Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

I have experienced two major technology shifts in my career: the web in the late 1990’s and social media, cloud and mobile in the last few years.  In both periods, I have been fortunate to have been given opportunities in my organization to be an early adopter/implementer of these technologies.  Along the way, I learned some lessons I carry along with me and I share with my team  in how to have some success when it comes to leading change.

• You need champions/advocates and adopters. You need allies.
• Distribute the work AND accolades.
• Recognition should be the byproduct, not the goal.
• Don’t ignore detractors, but don’t let them stop you either.
• Turn your detractors into your allies and you may have your strongest advocates.
• Learn to know when to ask for forgiveness and/or permission.
• You’ll need a plan, but don’t let the plan stifle progress.
• Better to make mistake moving forward than stagnate and do nothing.
• Embrace ambiguity.
• Know that you will make mistakes from time to time. Don’t dwell on them.
• Learn. Always Learn.
• Politics do matter.
• Develop thick skin. You will be criticized.
• Speak in the language of those you’re trying to convince.
• Ask why would folks want to invest time and resources.
• “No” is not permanent.
• Have fun. Hard to sustain energy for a long time if you’re not having fun.
• Anticipate tomorrow’s needs and build solutions for them.
• Look outside your organization/industry to gain perspective, inspirations.
• Dream.
• It’s more than technology. It’s about people and culture.

In your experience, what else would you add?

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]

Following higher education folks on social media who are definitely thinking about how to change the system in its current form makes me envious/frustrated sometimes that I don’t have the foresight they do.  Sometimes I feel like maybe as part of the status quo, I am contributing to the old way of thinking that prohibits innovative thinking. Maybe I am part of the problem.

But then again, sometimes, it frustrates me to see my colleagues and my institution have to shoulder the burdens of meeting unfunded mandates, having to say not to new projects we know can benefit our students and our staff, maintaining legacy systems that were built so many decades ago and at the same time trying to keep the lights on. It frustrates me to see my colleagues have to shoulder work enough for more than 2 or 3 people. These are the same colleagues who will never get the praise they deserve because they work behind the scenes, making sure our servers and network stays up, that they are secure. These are the same colleagues who will gladly work beyond 5 pm to finish their codes for the next release or to fix some bugs in applications they must try to understand because it was written by someone else before them.

In the last decade or so since I joined my organization, I would like to think I’ve contributed to new solutions to improve how we do business through the applications I’ve created. I may even dare say they were innovative ideas. Innovative in that these applications were new to our organization or they redefined the way we do business. But for every new ideas introduced, what I have come to realize is that there’s a cost to maintaining these ideas. For every application I created, someone other than me had to take on the responsibility of maintaining/enhancing them.

As much as I get excited about the possibility of implementing new ideas or new technologies in our organization, even as they are for the benefit our customers, the reality is that for my ideas to be realized and to be sustainable, I need the help of my colleagues. Unfortunately, these are the same colleagues who are too busy having to maintain some of those bright ideas I had years ago.

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.