When ‘Strategic’ Means ‘Hard to Sell’
Having trouble getting dollars for those all-important ‘top-of-the-stack’
projects? These tips just may grease the wheels.
YUP, THAT WEB PORTAL seems like a worthy
project, and so d'es the distance learning
application, and the customer relationship
management (CRM) system. In fact, such initiatives
routinely land on many a wish list in
higher education, but although they promise
to harness information technology as a tool
for competitive advantage, they also cost
considerable sums of money. So, how can IT
directors justify purchases that could help a
school compete for students with its peer
schools? How d'es one go about building
that all-important business case?
Richard Katz has a few ideas on those topics.
Katz is VP of Educause, a Boulder, CO-based nonprofit
association that promotes IT use in higher education.
He joined the organization in 1996
after spending 14 years in management and
executive positions at the University of California.
According to Katz, the IT investment
breaks down into layers, with the remediation
of legacy infrastructure lying at the bottom of
the stack.
From the Bottom Up
At-risk systems that require fixing, or an application that a
vendor has stopped supporting, fall into the category of
legacy infrastructure remediation, Katz notes. At this bottom-
most layer, “you have to make the business case from
a risk-management point of view,” he advises. That is, in this
scenario, the business case simply boils down to positing
that a given system or piece of infrastructure will break
without fresh investment. Katz says forward-thinking
schools may have a “sinking” fund (or other kind of
reserve), in which an organization sets aside money over
time to deal with maintenance investments of this sort. In
other cases, he adds, IT managers frequently redeploy
funding priorities within an existing budget.
So g'es the task of mending the trailing edge of technology.
Then there’s the top of the stack, the innovation
layer, which Katz says is “associated with investments that
may be viewed as strategic or contributing in a positive
way to competitive advantage.” He characterizes investments
in this space as “opportunistic.”
The Top of the Stack: Fueling Innovation
Katz points out that “Newer initiatives
such as CRM, portals, or eLearning—
and most institutions still don’t even
have an enterprise course management
system—get funded, for the most part,
through ‘new’ money.” Yet typically, he
says, university CIOs haven’t been successful
in unlocking new money to support
tech investments aimed at the
management of brand identity.
And that’s an unfortunate situation,
given the link between brand management
and competitive advantage. The
importance of that link is described in a
paper (posted on the Educause website)
by Paul Herr, associate professor
of marketing at the University of Colorado.
Herr notes that the principles of
brand management “may help institutions
better position themselves in the
minds of their targets.” The institution’s
goal, he contends, “is not merely to
attract the best students to attend the
first day of classes, but rather to retain
those students through graduation and
beyond as loyal alumni.” Understandably
then, supporting a college or university’s
brand through aggressive
technology deployment is not only
strategic—it also keeps dollars in the till
as students sign on and stay on.
Finding Allies: Supporting Top-of-the-Stack Projects
Gaining the support of key process
owners within the university is a critical
step for IT managers hoping to
obtain funding for brand management/
competitive advantage projects. Ideally,
a vice chancellor for development or
a dean of enrollment management will
point to a certain project as having the
potential to improve student retention
or have some other bottom-line impact
for the institution, Katz says. “The day a
campus business owner drives the
business requirements of the institution
is the CIO’s best day of the week,”
he declares.
In most cases, however, it is the CIO
who first has the vision of how a new
technology investment can generate
strategic competitive advantage. The
CIO’s job then becomes one of enlisting
the support of the executive or executives
with responsibility for a given
process or function, Katz says. This
support is crucial for such systems as
CRM, simply because universities have
begun implementing CRM with an eye
toward improving the management of
such critical activities as recruitment,
admissions, and alumni programs. Katz
puts it bluntly: “A CIO without a tremendous
amount of support from executives
is going to have some pretty tough
sledding selling CRM.” He adds that,
essentially, the business case should
be driven by someone other than the IT
executive. Then it is the CIO who
becomes a supporting cast member;
who helps the business executives
understand how they will benefit from a
given investment.
A portal project, for example, is not
just a technology exercise, but the
means for organizing an institution’s
resources on the web with the objective
of benefiting students, parents,
and faculty, Katz points out. In this situation,
the CIO needs to “help everybody
around the table answer the
question: ‘What’s in it for me?’”
IT execs need improvement in their
ability to drive this kind of strategic
thinking, says Katz. “CIOs have not
been as successful as they need to be,
assisting other major leaders of the
institution to assume responsibility for
technologically enabled changes,” he
observes. “That responsibility continues
to remain on the shoulders of the CIO.”
Bottom line: Move that responsibility
toward the owners of the business units
involved, and help them to understand
that their active involvement in the
cause is the most direct means of “selling”
the project and getting the money.
This tip alone may be worth its weight in
tech funding dollars, the next time the
budget cycle heats up.