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Assessment of Cost, Quality, and Value in University IT Services. Christopher S. Peebles Associate Vice President for Research and Academic Computing and Dean for Information Technology Indiana University JISC/CNI Conference, 14th-16th June 2000, Moat House, Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
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Assessment of Cost, Quality, and Value in University IT Services Christopher S. Peebles Associate Vice President for Research and Academic Computing and Dean for Information Technology Indiana University JISC/CNI Conference, 14th-16th June 2000, Moat House, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Assessment • “Assessment is a process that focuses on student learning, a process that involves reviewing and reflecting on practice as academics have always done, but in a more planned and careful way.” Catherine Palomba and Trudy Banta. Assessment Essentials. Josey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1999, p. 1. • Assessment effort of IT in the context of distributed education has gone hand-in-hand with the development of distance learning. For example: • John Daniel. Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media. Kogan Page, Ltd., London, 1996 • A.W. (Tony) Bates. Managing Technological Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders. Josey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 2000.
Assessment Continued • Assessment of IT in the context of bricks-and-mortar based higher education is of recent vintage. IT was always taken as a “good thing,” valuable by its mere existence. Now, where IT can consume up to 6% of a university budget, questions are asked about its cost, quality, and value to teaching, learning, research, and support of the business of the institution. • Exemplary explorations: • Patricia Senn Brevik. Student Learning in the Information Age. ACE Oryx Press, Phoenix AZ, 1998 • Diana Oblinger and Richard Katz. Renewing Administration: Preparing Colleges and Universities for the 21st Century. Anker Publishing, Bolton, MA, 1999 • Richard Katz and Associates. Dancing with the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education. Josey Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1999
Assessment Continued • Assessment -- that is hard measures of output and outcomes -- in the context of cost, quality, and value measures of IT in traditional higher education settings are hard to find. • Three useful examples: • The Flashlight Program: systematic evaluation of the consequences of the use of IT in teaching and learning. Instruments and methods to measure learning outcomes and costs of IT. http://www.tltgroup.org/programs/flashlight.html • CNI Assessing the Academic Network. The assessment “manual” by Charles McClure and Cynthia Lopata. Cooperative venture of assessment of IT among several universities. http://www.cni.org/projects/assessing/ • CAA Computer Assisted Assessment Center at the University of Luton, UK, http://caacentre.ac.uk/index.shtml, which is part of the Teaching and Learning Technology Program
Cost • “There are no results inside an organization. There are only costs.” • Peter F Drucker, Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Principles and Practices. Harper Collins, NY, 1990. p. 120 • Activity Based Costing-Activity Based Management • John Shank and Vijay Govindarajan. Strategic Cost Management. Free Press, NY, 1993 • Robert Kaplan and Robin Cooper. Cost and Effect. HBS Press, Boston, MA, 1998
Quality • Quality, def. Fitness for use and freedom from defect in a product or service. Joseph Juran, Juran’s Quality Handbook, 5th edition, 1999. • Quality foundations (a few good works among much management rubbish) • Joseph M. Juran. Juran on Quality by Design. Free Press, New York, 1992. • W. Edwards Demming. The New Economics. MIT CAES Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993 • Daniel Seymour. On Q: Causing Quality in Higher Education. ACE Oryx Press, Phoenix, AZ, 1993 • Daniel Seymour. Once Upon A Campus: Lessons for Improving Quality and Productivity in Higher Education. ACE Oryx Press, Phoenix, AZ, 1995. • Roger Kaufman and Douglas Zahn. Quality Management Plus: The Continuous Improvement of Education. Corwin Press, Newbury Park, CA, 1993
Value • IT and Value Creation • It’s all about time: powers of automation and augmentation • IT and Value Destruction • It’s all about time: wasted time due to poor operating systems, poorly crafter applications, and mysterious, opaque user interfaces • IT and Value Protection • It’s all about time: time spent in support and education
Measures of Performance and Success • Do not have measures like EVA and “profit” as a measure for the success of university IT organizations • Must draw exemplars from business and benchmarks from wherever they are available • Organization performance: IBM “Adaptive Organization” and “Customer Relationship Management” • Measurement: “The Balanced Scorecard” and “ Counting What Counts”
The Ferengi “First Rule of Acquisition”: Once You have their money, never, ever give it back
IT Organization • Stephan Haeckel. Adaptive Enterprise. HBS Press, Boston, MA, 1999 • “business focus must shift from products to processes and competencies; • individuals close to the firing line must be empowered; • customers needs must receive increased attention” p. 2 • The highly flexible, modular organization that can “sense and respond” rather than “make and sell.” • James Cortada and Thomas Hargraves. Into the networked age: How IBM and other forms are getting there now. Oxford University Press, New York, 1999 • enterprise transformations based on knowledge, process, and technology
Harvey Thompson,The Customer Centered Enterprise: How IBM and Other World-Class Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results by Putting Customers First.McGraw Hill, NY, 2000
Performance Measures for All Organizations, Including University IT Organizations • Robert Kaplan and David Norton. The Balanced Scorecard. HBS Press, Boston, MA, 1996. • Four dimensions of retrospective and prospective measures • Financial perspective: deployment (and growth) of revenue, ABC against internal (historical) and external benchmarks • Customer perspective: customer satisfaction measures, number of partnerships with faculty in teaching and research, support of university business processes, support of library processes • Internal perspective: process measures, classic IT measures of availability, cost-of-poor-quality, speed and depth of development cycles • Learning perspective: employee satisfaction, employee development (MSCE, CCNE, etc.), personal alignment of employee goals with position
Accountability: More than Measurement Marc Epstein add Bill Birchard. Counting What Counts: Turning Corporate Accountability to Competitive Advantage. Perseus Books, Reading, MA, 1999
Culture, Strategy, Organization & Structure • Mary Douglas. How Institutions Think. Syracuse University Press, 1986. Dimensions of Grid and Group
Culture, Strategy, Organization & StructureContinued • James Cortada. Best Practices in Information Technology. Prentice Hall, NY, 1998
Culture, Strategy, Organization & StructureContinued • Systematic relationship among strategy, structure, and culture. Paul Bate. Strategies for Cultural Change.Butterworth Heineman, Oxford, UK, 1994. • Systematic relationship among “levels of culture” -- Artifacts (visible organizational structures and processes), Espoused values (espoused justifications), Basic underlying assumptions (unconscious taken for granted beliefs, thoughts, feelings -- ultimate source of values and actions. Edgar Schein. The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. Josey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1999.
Culture, Strategy, Organization & StructureIn Action • Imagine combination of academic computing (craft culture), administrative computing (continuous improvement), and the university telephone services (systematic production) into a single integrated organization, which happened at IU Bloomington between 1989 and 1995. • Imagine then the combination of this organization with a similar organization from the Indianapolis campus (another “tribe” altogether). • Finally, try to imagine the goal of melding these parts into a combination of continuous improvement and systematic customization. • Major cultural changes: from a “technology” organization to a “service” organization; from a “take it the way we give it” to a responsive, customer focused organization
IU in a nutshell • Founded in 1820 • $2B Annual Budget • 8 campuses • >90,000 students • 3,900 faculty • 878 degree programs; >1,000 majors; > 60 programs ranked within top 20 of their type nationally • University highly regarded as research and teaching institution
IT@IU in a nutshell • Academic programs in IT through computer science, library and information sciences, engineering and technology, and most notably through new School of Informatics • CIO: Vice President Michael A. McRobbie • ~$70M annual budget • Technology services offered university-wide • UITS comprises ~500 FTE staff, organized into crosscutting unites (e.g. finance and HR) and four technology divisions (Teaching & Learning Information Technology,Telecommunications, University Information Systems, Research and Academic Computing)
IU IT Strategic Plan • 10 recommendations, 68 Actions covering all campuses and all IT areas • Total required for implementation: $205M over 5 years • A unique charter for Information Technology at a large university that sets the strategic course for the next five years • http://www.indiana.edu/~ovpit/strategic/
UITS Services — Bloomington CampusFY 98-99Report on Cost and Quality of Services
UITS Services — Bloomington CampusFY 98-99Report on Cost and Quality of Services
UITS Services — Bloomington CampusFY 98-99Report on Cost and Quality of Services
Aggregate daily survey results for the IU Bloomington Support Center January - December 1999
The 11th Annual IT User Survey at Indiana University Bloomington 1999
A Case Study of Activity Based Management Reengineering E-Mail at Indiana University Bloomington
Volume and Cost for e-mail services at Indiana University - Bloomington, 1996 - 1998 Academic Years.
User perceived quality measures for five mail systems used at Indiana University - Bloomington, 1996-1998 Academic Years
Comparative measures for e-mail support requests in Indianapolis and Bloomington during the academic year 1998-1999.