Who's Laughing Now, or, I Sure Am Glad I Didn't Go Corporate
A few days ago I noticed and skimmed an article reporting on a survey conducted
last fall of CIOs at a number of higher education institutions. It found that
they were experiencing some budget reductions, were working hard to do more
but without more people, and that there were some concerns that the innovative
and creative parts of what higher ed IT staff do might suffer.
I don't think that will happen. I happen to think that many of us who are in
the higher education realm, even if lacking a faculty position, are here for
the same reasons that the faculty are - for precisely the creativity and innovation
possibilities. "Playing" is part of our job, and the future looks
bright for that part of our job description staying put.
Just after I read that article, I happened to see a bright, fluorescent green
dinosaur staring up at me from the inside of a box of old papers and magazine
as I crossed by my office's storage area. I picked it up, and read, in big letters
across the front "Forget the Dow! Here Comes the New Economy! You might
have already guessed, if you've got a collection on your bookshelf, that I was
looking at the June 1998 issue of Wired magazine, with the logo "Capitalize
on the Future" under the "w" in the magazine title. (This was
published just after Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance"
remarks.)
Boy, did skimming through that bring back some memories. I bet every one of
the following items stimulates some memories and thoughts for you, too:
· Right away, there's a Kinko's ad emphasizing "the new way to
office" and promising "total support," 24x7. I don't know about
where you are, but I haven't run across an all night Kinko's in quite some time.
And now, Kinko's is being purchased and renamed by Federal Express.
· Then there's an ad for the "Long Boom" symposium in Brazil,
where experts were to discuss how the long economic boom which had started in
the United States would sweep throughout Latin America, eventually flowering
in 2020.
· That's closely followed by an ad for high-density floppy disks. (I
think it's been more than a year since I've touched a so-called "floppy"
disk.
· One opinion piece noted that a "recent" (1996, remember)
survey of mutual fund investors showed that they expected a 34 percent annual
return on their investments for the next 10 years and finished with this statement:
"If the market is right - and we know it is! - there's nothing to worry
about."
Anyway, browsing through the issue, I recalled going to conferences in New
York, San Francisco, and Atlanta where my buddies in the Internet professionals
association (which I helped to found and served on the board of for many years)
were mixing, socially and professionally, with - and themselves becoming, on
paper - multi-millionaires. And there I was with my decent but low-paying job
in academia, unable to afford to buy or even rent the Porsches and the Ferraris
my friends were driving around in. And desperately hoping at major meals not
to get stuck with the incredible check. I was, frankly, often quite envious.
But for some reason, I was rarely tempted by the occasional offer of a West
Coast or an East Coast job offer.
I liked living in a college town and I had
a young family that sort of kept me grounded. Boy, am I glad now that I stayed
where I was. I know lots of people who are looking hopefully for jobs, and quite
a few who are unhappily working at jobs now that pay a lot less than they were
making several years ago. In "the outside world," companies are more
and more driven by the "IT D'esn't Matter" philosophy expounded by
a recent Harvard Business Review article by the same title, with its blood-curdling
mantra of "Spend Less. Follow, don't lead. Focus on vulnerabilities, not
opportunities." Gasp!
I had lunch recently with a colleague from deep inside the IT structure of
the University of Michigan and was pleased to learn from the conversation that
although there are indeed budget cuts and some changed expectations about support
work, he's able to go right ahead and do creative kinds of things, every day.
He might work a 10-hour day and put in 60 hours a week, but he gets to play
at work. It's expected that he'll play at work.
Here, inside higher education, we might be a little worried that budget cuts
might de-motivate some of our more creative and innovative work, but no one's
telling us that because IT is now simply infrastructure; we're now custodians
of the virtual infrastructure, virtual maintenance workers. Pity the poor custodians
of the physical infrastructure, because they don't have the freedom we do to
play with their infrastructure and create new things. We do play as part of
our jobs, it's expected of us, and at least in mid-2004, no one's trying to
tell us we can't play anymore. Our buddies who still have jobs in the corporate
sector are, by and large, being told that playing isn't allowed.
And there's no end in sight to the creative and innovative parts of our jobs.
One of the news items in this
edition of Syllabus IT Trends is an article called "Why IT Has Not
Paid Off As We Had Hoped (Yet)" by the dean of arts and sciences and the chief
technology officer at the University of Virginia. If you haven't read it yet,
you must do so! They provide yet another reason to be glad that you work in
IT and within higher education - the fact that there is so much yet to do:
"The revolution has taken the easy ground, the unprotected edges of the city,
The citadel remains above, with the flags of the old regime flying: teaching
and scholarship at leading institutions of higher education remain relatively
untouched. How might we take that citadel? Not by storming it. We've tried that.
We must take it from within." --Excerpted from Why
It Has Not Paid Off As We Had Hoped (Yet) (Virginia.edu)
