E I P
Managing the Introduction of
Technology in the Delivery and
Administration of Higher Education
97/3
Philip Yetton
Fujitsu Centre
Australian Graduate School of Management
The University of New South Wales
Evaluations and Investigations Program
Higher Education Division
Department of Employment, Education,
Training and Youth Affairs
2. Strategy and Information Technology
3. Developing New Roles and Skills
4. Management Processes: Evaluating IT Investments
6. Managing IT-based Strategic Change: Integration and Conclusions
Appendix: Staff Development Strategies
The authors wish to thank all the people who assisted us with this project. We are grateful to the many colleagues in academic and general staff roles across twenty universities for generously giving their time to talk with us about the management of information technology in higher education.
In particular, we wish to thank John Niland, Alan Gilbert and Denise Bradley for their comments on The University of New South Wales, The University of Melbourne and the University of South Australia. Jeremy Davis shared with us his understanding of strategy and competition within the higher education sector.
The DEETYA Advisory Committee—Ian Lucas, Lee Watts and Alan Lindsay—provided helpful and insightful guidance in the early stages of the project, and along with David McCann and Jenny Christmass at DEETYA, provided very useful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this report.
Several people also assisted with the field research. Finally, we wish to thank Barbara Potter of the Fujitsu Centre for her invaluable assistance in putting the report together.
[next chapter] [contents]
IT and Strategy
Developing New Roles and Skills
Management Processes: Evaluating IT Investments
IT Management Structures
Three Emerging Models for the Future
The ‘Old’ University
The ‘Divisional’ University
The ‘New’ University
There is widespread agreement that the role of information technology (IT) is critical to the future success of Australian universities. But there is little understanding and, hence, agreement about how it should be managed. The purpose of this study is:
To identify how higher education institutions are managing the introduction of technology to deliver and administer higher education and what approaches at the institutional level have been most effective in ensuring that technology is applied effectively to educational delivery and administration.
We studied twelve universities’ management of IT in some detail with follow up investigations at another eight universities. We selected the MIT90s schema both to frame our field research and to structure our analysis. This assumes that an organisation’s performance is a function of the level of fit among five factors: strategy, roles and skills, management processes, structure and technology. Their interactions are presented in Figure 1.
Adapted from M. Scott Morton 1991
We analyse IT in relation to strategy, roles and skills, management processes and structure in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively. Our findings are summarised below.
Increasing competition in the higher education sector is leading to greater differentiation among, and an increased strategic focus by universities. Six strategic issues are identified, all of which have important IT drivers. They include:
Three generic strategies are observed to be emerging as universities compete across these six areas:
As differentiation increases, other strategies will be discovered.
Developing New Roles and Skills
To successfully manage IT based change, universities must meet the challenge of the changing roles and skills requirements. As technology becomes more pervasive in all aspects of teaching and administration, both academic and general staff roles are being transformed. New positions and skills are required across all key areas. From the diversity of staff development strategies and activities that universities are adopting, we identified three approaches to deal with this challenge.
These approaches will need to support an accelerated shift from teaching to learning, delivered not by individual lecturers but by multi-functional teams. Universities are poorly equipped and under resourced to manage this strategic change.
Management Processes: Evaluating IT Investments
We found almost universal agreement that IT initiatives had both improved quality and reduced the costs in teaching and administration. But there was very little evidence of formal evaluation of IT investments to support those claims. We suggest that methodologies such as chargeback would be useful control systems for universities to adopt. In addition, many universities were ‘waiting for CASMAC’ before deciding on upgrading administrative systems. We highlight the potential problems which can arise due to organisational differences, separation of design from implementation, and technical and business risk. Finally, selective outsourcing is identified as one option for improving the management of IT in universities.
Rapid changes in IT and in the higher education sector have stimulated changes in IT management structures. But the pervasive questions remain: who owns IT, where should IT sit in the university structure, and how do we get the cost benefits of centralisation as well as the value added benefits of devolution and user control? As universities confront these questions, we find increasing tension between elements of the professional and machine bureaucracy, which create competing priorities for IT management. The federal structure which is the current solution in the business world is examined and found inadequate. Three structural forms are identified:
The divisional and subsidiary structures are discussed as alternatives to the traditional integrated campus structure. In the divisional university, significant authority is devolved to the faculties, enabled by a powerful IT infrastructure. In contrast, in the subsidiary form, a university sets up a separate organisation to develop and deliver IT-enabled education.
Three Emerging Models for the Future
Chapters 2 to 5 describe the above findings in detail. They report a very complex picture of the various attempts by different universities to manage the introduction of IT into all aspects of their educational programs and administration. What universities need is to reduce the complexity presented in Chapters 2 to 5, in order to make the problem of managing IT in universities tractable. We observe three emerging organisational forms in universities which capture the interdependencies in Figure 1, provide a template against which a university can check a decision, and, therefore, impose a discipline which simplifies the complex range of potential issues that otherwise might be considered. While not yet well specified, they form the basis of three different ways of competing:
IT is used to enrich its elite learning community. This model, based on maintaining the established base while funding independent new ventures, creates a number of small entrepreneurial ventures based on unique and different competencies. Successful ventures grow, while ‘feeding’ the established university campus with their innovations in teaching, learning and research. The ‘ventures’ have the ability to select expertise with few constraints, including terms and conditions of employment. This attracts high status academic risk takers and innovators. The administrative IT system will be flexible and user friendly.
IT supports the success of semi-autonomous faculties. The devolved powerful faculties enabled by a powerful central IT infrastructure, each have different competencies and strategic foci. This form is more complex to manage given its scale, but relies on the focused innovation and particular competencies of its academic divisions to manage and limit that complexity. Each division would have its own IT support, and to some extent develop its own appropriate set of technologies, management processes and skills and roles, which focus on the division’s core competencies in particular areas of applied research and teaching.
IT is central to and critically underpins the strategic agenda. A new ‘subsidiary’ delivers IT based teaching and learning, undertaking its innovative IT-based development in a separate, centrally resourced unit, and building new core competencies. IT enabled teaching and learning, designed to deliver quality and reliability to a large number of students, is the key driver in this model. In such a ‘greenfield’ site, highly skilled experts can be selected as required, with a focus on the motivation and ability to work in multi-functional teams. Administration will be primarily project management based.
Typically, universities are more suited to one strategic model than another, depending upon their capabilities and competencies, which are derived from such factors as history, age, size and reputation. Most important, a university must choose how it is going to compete. Furthermore, it would be difficult for any university to build competencies in more than one of these models at a time. Therefore, failure to choose a strategic focus is likely to put performance at risk in an increasingly competitive environment.
As the universities make such strategic choices and increasingly differentiate among themselves, they will also reduce their internal differentiation and adopt a more focused strategy. IT functions which are not core to that strategy will be targeted for cost cutting, through either collaboration with other universities or outsourcing.
Finally, two consequences are important for the whole higher education sector. One is the major restructuring of terms and conditions of employment in universities implied by these IT-enabled strategic changes. The other is the growing pressure to rationalise the higher education sector through mergers and other mechanisms.
The universities which get IT right will attract resources; those that get it wrong will not. There will be winners and losers. Above we briefly describe three ways to compete which are powerfully and differently enabled by IT. Together they segment the ‘market’ for higher education. Each satisfies its own core market segment in a very different way. In that sense, they are only weakly in competition with each other. But within each segment the competition will be strong. This will be particularly true for the ‘new’ universities who will compete directly for each other’s students, at least in Australia.