Innovation Strategies for Using IT as Leverage for Improving Institutional Performance

Academic leaders dedicated to using technology to improve institutional performance first must identify priority performance indicators, establish their tracking and improvement as an institutional priority, and support and oversee the management of a high-performance IT organization that is collaborating daily with other units in support of an innovation infrastructure and culture.  Then they must use their priority performance indicators to select and support redesign strategies and initiatives that can directly affect the indicators.  This is the point at which the two aforementioned service process redesign strategies come into play—the a) program and service flex redesign strategy and b) common-course redesign strategy. 

As in the Benedictine University, Ocean County College, and banking industry examples, the program and service flex redesign strategy is to redesign academic and administrative services and programs to provide options for individual customization while eliminating or relaxing inflexibilities and inconveniences in their delivery. The goals align with the performance obligations for expense accountability, program accountability, convenience of access, and capacity for access, and are more specifically as follows:

Reduce requirements for real-time interactions between students and faculty/staff by providing:

• more instruction and other study and service opportunities delivered in online, time-shifted (asynchronous) self-service modality with as much option for individual customization as possible;
• less contact-hour instruction, regardless of whether faculty/students are in the same classroom or are interacting in real time online or in a tele-video classroom;
• fewer face-to-face or scheduled non-instructional service transactions; and
• expert service interactions with the faculty/staff when needed or wanted by the individual.

Increase students' options for conducting service transactions, scheduling courses, studying, getting expert help, and completing a degree program.

Increase enrollment capacities.

Reduce the unit expense of services.

Reduce dependency on the semester model.