult to develop and to implement important information technology policies and practices that would apply across the board—to every staff and faculty member and to all students. I noticed the same situation on several campuses where I had the privilege of serving as an outside consultant.
At Berkeley, we decided to conduct a thorough review of the way that we govern the IT enterprise and to develop a new model that would fit our current situation better than the one that has evolved over the past couple of decades.
Is there a difference between governance and management or administration? Management differs from governance in that its primary focus is on the implementation of decisions made through the governance process. When I speak of IT governance, I mean the process that clarifies strategic directions, identifies priorities, and exerts sufficient control to manage outcomes. More informally, governance describes who makes which decisions, who provides inputs and analyzes the issues, who sets priorities, who implements the results of the decisions, and who settles disputes when there is no clear consensus. Good governance processes will foster timely decisions, responsible actions, and alignment of an organization's IT strategy with its overall mission and goals.
How have IT organizations changed over the past few years in terms of governance? Many colleges and universities are currently examining their IT governance structures. My hypothesis is that many organizations have simply evolved to their current governance structure. They have never taken a disciplined look at how they should govern information technology with all the technological, economic, and political changes that have occurred over the past 40-50 years. Security, privacy, increased importance of IT in all disciplines, increased governmental reporting requirements, and more attention to IT budgets are all topics that signal that it is time for a fresh look at how the 21st century college or university governs its IT enterprise. Sentrigo Inc. released its new Hedgehog vPatch database security software product Tuesday. The product addresses patching inconsistencies that seem to affect busy Oracle database administrators (DBAs), who don't always have time to test and patch. However, users of Microsoft SQL Server database in the enterprise can take a lesson here too. Software provider Starfish Retention Solutions has announced the upcoming launch of its first product, Starfish Office Hours. The company said this will be the first in a series of products intended to help higher education institutions improve retention and graduation rates by aiding in the delivery of programs designed to help at-risk student populations. Unisys announced Monday that it is offering companies a free 30-day unified communications trial using Microsoft solutions. The offer is currently available through Microsoft's sales personnel. As part of its Innovative Digital Education and Learning initiative (IDEAL-NM), New Mexico is launching a statewide program to standardize on a single electronic learning platform--Blackboard--spanning K-12, higher education, adult education, and government. The initiative will also support a new statewide virtual high school. The University of North Carolina and the North Carolina Community College System have signed on with Blackboard to deploy that company's electronic learning platform across 68 individual campuses. Semantics is a sub-field of linguistics that focuses on meaning making in language. Therefore, the Semantic Web we're still reaching for will be based on a set of definitions, languages, and standards that can base a search on the detection of meaning and not just on a simple character string. The Semantic Web will at least be smarter than the current Web.
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