The moment it becomes an IT project...

...you're dead in the water.  Steve Laster, Harvard Business School's CIO, put forward this aphorism at Campus Technology 2010 while describing a major project to investigate, design and implement an online collaboration environment at the Harvard Business School.  The statement resonated with me and speaks to the maturity of the IT culture at HBS. 

Many IT organizations (and I'm not limiting myself to the education sector) would have eagerly jumped into the project.  A short time later, the latest and coolest Web 2.0, social media integrated toolset would have been installed.  And henceforth ignored.  I attended another session at CT 2010 where the IT director described the new ePortfolio system they (i.e. IT) had researched and implemented.  It had all kinds of great features that students and faculty could use.  After the first semester exactly 0 (zero) students and faculty had signed up.  The IT director chalked it up to a lesson learned regarding communication.  Certainly communication and change management would have helped but I'd bet their results would not have been significantly better if all they changed was communication.

HBS approached the challenge of online collaboration quite differently.  Right from inception, they treated the notion as a business question rather than an IT problem.  Instead of jumping right in to a juicy "IT project" or allowing the school to "just let IT solve this problem" Laster pulled together a small group of key stakeholders from different departments of the business (yes, I say "business" rather than "school" although it grates on some faculty).  While the HBS Collaboration group included an IT representative it was comprised of and even lead by representatives of other business units.  It was that team's conclusion that an online collaboration tool was indeed needed.  Furthermore, they worked together to develop requirements and explore options. 

This approach had a number of immediate benefits.  The technology choice had immediate buy-in due to the inclusive method of its selection.  The business units had at least one, and often more than one, knowledgeable member on their team which helped in communication, change management, and rapid adoption.  These knowledgeable members were trained as expert trainers which distributed education and support responsibilities.  The team of experts continued to meet during and after implementation.

Would it surprise anyone that HBS is a Scrum shop?  Those with a background in agile software development methodologies no doubt see the HBS arrangement as perfectly normal.  The cross-functional working group was, in essence, a product owner / customer proxy.  Wouldn't it be great of more IT organizations thought of their projects and potential projects as being owned by the business rather than by IT? 

From Campus Technology 2010

Today is Day 2 of my Campus Technology 2010 tour.  While yesterday's speakers and activities had my aching to run away from the conference never to return (Janet had better luck than I did) today's speakers more than made up for the deficit.  Yesterday brought me no insight nor inspired any new ideas.  Today, however, my horizons were expanded and many of my assumptions were challenged.  Perfect!

The Keynote

The day kicked off with an excellent Key Note by the Stephen Laster, CIO of the Harvard Business School.  Stephen is a great speaker and his topic was near and dear to my heart -- factors (8, in this case) that contribute to the success of an IT organization.

1. Hire and mentor a great team (people first!)
2. Run the shop as a business (a key consideration for an internal IT organization)
3. Leverage planning and governance
4. Take smart risks
5. Actively measure
6. Capture the customer (not literally!)
7. Communicate, communicate, communicate (and make it someone's responsibility in IT)
8. Leverage trusted advisors

He didn't come out and say it in his keynote but in a talk later in the day I got the impression he had a 9th factor which would go something like "Start small and iterate quickly".  It's nice to see successful organizations subscribing to the same principles as your own.  They're just a little further down the path than we are at Ivey and I hope to stand on the shoulders of HBS in order to accelerate ourselves. You can get a sense for the keynote from this interview Campus Technology did back in April.   

Conference Themes

I must admit that the themes I spotted at the conference were different than what I expected.  I expected a major theme to be cloud computing but it was barely even mentioned.  Other themes that received little or no attention: classroom A/V, eReaders, IT infrastructure, IT methodologies (ok, I'm not surprised about this one).  Below are the major themes that I picked out.

Distance Learning

This one comes as no surprise as higher ed institutions try to either bring in new revenue or reduce costs of delivering courses.  The industry has been working on this for some time and it looks like it'll be some time still before we can deliver a good student experience to remote learners.

Post-LMS World

The LMS (or Learning Management System) is considered a table stake technology for any educational institution.  Ivey has a homegrown LMS.  UWO uses WebCT (now Blackboard).  Moodle and Sakai are viable open source options as are others.  At the conference there seemed to be an underlying theme that the LMS as we know it today (calendars, events, forums) are outdated concepts and not in step with how students of today communicate.  There was an emphasis on leveraging modern collaboration and social networking tools.  A move away from "management" towards "personal collaboration".

ePortfolios

There seemed to be an explosion of ePortfolio vendors at the conference.  I must admit that I wasn't familiar with the term prior to the conference but now feel sufficiently schooled to at least describe what it means.  An ePortfolio is an personalized, online aggregation of a student's achievements in not only academics but also in other activities such as volunteerism, sport, clubs, etc.  Think of it as a mash up between LinkedIn, Google Profile, Facebook, and Dropbox.

Mobility

The community seemed to collectively recognize that students entering higher education did more communication via handheld devices (like iPhones, Androids, and even Blackberrys) than they did on laptops and computers.  A few schools were experimenting with mobile offerings but most were not even that far.

Academic Content Support

I was surprised to learn that many schools offer Academic Content Support via their IT organizations.  This type of support involves aiding faculty in the creation and maintenance of the content they use for teaching.  This might mean developing interactive web content to use in class.  It might mean adapting a lecture for display on an interactive whiteboard.  It might mean developing a mobile application.  It might mean aiding in the selection of a simulation vendor.  It might mean recording and/or editing video for use in a class.