Around that time, maybe a little earlier, I was part of an Educause committee called 2020, whose job was to project to the future (now only 2+ months away) and think back to the present about what Educause needed to do to be well prepared. I don't recall our core recommendations, but I do remember that I brought to the attention of the group the lack of communication between the campus CIO and the Provost's Office, which had been my experience up to that time (and I believe may have gotten worse on my campus subsequently). The issue is what could be done about this communication blockage. I don't believe our Educause group solved that puzzle. I hope to see some of these people, my friends and colleagues in the profession, at the Educause national conference next week. While I have no longing for the work we did back then, I do miss them very much. Maybe some of the themes in my post will become part of the conversation we have.
Let me get to the reasons for why I couldn't be a campus CIO.
Strength is not my weakness.
"Danimal" Dan Hampton
I like this line, a lot. Dan Hampton was a defensive end for the Bears in their glory years. He had a physically imposing presence. This line shows he had an element of wit as well. I'm going to take advantage of the line to segue into some of the more obvious weaknesses I had then (which I probably still have, though they aren't tested nearly as much now).
(1) I didn't know how to deal with stress, which I felt almost constantly. Eventually, writing this blog became one release point. But though I enjoy writing it wasn't sufficient. I put on a huge amount of weight during my time in campus IT. And after I stopped jogging because my knees were no longer up to it, I didn't do nearly enough physical activity, only taking up walking several years later. I also drank like a fish, not a good thing to do on a recurrent basis. And now I'm talking about when I was the Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, where I was competent to do the job. I could only see things getting worse on this score, if I were the campus CIO. (I'm writing this with an Illinois-centric perspective, where the stress was palpable. I don't know how it would be on a smaller campus, one that didn't have such a rich history with IT. In this piece I'm going to keep the Illinois focus, because it's where I have concrete memories.)
(2) My personal history with Ed Tech was first as an instructor who did ALN under the SCALE project (One semester before that I used PacerForum in my Econ class on a server hosted by the CHP program.) Even after I took over running SCALE, a year later, my mindset was from the perspective of a user of technology. The part that interested me was clever adaptations, made in an attempt to improve the teaching. Some years later John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid came out with a book, The Social Life of Information. The themes of that book captivated me. I viewed the back end stuff as an enabler only, not as an object of attention in itself. This was fine for a director of an ed tech unit, but might be a fatal flaw in itself for a campus CIO. Further, when I was in the campus IT organization as Assistant CIO, I was viewed as a strategic thinker, not as an operations guy. It would be very difficult to segue from that to a position where operational concerns were of top importance and where the people who did operational work, much of the IT organization, felt I had their back. I think the CIO position needs the support of the IT organization and it needs the support of the campus too. Conversely the IT organization needs to feel the CIO is for them while also feeling that what they are doing is in support of the campus mission. I likely would have been blocked in at least part of this from the get go.
(3) The reality when I took over SCALE is that I was largely ignorant on a host of issues, particularly on how people learn, but at that time I felt a very strong need to self-educate and that became something of a passion. Because of my prior views of big IT as an enabler only, I'm not sure I could develop the same sort of passion to self-educate. (Here self-education includes talking with people who are knowledgeable about the issues, including those who report to the CIO, directly or indirectly.) Around this time Nicholas Carr came out with a widely discussed paper, IT Doesn't Matter. In other words, IT was the 21st century equivalent to plumbing. For me to be a campus CIO I would need a refutation to Carr's argument, one I could deeply believe in. I'm not sure I could come up with that.
(4) From the time I started running SCALE to the time I left the position as Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, I had good connections around campus and in the Provost's Office (though not with the Provost himself after Larry Faulkner left). Once there was turnover in the Provost's Office, that relational asset was lost. I'm not sure whether it could be rebuilt or not.
(5) I never wanted to be campus CIO. Climbing the hierarchy didn't get my motor going. I was all about self-expression in the name of supporting what I cared about. I didn't see the CIO position as enabling that. This wasn't a Peter Principle thing, though that might be part of it. I simply couldn't see how becoming a campus CIO would count as personal growth for me.
(6) There was a lot of political infighting within the campus IT organization when I was part of it. It would have been necessary to put a stop to all the divisiveness. Making that a focal point clearly was necessary, but it wasn't where my head was. I never liked to manage down - even with the old Center for Educational Technologies. I was all about managing out - being an ambassador to the rest of the Campus. I liked to doing that.
I could make this list longer, but I think it sufficient to explain my title. Now, in spite of all of that, I want to consider what I brought to the table which might have been helpful in the CIO's role, and in so doing bring out some issues that might be generally relevant, not just at Illinois.
With that I want to cut to the chase. I believe there is a kind of prejudice on campus that exists at upper administrative levels that is not often discussed. The focus of this prejudice is on the person's background. In your prior life before becoming a big-time administrator, were you a faculty member or not? Being a faculty member was a big plus. I wouldn't say it was absolutely necessary, but it was extremely helpful. Conversely, if you were not a faculty member you already had two-strikes against you. Further, if you were a CIO who could only talk about IT issues in tech gobbledygook or in Gartner-speak, you were doomed to the outreaches of the Provost's Office and you would never be invited to participate in the Council of Deans. In contrast, if you could make IT issues available to other campus leaders in a language they could understand, then you might have a fighting chance to be an insider in these high level discussions. The clincher is whether you could also participate in conversation that weren't about IT at all, be a good listener and make reasonable contributions then, so when it came to discussing the overlap between campus issues and IT, you would have the trust of the other decision makers, which would enable strategic conversations about the use of IT to proceed apace. In this dimension I believe I would be reasonably good.
A core question about IT on campus is how much the central IT organization should be budgeted and about how much of IT function should be distributed around campus. During the aftermath of the burst of the housing bubble, when campus budgets overall went south, there was some consensus built for greater central provision of IT services. Ultimately, it seems to me as an observer now, much of that was on outsourcing with large commercial providers - Microsoft, Google, and Box.com come to mind. There may also have been important conversations about services that need to be retained with campus hosting, though I was retired by the time those discussions were happening. In any event, we tend not to make the budgeting part of such conversations public and it's been my experience that people tend to think about these things on a service by service basis, rather than consider the overall picture. An overall picture is needed. A realistic discussion that brings to convergence the expectations for IT funding, on the one hand, and the reality of the likely funding available, on the other is needed. Given my economics background, I suspect I'd be as good at doing that as anyone else who might have the job.
There is then the issue about what happens once the CIO gets his or her wings clipped, being given the cold shoulder from the Council of Deans and/or from the Provost. The experience I've seen is to retrench with IT peers around the country, and with folks with IT on campus. The conversation, unfortunately, gets very insular. It's a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma. It's not a good outcome, but it seems inevitable. One might ask how to cut through this or if that is possible.
When I was doing the campus job as Assistant CIO for Educational Technologies, I was also the campus representative to the CIC Learning Technologies Group. (The CIC is now called the Big Ten Academic Alliance.) It was one of my favorite spots for interactions, with peers from campuses similar to Illinois. The dinners the night before our meetings were better than the meetings itself. There was no agenda then and people were quite open with one another. The membership at the time was split between those who were faculty members in their previous life and those who were academic professionals doing the work. We got along quite well across those lines. But, the group when I first joined it also had people from the Provost's Office who were responsible for undergraduate education. So there was the cross pollination I talked about above. Yet the arrangement was not stable. Those folks in the Provost's Office all eventually left the group. They wanted to pass the baton to the full time ed tech people. I gather that issue is still with us, as evidenced by this recent piece in Educause Review.
With that background as the canary in the coal mine, one wants to know whether the campus CIO truly integrated into the campus leadership is a pipe-dream only. I don't know. I will ask a different question instead. Are the strengths I brought to the table replicable to some degree? If they are and a candidate for the CIO position clearly showcased those talents, would the person be given a fair chance to become integrated into the campus leadership?
In my teaching I show students the theoretical ways that the Prisoner's Dilemma logic can be overcome. It requires forward thinking and patience. At my core, I'm a theory guy. It's how I was trained in grad school. On a practical level, I'm much less sure on how to go about it. In spite of that, I believe that schmooze skills have to be a big part of the answer.
Maybe, just maybe, the full answer can be found.
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