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Consumerization Of IT

Highered IT Leadership Responsibility: Understand Customers/Users

I once read a line related to application development that goes something like this: “We (application/web developers) design and build for end-users, and we are not the end-users.” One of the biggest mistakes IT folks commit, which I’ve certainly been guilty of, is designing products and services for ourselves rather than the end-users. It’s too easy to get caught in this trap of creating for ourselves when we never leave the comfort of the office and do not understand those who will use the systems we build. To build effective systems, IT folks need to understand their end-users, those who will either benefit from the IT products/services provided or, unfortunately, will suffer the daily consequences of using systems that are either ineffective or inflict physical/mental pain. If you think I’m over-dramatic with the last sentence, imagine using a system that requires the mouse to scroll up and down web pages hundreds of times daily. After a while, you’ll develop carpal tunnel syndrome. Or, what about websites that are not responsive and the width of the page is wider than the size of the screens the users use, which require them to scroll sideways to see the entire page? That could be very frustrating, right? How about websites that are so heavy with graphics that it takes forever to display (yes, there are still folks worldwide who are connected to the internet on slow networks), which leads to frustrations? Developers and designers need to keep end-users in mind when building effective applications that satisfy the needs of the end-users.

For higher ed IT leaders (or IT leaders in any industry), the burden of responsibility to understand those they serve and their needs is even higher because, at the leadership level, they are essentially dealing not only with technology but business, organizational, and cultural transformations. Their leaders influence and drive the quality of services and products IT provides. Consider the following scenario: an IT leader thinks their organization’s role is to “keep the lights on,” and so they pursue a strategy where they don’t pursue innovation and attempt to introduce new ideas, which at times could lead to disruptions in services, are punished. Consider another scenario where an IT leader thinks the cloud, social media, and mobile computing are all fads. So they tell their staff to ignore these fads since they’re wasteful investments.

The scenarios I described above could be more hypothetical. From articles, blogs, etc., and my conversations with other IT leaders, there’s a disconnect between IT and the business units regarding understanding the priorities and how services/products are designed. A big part of this disconnect is the lack of understanding regarding what business users want and need. Without understanding the business needs and the end-users, IT will use technology to drive the business needs rather than business needs defining what technologies are to be used.

How should IT leaders understand their customers/users and their needs? In higher education, I’ve found several ways to do this:

1) Be part of campus strategic planning processes. When IT leaders get involved after technology-related decisions have been made, these decisions often have to be re-visited as factors that are only evident to IT folks may not have been considered. IT leaders must also think like business leaders instead of technologists to frame how their organizations can best address business problems and not just use technology for technology’s sake. The missions of their campus must drive the efforts of IT organizations, so IT leaders need to understand the missions and priorities of their campus.

2) Understand technology trends. IT leaders are often in no position to be technology experts, given their responsibilities as strategists. Still, they should be aware of technology trends impacting their campus and higher education. For example, publications/orgs such as Pew Research, Educause, and Gartner, as well as national higher education organizations from time to time, have articles on future technology trends and technology use of different demographics. Attend conferences, but not only technology conferences. IT leaders also need to attend conferences attended by functional business users. For example, student affairs IT should attend conferences by NASPA and ACPA, the two major student affairs organizations, and conferences for specific functional units like AACRAO for enrollment management departments.

3) Get out of the office and walk around campus. Observe what devices students use as they will probably be ahead of IT organizations, especially for consumer products like social media, mobile computing, and the next wave of computing – the Internet of Things.

4) Get on social media. Some IT folks pridefully tell me, “I am not on social media because it’s a waste of time!” Frankly, I think that’s a misguided way of thinking. IT folks can learn much from the network of other technology and business experts/leaders in higher education and other industries. I follow the healthcare industry because of the similarities between that industry and student affairs. Specifically, the nature of the high-tech/high-touch services must operate.

There are many more ways IT leaders can begin to understand their customers/users, and it’s a continuous process. Technology is evolving faster than ever, but the business challenges/opportunities in higher education driven by the needs of students, the economy, and politics are so dynamic and complex that IT leaders cannot afford to be left behind and fail to understand those they serve.

I once read a line related to application development that goes something like this “we (application/web developers) design and build for end-users, and we are not the end-users.” One of the biggest mistakes IT folks commit, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this, is designing products and services for ourselves rather than the end-users. It’s too easy to get caught in this trap of designing for ourselves when we never leave the comfort of the office and do not understand those who will use the systems we build. To build effective systems, IT folks need to understand their end-users, those who will either benefit from the IT products/services provided or, unfortunately, will suffer the daily consequences of using systems that are either ineffective or inflict physical/mental pain. If you think I’m being over-dramatic with the last sentence, imagine using a system that requires one to have to repetitively use the mouse to scroll up and down web pages hundreds of times a day. After a while, you’ll develop carpal tunnel syndrome. Or, what about websites that are not responsive and the width of the page is wider than the size of the screens the users are using, which require them to scroll sideways to see the entire page? That could be very frustrating, right? How about websites that are so heavy with graphics that it takes forever to display (yes, there are still folks around the world who are connected to the internet on slow networks), which leads to frustrations? Developers and designers need to keep end-users in mind when building effective applications that satisfy the needs of the end-users.

For higher ed IT leaders (or IT leaders in any industry), the burden of responsibility to understand those they serve and their needs are even higher because when at the leadership level, they are essentially dealing not only with technology but business, organizational, and cultural transformations as well. The quality of service and products provided by IT are influenced and driven by their leaders. Consider the following scenario: an IT leader thinks their organization’s role is to “keep the lights on,” and so they pursue a strategy where they don’t pursue innovation and attempt to introduce new ideas, which at times could lead to disruptions in services, are punished. Consider another scenario where an IT leader thinks the cloud, social media, and mobile computing are all fads. So he/she tells their staff to ignore these fads since they’re wasteful investments.

The scenarios I described above are, unfortunately, not hypothetical. From articles, blogs, etc., and my conversations with other IT leaders, there’s a disconnect between IT and the business units when it comes to an understanding of the priorities and/or how services/products are designed. A big part of this disconnect is the lack of understanding regarding what business users want and need. Without understanding the business needs and the end-users, IT will use technology to drive the business needs rather than business needs defining what technologies are to be used.

How should IT leaders begin to understand their customers/users and their needs? In higher education, I’ve found several ways to do this:

1) Be part of campus strategic planning processes. When IT leaders get involved after technology-related decisions have been made, these decisions often have to be re-visited as factors that are only evident to IT folks may not have been considered. IT leaders also need to think like business leaders instead of technologists to frame how their organizations can best address business problems and not just use technology for technology’s sake. The missions of their campus must drive the efforts of IT organizations, so IT leaders need to understand the missions and priorities of their campus.

2) Understand technology trends. IT leaders are often in no position to be technology experts, given their responsibilities as strategists. Still, they should be cognizant of technology trends impacting their campus and higher education. For example, publications/orgs such as Pew Research, Educause, and Gartner, as well as national higher education organizations from time to time, have articles on future technology trends and technology use of different demographics. Attend conferences but not only technology conferences. IT leaders also need to attend conferences attended by functional business users. For example, student affairs IT should attend conferences by NASPA and ACPA, the two major student affairs organizations, and conferences for specific functional units like AACRAO for enrollment management departments.

3) Get out of the office and walk around campus. Observe what devices students are using as they will probably be ahead of IT organizations, especially when it comes to consumer products like social media and mobile computing and the next wave of computing – the internet of things.

4) Get on social media. Some IT folks pridefully tell me, “I am not on social media because it’s a waste of time!” Frankly, I think that’s a misguided way of thinking. IT folks can learn a lot from the network of other technology and business experts/leaders in higher education and other industries. I follow the health care industry because of the similarities between that industry and student affairs. Specifically, the nature of the high-tech/high-touch services must operate.

There are many more ways IT leaders can begin to understand their customers/users, and it’s a continuous process. Technology is evolving faster than ever, but the business challenges/opportunities in higher education driven by the needs of students, the economy, and politics are so dynamic and complex that IT leaders cannot afford to be left behind and fail to understand those they serve.


IFTTT for Integrating Cloud, Mobile, Wearable, Social Media, and Internet of Things

IFTTT for iPhone - Intro Screen 01I like gadgets and discovering how I can use them beyond how they come out of the box. One fun part about having these gadgets is figuring out how to integrate them with other devices and services. This is where IFTTT (If This Then That) comes in. IFTTT is a service that, through triggers and actions, can enable different devices and services, including cloud, mobile, wearable computing, social media, and the internet of things, to work together. I use Evernote, Dropbox,  iPhone/iPad/Samsung Galaxy Note, Fitbit, Pebble watch, Google Glass, Nest Thermostat, Automatic app, and various social media platforms. I’ve experimented with some IFTTT “Recipes,” a combination of triggers and actions, just for fun and to see what I can use for productivity. Listed below are a few of the recipes I’ve used:

1) Fitbit activities to Google Drive. This recipe saves daily activity summaries to a spreadsheet on Google Drive.

2) Automatic/Nest Thermostat – turn on Nest with the car. This recipe turns on the Nest thermostat when my car, which has Automatic, is detected within a certain distance from home.

3) Automatic/Nest Thermostat – turn on the fan for 15 minutes when the car is home. This is similar to #2 above.

4) Twitter favorite creates a note in Evernote. This recipe creates an Evernote containing the tweet I marked as a favorite.

While this post is about IFTTT, I also want to mention an application I have used to issue commands to my Nest Thermostat using voice commands from my Google Glass. As this page shows, this app called “Google Glass App for the Nest” can be used to issue different commands, which include adjusting the Nest thermostat temperature to a certain temperature.

Klout recently gave me a Parrot mini-drone as a “perk.” Currently, there are no IFFFT recipes published for it, but just like the Google Glass App for Nest, I wonder if I can control the mini-drone with Google Glass. It seems some companies, including this one, have tried it.

It’s fun trying to integrate these technologies through IFTTT and other means. I do them mainly to explore what is possible for entertainment’s sake. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they do. But, I do explore these possibilities as part of my thinking of what the future may hold. There are ethical and privacy considerations with these technologies, and so as I do these experiments, I think about the implications. As I mentioned in this blog post about why I decided to buy Google Glass, to truly understand how these technologies work and the implications behind their use of them, one must have real-world experience with them. Just like golf, there’s no substitute for actually swinging a golf club to understand how a swing works.

Going back to IFTTT, there are thousands of recipes for you to try. Check it out and have fun with it!

Photo credit: http://blog.ifttt.com/post/55130449805/the-power-of-ifttt-now-in-your-pocket


Technologies, Assessment, and the Future of Student Affairs

Technology is already a significant component in all facets of student affairs. As Kevin Guidry shares in this blog post about student affairs technology competency, technology has played a role in student affairs for several decades.  The new types of technologies and how quickly they evolve will pose challenges and opportunities. This blog post includes what I see as changes in the landscape of consumer technologies and how campus information system providers will need to change their approach to designing applications for devices and how end-users may interact with systems in ways they don’t do today. It will also talk about assessment, the limitations of current systems towards a complete analysis and evaluation of data from different sources, and how to potentially overcome these constraints.

The future of student affairs will include consumer technologies including mobile, data, sensors, social media, cloud, wearable computing, and location-based systems. This possibility is by no means a stretch if one is to consider what already exists outside the world of academia and follow consumer technology trends. I’ve written a few blog posts about possible future scenarios for student affairs using the technologies I mentioned above. This blog post also talks about how I think wearable computing, specifically Google Glass, can be used in student affairs. The use of consumer technologies can no longer be ignored by IT and other campus service providers. For one, privacy, policy, and ethical considerations must be addressed as data freely from one device to another enabled by cloud services (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) and increasing availability of internet connectivity. In addition, the design and development of campus systems must consider how consumers of these systems expect them to work. As it is, legacy systems designed before the wide use of mobile are not mobile-friendly, and campus IT and vendors are still spending their time retrofitting these systems to provide mobile interfaces.

As the development of enterprise campus systems like learning management systems, residential management systems, student information systems, and other administrative systems take years to complete, it’s probably wise to think ahead of what consumer technologies may be available two or three years from now and design for them. I believe one of the major considerations when designing these systems is how users interface with the systems. Most systems are now through a graphical user interface (GUI) like websites. However, developers must also consider presenting systems through Conversation User Interface (CUI), which provides user interaction through voice. Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana are three technologies available via CUI. In addition to GUI and CUI, developers must also provide users the ability to interface with systems using gestures, which I consider part of the Natural User Interface (NUI) approach. Consider that a user can now wink when using Google Glass to take pictures or that a user can use Leap Motion or Kinect to control objects on a screen.

Another consideration is how data that may have been designed for a specific use today may be used differently in the future. For this reason, it’s wise to design applications to provide these data through services that can be consumed separately and in ways that may not have been considered before. For example, one data set commonly used across student systems is student demographic data. While in the past, this set of information may have only existed on the campus student information system (admissions, registrar, financial aid), increasingly, functional systems (judicial affairs, housing, etc.) often provided by vendors are now using this information for operational use as well as for assessment/reporting purposes. The older (and most likely used today) is to provide extracts of this data set and send it to departments responsible for managing these systems via text files, which they then import. A more effective way would be to expose these data through API (application programming interface), including web service, which can be used by these other systems without manual actions, given proper permissions.

One topic that has gotten more attention in student affairs and involves enterprise systems that cross-campus units are assessment. The need for assessment is because of the seemingly greater need for accountability by the government in light of questions surrounding the purpose/effectiveness of higher education and to show the value of the work student affairs do. This is in addition to efforts by departments to improve how they conduct their business (operational) and how effective they are towards meeting student learning outcomes. A major obstacle to a complete campus assessment, or just within student affairs, is the fact that so many of the systems, including student health, counseling, judicial affairs, disabled student programs, and other student service systems, are not designed to be able to seamlessly communicate and exchange data with each other. This is one of the challenges I discussed in this blog post about Higher Education and Data Liquidity. Moving forward, there must be a way for these separate systems to communicate and exchange data. At the least, there has to be a way to combine these data into a central database for analysis. One approach to solve this issue would be to have a common data format that these systems can use, similar to a common transcript system by Parchment, which enables high schools and colleges to exchange transcripts electronically. Additionally, a proposal I had recommended is to create a common markup language that can be used across all types of learning institutions. This learner-centered approach accounts for the fact that students are no longer receiving or completing their education from a single place, also called the student swirl.

It would also be wise for student affairs practitioners and IT departments providing support to student affairs units to lead the discussion on how vendors should design their systems to overcome the constraints above. As it is, there are not too many vendors focusing on student services who are developing systems that can accommodate the needs of student affairs as a whole. A company that can do this would need domain expertise in areas within student affairs that are so distinct (student health vs. residential life) from each other to develop systems beyond just a department or two. I think NASPA and ACPA, the two national student affairs organizations, should lead this charge as they should better understand the general needs across institutions. In leading this charge, they need to work with other organizations representing specific functions within student affairs to understand the specific needs within these areas. These organizations include but are not limited to  AACRAO, ACUI, ACUHO-I, and NACE, to name a few.

There are many more topics and questions to discuss regarding the use of technology in student affairs. This post is just a small piece of that discussion, though I hope it provided readers like you with some ideas and questions to think about when it comes to the future of student affairs.


Challenges with Change and Innovation – More Than Technology

innovation_change

The topics of change and innovation, specifically technology-related, intrigue me. I read about disruptive innovationdiffusion of innovation, and continual improvement process. At this point, I’m still trying to wrap my thinking as to how these relate and when can/should they be applied in higher education. I have more questions than answers, so I seek new knowledge and perspectives to make sense of it all.

I work in the technology field within higher education, where I’ve witnessed and implemented business processes enabled by technology since the mid-1990s. In the last few years, the pace at which technologies change has become even faster. Who would have imagined the growth and impact of social media, cloud, mobile, and big data just five years ago? Last year, I started noticing more articles about wearable computing and the “internet of things.“. The blurring of the lines between computing services and products only available via IT departments years ago and those readily available to consumers, also known as “consumerization of IT,” has only become more pronounced in the last few years. These changes have provided opportunities and introduced new challenges. All these observations have led me to become more interested in anticipating where the future of higher education and technology may be heading.

If change and innovation in higher education are only about technology, maybe it would be easy if not because change involves culture, politics, traditions, paradigms, and personalities. Technological changes happen within how higher education views itself regarding its perceived roles (preparing students for careers, providing civic service by molding students as productive citizens, research) and how it operates (shared governance, teaching methods, funding priorities, etc.). There is no consensus on these views. The role of faculty and teaching methods are now being challenged in light of new learning opportunities provided to students because of technology, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and personal learning networks. Current technologies have also added a new spin to the old debate of how individuals learn (objectivism vs. constructivism).

Beyond philosophical debates about the role of technology in higher education, from a practical perspective, it takes time and resources to introduce and implement new ways of using technology. It’s a process, and the process involves human emotions. As one who works in IT, my role is a service provider to my university’s communities of staff, faculty, and students. At the core of my responsibility is ensuring the systems they use work appropriately as they would expect. Network outages and disruption of applications/web services are what we try to avoid.

Given that failures, trial-and-error, and not-so-perfect systems that lead to disorders of services are all part of the process when introducing new systems, how do organizations balance the need to manage stability and provide room for transformational (potentially disruptive) innovations? How do organizations gain buy-ins from faculty, staff, students, and administrators to adopt new systems and ways of doing things? More importantly, the question is when and how do we know when to apply incremental improvements vs. introducing a new way of doing things and disrupting the system?

I’m hoping someone in higher education has figured out the answers to the questions I pose above because I have yet to figure all these out. Let’s talk if you have figured it out or have some ideas.

n light of new learning opportunities provided to students because of technology, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and personal learning networks. Current technologies have also added a new spin to the old debate of how individuals learn (objectivism vs. constructivism).

Beyond philosophical debates about the role of technology in higher education, from a practicality perspective, it takes time and resources to introduce and implement new ways of using technology. It’s a process, and the process involves human emotions. As one who works in IT, my role is a service provider to my university’s communities of staff, faculty, and students. At the core of my responsibility is ensuring the systems they use work appropriately as they would expect. Network outages and disruption of applications/web services are what we try to avoid. Given that failures, trial-and-error, and not-so-perfect systems that lead to disorders of services are all part of the process when introducing new systems, how do organizations balance the need to manage for stability and provide room for transformational (and potentially disruptive) innovations? How do organizations gain buy-ins from faculty, staff, students, and administrators to adopt new systems and ways of doing things? I suppose, more importantly, the question is when and how do we know when to apply incremental improvements vs. introducing a radically new way of doing things and disrupting the system?

I’m hoping someone in higher education has figured out the answers to the questions I pose above because I have yet to figure all these out. Let’s talk if you have figured it out or have some ideas.

image credit: http://www.innovation-post.com/what-is-the-difference-between-innovation-management-and-change-management/


Student Affairs Technology Competency Assessment

Student Affairs Technology CompetencyThis post is about student affairs technology competency.  Actually, this post is an invitation for readers to contribute some ideas on how to define and assess student affairs technology competency. I believe it’s a very important issue to resolve for our profession. It  will require a group effort to generate some ideas to move the discussion moving forward. Admittedly, the proposed ideas and approach are rudimentary so feedback is welcomed.

(continue reading…)


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