Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

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.

Social media presents challenges and opportunities for universities in the way they communicate and provide services to students, enhance their educational experiences, and prepare them for the workforce. Social media can be defined as a set of online tools that people use to share content, opinions, and ideas that create potential interactions. The most popular social media sites are facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs.  Combined with mobile devices and cloud computing, all known as consumer technologies, social media has enabled students to have access to information anytime, anywhere.

The majority of college students are members of the Millennial Generation, those between the ages of 18-29 years old. They are also known as the Net Generation because of their generally increased use and familiarity with communications media and technology. According to a study conducted in 2011 by Pew Internet Center, 61% of online Americans under the age of 30 use social network sites on a typical day. A 2010 survey conducted by Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania found that of the 800 students and faculty that responded, roughly 20 % of the respondents spent between 11 and 20 hours a week using social media.

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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.

credit: http://www.trektraka.com/

I presented on the topic of social media along with some colleagues at UCSB twice last week, one for the Professional Development Conference for the Division of Student Affairs on Thursday, March 22 and for a whole-day workshop called “Diving Into Social Media at UCSB” on March 23.  My presentations focused on overview of social media use in higher education. The Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Dr. Michael Young opened both presentations in which he talked about the role social media in how we communicate and serve our students. In his words, “we need to evolve and transform so that we can thoughtfully and adequately serve our students.” He acknowledged that in moving forward with social media as part of our university business, we will make mistakes but that he would rather us move forward and make mistakes than stagnate. Personally, the Vice Chancellor’s declaration of social media as a part of our future was an affirmation of what I had observed a couple of years ago, that social media will be an integral part of how we in student affairs conduct our business.

Truth be told, there was a time when I felt like I could not even utter the words “social media” as those words were met with smirks and rolling eyes by the few skeptics who viewed social media as nothing more than a waste of time, a fad not worth investing, and risks not worthy of any benefits. These reactions reminded me of when I started developing websites in 1996 when I was asked “Why do we need websites for?” I realized when I started promoting social media to be formally adopted in our division that it would need the support of the Vice Chancellor.  I used to joke around with a few colleagues that the skeptics who view social media as “stupid” can always talk to the Vice Chancellor about his “stupid” idea.

I joined twitter in August 2010 in part to satisfy my curiosity about this “waste of time” and I have been wasting my time since then. That is if wasting time means creating professional networks, expanding my views of what the future may look like for higher education, including student affairs, and coming to realization that my technology leadership role will have to evolve to keep up with the changing demands of our students.

I’m excited about the future of social media and how we could use it in student affairs.  We’re just starting to figure out how to use social media beyond marketing. I’m looking forward to the point when we will start using social media as part of  social business. I don’t exactly know how we will evolve to get to that point, or how it will look like a year from now.

I asked VC Young once how he sees social media a year from now and his response was “We’ve got to find ways, across the division, to get to our students and constituents in ways that are effective. I don’t always know what that will look like, but this is my view:  if I wait until I fully understand what it looks like, we’ll never get a damn thing done.” I concur.