Then globalization and the Internet changed everything. Customers suddenly had real choices, access to instant reliable information and the ability to communicate with each other. Power in the marketplace shifted from seller to buyer. Customers started insisting on ‘better, cheaper, quicker and smaller,’ along with ‘more convenient, reliable and personalized.’ Continuous, even transformational, innovation have become requirements for survival.”

Steve Denning, “The Management Revolution That’s Already Happening,”
Forbes Magazine, May 30, 2013.

 

 

ChangeIsOptionalDanielChristian-evolllutionDotcom-June2013

 

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PDF of article here

 

 

Top-Ten IT Issues, 2013: Welcome to the Connected Age — from educause review online by Susan Grajek

Also see:

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From DSC:
If we want organizations to survive/thrive in the future, we really need to drop the word “geek” from our vocabularies and get rid of the mental tapes and images that the word “geek” suggests.  It’s just not helpful.

 

 

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TheNextGenerationUniversity-May2013

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Excerpt:

As the nation struggles to find new ways to increase college access and completion rates while lowering costs, a handful of “Next Generation Universities” are embracing key strategies that make them models for national reform. The report The Next Generation University comes at a time when too many public universities are failing to respond to the nation’s higher education crisis. Rather than expanding enrollment and focusing limited dollars on the neediest of students, many institutions are instead restricting enrollments and encouraging the use of student-aid dollars on merit awards. But, according to the report, some schools are breaking the mold by boldly restructuring operating costs and creating clear, accelerated pathways for students.

Download the full report here.

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In addition to the report, see:

 

Also see:

  • What happens when 2 colleges become one — from chronicle.com by Ricardo Azziz
    Excerpt:
    Earlier this year, Moody’s Investors Service released its annual assessment of higher education in the United States, a report that viewed the sector’s short-term outlook as largely negative amid growing economic pressures. The analysts, however, applauded the efforts of a few states that were trying to merge or consolidate campuses because such efforts “foster operating efficiencies and reduce costs amid declining state support.”

5 ways to build a future leader — from forbes.com by Meghan Biro

Excerpt:

This skills shortage threatens to undermine all the positive advances in talent recruitment and management and this is alarming to me.

Companies just can’t find the people they need. And at the same time, they’re cutting their recruiting and development budgets, expecting new hires to hit the ground running.

The IT conversation we should be having — from HBR.org by Jim Stikeleather

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

It is a conversation about the increasing importance of information technology and the role it must assume in every enterprise, regardless of size, industry or geography.

Our observations:

  • CEOs are demanding more visible value from their CIOs, in terms of generating revenue, gaining new customers, and increasing customer satisfaction.
  • Increasingly, the CIO and IT must be seen less as developing and deploying technology, and more as a source of innovation and transformation that delivers business value, leveraging technology instead of directly delivering it.
  • The CIO must be responsible and accountable if technology enables, facilitates or accelerates competition that the C-suite didn’t see coming, or allows the enterprise to miss opportunities because the C-suite did not understand the possibilities technology offered.
  • CIOs today must adapt or risk being marginalized.

 

From DSC:
This is critical in the higher ed space as well!

The majority of the higher education industry still isn’t getting it — we are operating in a brand new ball game where technology must be used strategically It’s not just about building and maintaining the infrastructure/plumbing anymore (though that is extremely important as well). It’s about the strategic, innovative use of IT that counts from here on out.

 

 

SimonSinek-PeopleBuyWhyYouDoSomething

 


DSC’s  notes re: Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action — with a special thanks going out to an excellent teacher and leader, Mr. Eric Closson, from the Kentwood Public Schools for this solid resource!



The Golden Circle

  • Outer circle — most people know what they do
  • Moving in — fewer people know how they do it
  • At the center is WHY: fewer people still know why they do it– cause, belief, why exist, why get out of bed in am, why should anyone care?

Great leaders think from the inside out

  • Apple communicates a message that says:  In everything we do, we believe in thinking differently.  We challenge the status quo.
  • People buy why you do it, not what you are offering or what you do.
  • People don’t buy what you are offering.
  • People will buy from those who believe what they believe.
  • People buy products or work for companies that believe what they believe.
  • Simon discussed some items re: biology and the human brain; neocortex — rational, language; limbic — feelings such as trust, loyalty, controls behavior
  • Driven by a cause, a belief.  [Ex: Wright Brothers’ success.]
  • People don’t buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it.
  • People will do things that THEY believe.
  • Beliefs are key.
  • Dr. Martin Luther King — I believe… I believe… I  believe…
  • I have a dream speech. Not I have a plan.  250,000 people showed up — for themselves. It’s what they believed about America.
  • Those who lead inspire us.
  • We follow those who lead not because we have to, but because we want to; it’s for ourselves.
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Youth in revolt: How to take education into your own hands — from gokicker.com by Jennifer Cain

 

The disruption higher ed doesn’t see coming (and how it could respond, even lead, but probably won’t) — from edtechpost.ca by sleslie 

 

Also see:

 

 

Also see:

 

From DSC:

I can hear the more academically-minded folks out there saying, why in the world are you pulling an article from USA Today?  But I have it that that audience is a subset of the type of audience higher ed is supposed to be serving.

Along these lines, this Snapshot Dissertation article is a highly-refreshing approach! 

My respect for the more academically minded folks continues to decrease — folks like my alma mater who pride themselves on the growing number of people that they can reject each year; and folks who essentially talk amongst themselves but don’t really care about helping out/addressing the greater society at large.

 

 

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From DSC:
Some very frustrated reflections after reading:

Excerpt:

Right now, boys are falling out of the kindergarten through 12th grade educational pipeline in ways that we can hardly imagine.

 

This situation continues to remind me of the oil spill in the Gulf (2010), where valuable resources spilled into the water untapped — later causing some serious issues:
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From DSC:
What are we doing?!!! We’ve watched the dropout rates grow — it doesn’t seem we’ve changed our strategies nearly enough! But the point that gets lost in this is that we will all pay for these broken strategies — and for generations to come!  It’s time to seriously move towards identifying and implementing some new goals.

What should the new goals look like? Here’s my take on at least a portion of a new vision for K-12 — and collegiate — education:

  • Help students identify their God-given gifts and then help them build up their own learning ecosystems to support the development of those gifts. Hook them up with resources that will develop students’ abilities and passions.
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  • Part of their learning ecosystems could be to help them enter into — and build up — communities of practice around subjects that they enjoy learning about. Those communities could be local, national, or international. (Also consider the creation of personalized learning agents, as these become more prevalent/powerful.)
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  • Do everything we can to make learning enjoyable and foster a love of learning — as we need lifelong learners these days.
    (It doesn’t help society much if students are dropping out of K-12 or if people struggle to make it through graduation — only to then harbor ill feelings towards learning/education in general for years to come.  Let’s greatly reduce the presence/usage of standardized tests — they’re killing us!  They don’t seem to be producing long-term positive results. I congratulate the recent group of teachers who refused to give their students such tests; and I greatly admire them for getting rid of a losing strategy.)

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  • Give students more choice, more control over what their learning looks like; let them take their own paths as much as possible (provide different ways to meet the same learning objective is one approach…but perhaps we need to think beyond/bigger than that. The concern/fear arises…but how will we manage this? That’s where a good share of our thinking should be focused; generating creative answers to that question.)
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  • Foster curiosity and wonder
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  • Provide cross-disciplinary assignments/opportunities
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  • Let students work on/try to resolve real issues in their communities
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  • Build up students’ appreciation of faith, hope, love, empathy, and a desire to make the world a better place. Provide ways that they can contribute.
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  • Let students experiment more — encourage failure.
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A seat at the table at lastfrom campustechnology.com by Andrew Barbour
One result of the Year of the MOOC is that IT is finally getting a say in the strategic direction of the institution.

Excerpt:

It’s interesting that it took an external force to propel IT into this inner circle. I can’t recall how many stories CT has run proposing strategies for how CIOs could win a place at the table. At the end of the day, though, changing an institution as hidebound as the average college is not easily tackled from within. In contrast, there’s nothing like a little existential angst to shake things up.

But MOOCs aren’t the only drivers of this change. We often think of BYOD as stripping IT of control but–on the broader stage–it may be playing its own part in elevating IT’s profile on campus. For years, faculty resisted IT recommendations on how technology could improve teaching and learning. Saying no was easy–preserving the status quo always is. That’s changing now. BYOD is a force that faculty can’t resist. It is, after all, their customers bringing the devices to school. Suddenly, faculty are faced with demands for new styles of teaching that accommodate student preferences for technology and much more. Enter IT and a host of others who see the potential of tech in education.

Also relevant/see:

  • The University’s Dilemma– from strategy-business.com by Tim Laseter; with thanks to Ross Dawson for the recent tweet on this

SanJoseStatePlus-UdacityPartnership-Jan2013

 

Also see:

Excerpt:

Today Udacity is thrilled to announce a partnership with San Jose State University to pilot three courses — Entry-Level Mathematics, College Algebra, and Elementary Statistics — available online at an affordable tuition rate and for college credit. To my knowledge, this is the first time a MOOC has been offered for credit and purely online. Much credit for this partnership goes to Mo Qayoumi and Ellen Junn, president and provost of SJSU, and to the five fearless SJSU professors who have chosen to work with us at Udacity to explore this new medium. The offices of Governor Brown and CSU Chancellor White have also been critically important to this partnership for their leadership and expediency. Last but not least, I want to personally thank our great Udacians who, like everyone on this list, have worked endless hours to drive innovation.
Over the past year, MOOCs have received a lot of attention in the media and education circles mostly because so many students are taking advantage of the course for free. Predictions that MOOCs would fundamentally change higher education often revolved around the fact that the courses have unprecedented reach and affordability.

 

From DSC:
Given that such “Walmarts of Education” (i.e. solid learning at a greatly reduced prices) continue to develop, what’s our/your plans for responding to this trend? How are we/you going to compete?  What’s our/your vision and strategy?  By the way, you can look all you want to for data — but at the end of the day, it’s likely with this sort of thing that you won’t find all of the data that you require to make a decision. Examples:

  • When I began working for Kraft Foods in 1990 (brought in to roll out email to 66 plants at the time), I believed in the power of email when few others did. Email was viewed as “fluff” and it would never be used for solid business practices; management put the project on hold. But I kept working with email at Kraft — trying to get others to use it. If you looked for data back then, you wouldn’t find it. But by the time I left Kraft in 1997, thousands of people could communicate with thousands of other people throughout the world — within minutes.
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  • When Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone, what data would support the success of his invention?  I suppose you could have pulled some data on the usage of the telegraph, but even then, vision would have had to trump the data (the ancestor of Western Union rejected his invention, as they questioned why anyone would need/use a telephone when there was already the telegraph in usage).
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  • Such technological developments often are not so easy to back up with data; they require some vision, experimentation, and risk taking.

 

Nine rules for stifling innovation — from blogs.hbr.org by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  1. Be suspicious of any new idea from below — because it’s new, and because it’s from below. After all, if the idea were any good, we at the top would have thought of it already.
  2. Invoke history. If a new idea comes up for discussion, find a precedent in an earlier idea that didn’t work, remind everyone of that bad past experience. Those who have been around a long time know that we tried it before, so it won’t work this time either.
  3. Keep people really busy. If people seem to have free time, load them with more work.
  4. In the name of excellence, encourage cut-throat competition. Get groups to critique and challenge each others’ proposals, preferably in public forums, and then declare winners and losers.
  5. Stress predictability above all. Count everything that can be counted, and do it as often as possible. Sweep any surplus into master accounts, and eliminate any slack. Favor exact plans and guarantees of success. Don’t credit people with exceeding their targets because that would just undermine planning. Insist that all procedures be followed.
  6. Confine discussion of strategies and plans to a small circle of trusted advisors. Then announce big decisions in full-blown form. This ensures that no one will start anything new because they never know what new orders will be coming down from the top.
  7. Act as though punishing failure motivates success. Practice public humiliation, making object lessons out of those who fail to meet expectations. Everyone will know that risk-taking is bad.
  8. Blame problems on the incompetent people below — their weak skills and poor work ethic. Complain frequently about the low quality of the talent pool today. If that doesn’t undermine self-confidence, it will undermine faith in anyone else’s ideas.
  9. Above all, never forget that we got to the top because we already know everything there is to know about this business.

 

From DSC:
The above posting reminds me of the phrase…”culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

On the flip side of things, see:

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The year ahead in IT, 2013 — from InsideHigherEd.com by Lev Gonick

Excerpt (emphasis by DSC):

The functional organization model makes it increasingly more difficult for IT on campus to be a meaningful partner and contributor to the strategic future of the University if and as it gets painted into the corner of being an expensive infrastructure cost center.

The alternative models to the functionally organized IT organization are many. The challenge for IT leaders is to cede a modicum of control and embrace the need to experiment in new, more porous, organizational models that facilitate and support the co-production of innovative solutions that meet the needs of higher education moving forward. Becoming a solutions-focused and internal consulting organization is at the core of what I take to be the opportunity for IT in higher education.

From DSC:

If other staff, faculty, students, and members of administration see everyone from the IT Department — and the IT Department as a whole — as only the folks who “install Microsoft Word and keep my PC running” — then we are in for some real trouble ahead. 

Endeavors originating out of — or significantly enabled by the IT department — have the potential to create massive new revenue streams. For example, this can be seen in  the growth of online learning these last few years and will most likely be true (at least in a significant part) for what MOOCs morph into.

Taking a cue from other industries that have gone to bat against the Internet, if you were the person in charge of picking members of the team that’s responsible for the future vision and strategies of your organization, who would you pick to be on your team?

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