Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

It is during this time of the year when front line colleagues who truly deserve the accolades for their student service will receive awards in front of a cheering crowd. I have personally received one myself for my work with student organizations as an advisor and so this post is not from a place of sour grapes. Oftentimes, I personally receive praises that should be reserved for the work my IT colleagues just because I am the one talking to the customers.  I do make sure to correct those giving me recognition and emphasize that for every application and service we provide, it requires team effort.

For every front line customer service professional, there is a layer of support behind them that makes their ability to provide service possible. In these days when most, if not all, business processes depend on technology, the IT staff is often involved at some point in the customer service process.  There are many roles within an IT organization, including  operations support positions such as help desk, server, and network admins. They often work after everyone’s gone home and during weekends to maintain and upgrade our systems. In my opinion, these are some of the hardest jobs and these are the positions that receive the least recognitions.  When our systems and networks are running well, they are invisible and only when the email system or the network goes down do people even know they exist.

I know that the colleagues I mentioned above are driven by their desire to be of service to others and not by accolades.  Appreciation of their work and their value to the organization does go a long way. Next time you have the opportunity to thank your IT staff, please do so. 🙂

In any technology dependent organization, IT units provide the basic infrastructure and operations such as networking, productivity tools, security, and servers.  Given this role, IT is often considered a utility just like water and electricity. However, IT has to play a greater role in today’s world of student affairs and higher education. IT needs to fulfill a higher role of a driver/partner in an organization’s innovation strategy simply because 1) if we do not evolve, we will become increasingly irrelevant in this world of consumer technologies, and 2) the expectations and demands of our customers require that business and IT units must collaborate to provide solutions that deliver at the very least, a satisfactory user experience, in a timely manner.

Consumer-driven innovations require a shift in how IT organizations must approach our role or we may see ourselves increasingly irrelevant. Will IT organization completely cease to exist in the near future? I highly doubt it just because there are legacy applications that require maintenance and operations such as networking, and help desk will continue to be needed.  However, I wrote about the trends in student affairs technology and their implications to IT last year, including the business units’ increasing reliance/preference on consumer technologies like cloud, social media and mobile to do their business.  One of the complaints I generally hear in my leadership role within student affairs IT is that sometimes it takes too long for us to provide our customers with the solutions they need and sometimes we are seen as a department of ‘No!”. For this reason, some of them have found it more convenient to use external services that are often free and faster to implement, with or without IT involvement. The challenge for IT however is that the need to keep up with consumer-driven innovations is constrained by the need to maintain legacy systems and “keeping the lights on” with limited resources.

The needs of our technologically dependent customers require collaboration between IT and business units to provide a good user experience delivered in timely manner. Our primary customers, the students and our staff are predominantly within the “Net Generation” or the “Millennials” generally characterized by their use of technologies. Studies by Pew Research on their use of social networking sites and Educause’s ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology 2011 provide some statistics and insight on students and technology.  Along with these new technologies come expectations and needs that are different from even a decade ago when mobile, social media and cloud computing did not exist. For example, the ability to work remotely, for some of our staff, is no longer a convenience but a necessity. In addition, as we recruit more out-of-state students (including international students), the need to communicate and how we provide services for them have also changed. The use of web conferencing tools for group webinars and individual advising has increased at our university in the last year.

For IT to stay relevant in student affairs (and in any organization), we need to realize that the systems we design and build need to evolve from systems of transactions to systems of engagement. We need to design systems that go beyond automation and efficiency. Because of social media and mobile computing, our customers now expect real-time two-way communication conducted in multiple channels.  In addition, how we do business within IT and in student affairs in general must also change. I wrote this blog post last year about student affairs as social business. It’s a post about how the use of social media in student affairs will evolve so that it will no longer be limited to communication with our customers. Social media will be used for internal communication and collaboration to enhance the business processes of student affairs.

I do not know what new technology will be introduced three to five years from now so building systems based solely on current technology and what we can only guess to accommodate a few years from now is a challenge.  However, creating an IT organization that is agile and responsive to the dynamic business needs is required for student affairs IT organizations to go beyond its role as a utility to a role of  a driver/partner in student affair’s innovation strategy. To be agile and responsive requires IT organizations and its leadership to take full advantage of the collective knowledge of our staff and customers.  It is imperative that we recognize their creativity and provide a culture that rewards innovative thinking as well as processes that promote free flows of ideas from all levels of our organization.

[Related blog posts on technology in student affairs/higher ed]

Colleagues who telecommute from northern California and Oregon are in town for a two-day visit starting today. I only see them in person two or three times a year now, though through technology, I can interact with them every day.  Their visit reminds me of how the IT organization I work for has grown significantly since 1996 when there were about 6 of us to about 50+ today. The way we work has also been transformed significantly as well.   Their visit also reminds me of several things:

• When two of my colleagues needed to move out of Santa Barbara maybe four or five years ago, human resources told me we had no policy regarding full-time telecommuting and I was further told there was not a single employee in the entire University of California system who had this work arrangement. My department had to create our own telecommuting agreement which was then approved by HR. This leads me to thinking that just because there is no policy or that something has never been done before does not mean that will always be the case. Organizations need to evolve to meet the changing business demands and using the absence of policy or lack of precedence to hinder progress does not make sense.
• Dependence on technology in how student affairs conduct business is evident by the investment and commitment our senior management towards our IT department. There is not a single unit in our student affairs organization that does not rely on technology as evident by the number of systems we have implemented the last decade and a half.  The emergence of social media, cloud, and mobile computing has introduced new opportunities for the organization to further utilize technology in how we serve and communicate with students, parents, other customers as well as with our colleagues.  However, consumer technologies have also brought challenges to IT.
• Telecommuting and working in distributed environment has become an accepted arrangement and this became possible because of technology, an indication of the future of work. We are no longer located in the same physical building and the way we communicate changed from just telephones and face-to-face visits to now using video conferencing tools, emails, and other forms of social media. I remember how I had to drive to campus at night to work because technology to access my workstation and servers did not exist when I started working in my department in late 1990’s.
• Approach to leadership, management  and community-building needed to evolve to accommodate the distributed nature of work and teams. Communicating via instant messaging, email and even through videos have led to misinterpretations and physical/emotional reactions do not often get communicated as clearly compared to face-to-face conversations. While tasks and schedules can easily be communicated, building relationships and communities take more effort. When we hire new employees, they may not meet their colleagues whom they work with remotely for months and so even setting up a wiki profile page with personal information and outside interests can start the introduction and build connections based on common interests. Soft skills, including emotional intelligence, is more than ever required for leadership and management. Even for someone like me who is relationship-oriented, I sometimes fail to think about how my emails or what I communicate electronically may be received by my teams because I don’t see immediate reactions from my staff.

The importance of these visits go beyond work as these are the only few times a year when we can socialize in person. Those few hours when we go to a local restaurant and just catch up are what I certainly look forward to and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels the same way.

I have only attended one student affairs related conference (NASPATech – Nov 2011) in my career and so my experience when it comes to regional and national conferences is very limited.   Blog posts by Joe Ginese and Eric Stoller and others about the need to improve the quality of student affairs conferences and the presentations themselves provide me some glimpse of what it would be like if I was to attend them.  If I read the blog posts correctly, one of the intent is to provide suggestions on how to improve the quality of the conferences/presentations leading to a more productive experience for the attendees who took their time out of their busy schedules and spent their institution’s money or their own.

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How would you respond to someone, especially to one in a position of authority, says those words to you?

This is a paraphrase of a response  I received when I was talking to a campus colleague about potentially using facebook for communication with students.  I can respect the idea that maybe, just maybe, facebook is not the right medium to communicate “official campus messages” like prompting them to log in to the campus student information system website to check a very important message. What I have a hard time accepting is the thinking that just because one does not see the value of a tool or that they do not use it means everyone else share the same point of view. Of course itt works the other way as well that just because I use social media heavily that I expect every student to be using it as much as I do. But rather than imposing our own biases, how about rather from looking at social media from our customers’ perspectives. There are studies like Pew Internet Research that shows young adults (18-29), the majority of our students, are indeed using social media.

I only wonder how much of this thinking prevents organizations, specifically higher ed,  from keeping up with the wants and needs of those we serve. I get the argument that we don’t have the necessary resource to meet the demands, that we have policies that we must adhere to and prevents us from using certain technologies, but I think it’s this mentality of elitism, the desire to keep the status quo that is a bigger problem.

Change can be scary and I wish I know what the future holds in term of how social media fits into what we do. What I do know is social media is here to stay and for those who disagree with this notion, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

image credit – http://www.autonettv.com.