Elephants in Our Room

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Elephants in Our Room

6/9/2004

By Terry Calhoun

I've spent a little time learning more about the roles of Chief Business Officers (CBOs) or Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) recently, so when I read the following essay by Richard N. Katz, Vice President of EDUCAUSE and Director of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR), it resonated with me. Luckily for me (and you) Richard agreed to let this piece be our guest opinion piece for IT Trends this week.

Richard takes a look at a little bit of the departmental cultural bias that partly springs from the differing perspectives that academic/campus culture allows its top executives to have. The CIO at a university or college d'esn't have quite the same role as the CIO in a for-profit company d'es, and that g'es for the CFO as well. Part of that result is a need for the IT folks and the folks at the business end of things to work together in ways that might not happen in a Fortune 500 company - because IT surely d'es matter in higher education. Enjoy!

There's an elephant in the room. It is large, so getting around it is difficult. Yet we squeeze by, saying to each other, "How are you?" and "I'm fine" and a thousand other forms of trivial chatter. We talk about the weather. We talk about work. We talk about everything except the elephant in the room.

Higher education has at least two elephants in the room. Many describe the current economic and political climate of higher education as being conducive to a perfect storm. As federal funding is reauthorized, fresh and loud debates about the costs, social and economic value, accessibility, affordability, accountability, and financial transparency of higher education will be engaged. This hot-air system of external pressures will meet the cold-air mass composed of both internal campus strife, as faculty square off against administrators, and inter-institutional strife, as competition increases for the best and brightest students. Storm clouds will be salted with the aging of the baby boomers, leading simultaneously to the aging of the workforce and to likely shortages of key faculty, institutional leaders, and technical staff. This is certainly a healthy pachyderm.

Squatting in the other corner of the room is higher education's culture and, in particular, its belief in the inherent wisdom of distributing authority, systems, operations, and efforts as widely as possible in its organizations. This belief is deeply rooted in ideas and (mis)perceptions about academic freedom and finds its greatest proponent in the modern research university. This elephant is so large that although we cannot discuss it, many of us in higher education spend large portions of our careers tipt'eing around it. While we talk publicly about the inherent costs of instruction and liken academic efficiency efforts to removing one member of a five-piece string ensemble, we whisper privately about the real costs of a culture that fosters a server, a Web designer, a security administrator, a firewall, and so on in every major or minor academic (or administrative) subunit of the institution. We talk only privately about the enormous, growing, and even "out of control" costs of operating such a massively distributed information system. And because of the way grants are funded and cuts are allocated, a little more of the ground for rationalizing or even (heaven forbid) centralizing some of the institutional IT operation is lost every year. So, there are two healthy pachyderms in the room.