Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

credit - internetsiao.com

A story about a tech firm CEO banning the use of email for internal communication has been a topic of discussion around social media the last couple of days. Reported by multiple news agencies and websites, the title centers around the idea of “banning email” which is certainly a more sensational headline than the the fact that as the story notes,  “instant messaging and facebook-style interface” is replacing email for internal communications in the company.

This story reminds me of how in the last few years, some of the ways we, in our higher ed, communicate have changed. In addition to email and phones, instant messaging and video conferencing have become additional means to communicate in our daily work.  A few years ago, when we say face to face communication, that most likely meant two or more people looking at each other in the same physical room.

I have heard some concerns about role of technology in how we interact with students and colleagues and how technology cannot/should not replace face to face interactions. However, our definition of face to face will probably have to change moving forward. Consider that some of our online students may never step onto our campus or that we will need to meet with students like international/out-of-state students before they even arrive on campus. With bigger bandwidth and the availability of wireless networking, face to face communication now carries a different meaning, to me anyways.

With Google+ Hangout, Skype via Facebook and other various free services available, the use of video conferencing for one-on-one and group communications will continue to become a bigger part of how we all communicate. Here are some examples I have seen video conferencing used on our campus:

• My team of developers located on our campus use their webcams and Microsoft Communicator/Live Meeting to communicate daily with a couple of their colleagues who telecommute from different cities
•  Our Admissions office staff use Adobe Connect to hold one-on-one and one-to-many virtual advising sessions with prospective students
• A professor uses the same product to hold review sessions with his students
• I had an informational interview using Skype and iphone with a graduate student from a different state
• Students use TokBox to have multiple conversations
• Video interviews of job applicants
• A presentation on Identity Development Theories by a professor from San Diego State University to undergraduate students
• Vendor presentations

A decade ago when the web became an important part of how we communicate with students,  along came  expectations of information/services available 24×7 and universities had to accommodate them. In these days of social media and more advanced technology, which include 2 way video communications, students will probably start expecting universities to use the tools and communicate they way they do in their personal lives.   In the future, what students define as face to face communication may be different than what we used to define it pre-social media days.

How do you see the way we communicate in our workplace  changing now and in the future?

The mission statement of the UCSB Division of Student Affairs, the organization I work for, has not changed since 1996, as far as I can tell.  Earlier this evening, I was looking at the original website for the division I created in 1996 via Wayback Machine and noticed the exact mission statement we have on our website now.  While our core mission has remained constant, the ways our various units and the division conduct our business have changed throughout the years. Shaped by technological advances including the internet,  infrastructures (virtualization, storage, networks), development tools,  as well as budgetary constraints, mandates and the demands of our students,  I think it’s safe to say our organization went through (and still going through) a technology (r)evolution.  My organization, in my opinion, is an example of how an organization can evolve and keep up with trends while maintaining its mission. This is not to say that keeping up with the trends has not had its challenges and resistance, but guided by the principle of innovation set by our Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Dr. Michael Young, we have been generally successful. When I started as a web developer in 1996, Dr. Young shared with me a principle I have used throughout my career. He told me “I’d rather have us moving forward and make mistakes along the way than to stagnate.” This is the same principle that has allowed our division to commit to technology as a key component of our division.

Throughout this period of transformation, I have seen the adoption of new technologies in virtually all aspects of our organization.  Just recently, I compiled a list of the systems (pdf – 4.55 mb) we have developed and implemented throughout the last 15 years along with some legacy mainframe applications we still support.  The more than 120+ information systems/web sites are products of a commitment towards technology that the leaders of our organizations made 15 years ago.  Some of the notable systems in our portfolio include:

• Integrated electronic medical system consisting of several vendor solutions for  our student health service and counseling services
• Enrollment management systems including online application status/statement of intent to register, electronic grades submission, academic progress, online application review, online catalog, course enrollment, document management system
• Student services systems including disabled student program online system (notetaking, proctoring management), alcohol/drug program enrollment management, online advising notes system
• Online events ticketing, recreation program integrated system including online course enrollment

A part of that commitment is to create a central computing department within the division which grew from approximately 5 staff to more than 40 today. The organizational chart has changed several times throughout the years to respond to the changing priorities and needs.

As the trend towards greater adoption of consumer technologies (social media, cloud, mobile) in student affairs continues, along with the increasing budgetary constraints, changing student demographics and greater financial burdens to students, our organization is now having to adapt to the expectations of our socially networked and mobile students.  This requires a move towards social business, integrating social networking technologies as part of our business processes.  As it was in 1996 when web became a serious business tool in our organization, it took some time for the entire organization to recognize the value of the web. A conclusion I’ve come to given my experience throughout this technology (r)evolution is that the pace of innovation moves at the speed of the organization. Undoubtedly, our organization will continue to remain dynamic and accommodating to new trends consistent with our mission.

I was talking with someone working in higher education IT a few days ago about social media and why I have embraced it. He told me  “No way will I be interested in social media. If you watched the movie Social Network,  you’ll know that Zuckerberg created facebook so his buddies could get laid.” He also told me “I don’t want to know what some mom cooked for breakfast.” So I asked him if he has a daughter and he tells me he does. I asked him “Who’s going to teach your daughter about how to properly use social media?” and his response was “Not me.” With the realization that I could not convince him about at least understanding social media and that they won’t go away soon, I changed the topic.  The negative attitude towards social media by some IT professionals is understandable given the security and policy implications. In some sense, social media also represents some loss of control when it comes to what and how technology should be used in the workplace.

Based on my short experience using social media, I would urge other colleagues who work in higher education IT to give social media a chance for the following reasons:

• Keep up with trends. I have observed the following the last couple of years:

• Increasing use of mobile devices on our campus by students and staff.
• Increasing requests from departments we serve to use external software services for their business needs.
• Increasing social media presence by campus departments, student organizations.

Before I started using twitter last year, I didn’t realize there was actually a term for this phenomenon and it is not unique to our campus.  This trend is called “consumerization of IT” and is defined on Wikipedia as “trend for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, resulting in the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries, and a shift in IT innovation from large businesses to the home.”

• Understand our customers.  How can we serve our customers if we don’t know their mindset and tools they use? By just observing the communication between students and our staff on facebook and the general conversations on twitter, IT staff can learn a lot about issues/trends that cannot be found anywhere else.

• Professional Development. Every day I log onto facebook, google+, twitter, youtube, slideshare and other social media websites, I consider them as free learning opportunities. I have only attended 2 conferences the last 4 years due to lack of training budgets but I have used social media as my personal learning network (PLN) and have learned a lot about mobile web development, social media and leadership.  When I read blogs by experts in technologies and higher ed, I find insights than typical articles and websites would often reveal.

• Be Relevant and credible. As more of our customers demand to use consumer technologies, inevitably, appropriateness and policy issues will come up for discussion.  Would I  really be credible as an IT professional if I don’t even know how these technologies work? Part of the reason why I spend so much time on social media is to research how they work and how they relate to our business, including what issues to consider. If I have to take the position of rejecting a customer’s proposal to use an external service, I want to be able to credibly tell them the reasons for my position. On the other hand, if I do approve their proposal, I need to be able to assist them in using the service that is consistent with university policies and in ways they may not have thought of.

• Keep up or get left behind. I was told a year ago that social media is a fad and so is Skype so I shouldn’t bother investing any time/resources investigating it for business use. I was also told students do not use mobile devices. Ironically, part of what motivated me to be on social media is to find out for myself on whether what I am being told are actually true. Given the pace at which consumer technology changes, it is a challenge to keep up. I generally spend up to 4 hours most nights just learning new technologies including mobile web and social media and I still feel as if I am behind. In some ways, I consider the time I spend on social media as career investment. I don’t know what IT will look like five years from now but all I know is that the convergence of social media and the enterprise will be even greater than what it is today and I want to be in a position where my knowledge lie in both areas to be employable, competing against our current students who will have entered the work place and who have far greater knowledge about consumer technologies than I do.

• Learn about hobbies, personal interests; connect with folks with same interests. While I hear stereotypes about IT folks as not being too sociable and have no lives, all the IT folks I work with have some outside interests/hobbies. I spend my weekends watching sports and it’s fun being able to watch the games with others that are in different cities, states and in some cases, other countries.

Social media definitely have some pitfalls but I think the benefits outweigh the risks. For anyone working in higher education, not just IT, the days of questioning the values of social media in higher education is long gone. If we are to stay relevant and provide quality customer service, we need to do our part to understand the current needs of our customers and future trends so that we are prepared to adopt them rather than reacting.

What other reasons should higher education IT staff be on social media?

The agility at which facebook can make changes is something I can admire. In creating company this big, facebook is not going to please everyone, but led by Mark Zuckerberg who at times is faulted for his naivete because of his young age – he has optimism and energy on his side. As a line in the Social Network movie says “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Facebook, in my mind, represents a new breed of consumer-driven organization who must continually adapt at a very high rate of change to satisfy their stakeholders. I realize that arguments have been made that facebook changes are made for the sake of revenue and to maximize advertising, etc and not for the sake of customers. That is most likely true. However, even with that argument, I think that facebook must make changes that will not completely upset its customer base as revenue would then suffer. Consider the following quotes attributed to another brilliant innovator, Steve Jobs:

• “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
• “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

Apple and Facebook, led by these two innovators are probably rare companies in that they are able to define their products and services to whatever visions they have set, making mistakes along the way, yet are able to survive and even thrive.

As a facebook user, I sometimes get annoyed with the changes. Specifically with the latest ones released yesterday which makes the site looks very cluttered with all the different functions I can’t even name. It’s beginning to remind me of the cluttered myspace. However, as someone who is in a technology leadership position at a university, I sometimes envy how facebook can seemingly introduce changes overnight without having to go through committee approvals. This is not to say that the need for approval process and committees are all bad given security, policy and legal constraints that must be considered when introducing new technologies like social media. It is those instances when “paralysis by over analysis” cripple a project that bothers me a lot. Finding balance between making sure we are not introducing high risk but at the same time have the room to innovate is a challenge.

One of the guiding principles I have applied in my career is from a mentor I admire so much, the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs  at UCSB – Dr. Michael Young. He told me way back when I was just starting my career that “I’d rather have you continually moving forward, making mistakes along the way, than stagnate.“

One of the challenges I face at work (and life) is determining when to apply the principle of  “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission”.  Looking back at what I have been able to accomplish throughout the years as a developer dating back to 1998 with our university’s campus calendar of events to the numerous applications I’ve built after, I wonder how much of it I would have even built if I had to ask for permission and if I had to prove the value of every single one of them every single time.

Do you agree/disagree with the idea that universities can learn from facebook or are we just different organizational models with different goals, stakeholders and customers?

This post is about how we, social media advocates, can better effectively convince those who are not sold on the values of social media. It’s not a post that offers definitive answers, but more of just personal observation on this matter. As a reader, maybe you can offer some suggestions on how to approach this topic.

In my casual conversations where I share the values of  social media, or in formal meetings where we discuss how social media fits into our organization, I sometimes find myself faced with puzzled looks or skepticism about the value of these tools as they relate to our business needs. Unfortunately, just like golf, social media is one of those things in life where it’s hard to explain what it is, what the experience is about, until one actually swings the clubs or in the case of social media, actually use them. What I have observed though is that as much as I would like to speak about what it means to me, how I have greatly benefited from it as a big part of my professional development,  or how I have used it  in my various professional roles (as an org advisor, as a manager who must provide professional development for my staff, as a tech leader who looks at trends, etc), I’m still talking about me and in probably in the language/terminologies those I speak with probably do not fully understand.  This is like a developer  talking in techie jargon to a business user.  Ultimately, to be effective, I’ve found that I need to look at it from the other person’s perspective in the language they understand and what matters to them.

Instead of describing what social media is and what we can do with them (e.g. send short messages on twitter, post statuses in facebook, etc),  maybe talk about it in the context of our business and from the interests of who we are speaking with. I work in student affairs and what matters to the decision makers include the following topics: outreach, enrollment, retention, wellness, academics, quality of student life, student engagement. If we frame the discussion of social media in the context of the topics I mentioned, then I think we can be more effective in convincing those that do not see the potential benefits of social media.

How do you think we can be more effective in communicating the value of social media?