Rethinking the technology bolt-on process is the essence of using technology-enabled innovation to redesign a service process—e.g., to change the service process in substantive ways to improve its quality, flexibility, and unit cost structure.  The time is right for higher education to embrace the opportunities of the Internet revolution systematically by responding to performance obligations and their challenges with strategies that are counter-intuitive to the tradition-bound strategies portrayed from an external perspective as “defensive” in this paper’s first graphic (A Defensive Response to Performance Pressures).  The two redesign strategies described in the previous section, when combined mission-appropriately and simultaneously over time, can lead from both an internal and external perspective to the proverbial win-win.  For example, applying the common-course redesign strategy to any course can measurably improve learning outcomes while simultaneously, in the case of a common course, reducing per-enrollment direct instructional expenses (typically through à posteriori increases in the student/faculty ratio).  Services and programs, including the general education program cluster of common courses, can also be redesigned for reasons of flexibility, convenience, and capacity to rely less on required synchronous interactions and more on online self-service and 24x7x365 online and call-in support complemented by interactions with the expert faculty/staff when assistance is required or desired during the normal working day.  It is the ongoing simultaneous and purposefully determined application of these redesign strategies that can lead to the high-performance result depicted in the graphic at the right. 

An institution’s mission priorities (its value discipline) should drive its efforts to fund and manage IT in support of innovation.  Institutions willing to act on these principles are using technology to lay the innovation infrastructure and cultural foundation for becoming high-performance institutions capable of commanding their own futures. Their leaders, both executive and academic, will:

• moderate the randomness of grass-roots, cost-ineffective innovation with the determined discipline to fund cost-effective innovation initiatives of verifiable institutional value,
• fund initiatives for their potential to advance stated strategic, performance objectives,
• monitor those initiatives using quantitative institutional performance indicators, and
• ensure that sure those indicators are embraced externally by policy and oversight bodies.