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As a ubiquitous, commoditized asset and competitive necessity, IT is here to stay at every nonprofit college and university and should be expertly managed and collaboratively, but determinedly applied to improve institutional performance. IT makes it possible, and selectively desirable, to turn the traditional higher education paradigm upside down by bringing the resources of a college or university to the learner rather than, of necessity, bringing the learner to the campus or its physical extensions for access to those resources. Determining when to apply such flex services and whether/when/how to displace their traditional counterparts are institution-by-institution value discipline issues (à la Treacy and Wiersema). The discipline demanded by an institution’s value discipline may appear to (and be allowed to) collide with mission values and academic culture—the values traditionally associated with tenure and it byproduct practices such as shared governance, learning community, collaboration, and collegiality. Open, but disciplined leadership can anticipate and avoid such collisions by establishing a culture of innovation that values measurable, affordable performance improvements over unsubstantiated proxies for performance or unrealistically expensive plans to improve performance. Leaders would do well to follow the lead of students who know that technology is a difference that can make a difference.
Indeed, a recent study from the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research confirmed a common belief about “millennial” students (aka “digital natives”): they expect a ubiquitous IT environment and heavily use technology in their studies and everyday student experiences for reasons of convenience and immediacy (time savings).[18] They attributed improved learning, however, only to the “good use of technology in the classroom,” and few reported good uses in their classrooms—a compelling reason for adopting and adapting the common course redesign strategy for measurably improving learning outcomes (even in courses that are not common courses). Students also notice that academic and administrative services too often retain the substance of their traditional process requirements after “bolting on” new technologies to effect service improvements. The institutional result, moreover, is an increased expense structure seldom justified by the resulting lowest-common-denominator service improvements that emerge when different service units are allowed to block services unification by insisting on “doing things the way we’ve always done them.”
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