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Interview
In Search of Good Governance
An interview with Jack McCredie
9/12/2007
Since his retirement in 2005, UC Berkeley's Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO Emeritus John W. (Jack) McCredie has devoted much of his professional energy to studying, writing about, and speaking about IT governance and leadership in higher education. Currently an ECAR senior fellow, he is leading Educause's study of IT governance to be released in early 2008. CT asked McCredie for his perspectives on IT governance issues.
In your career, you've had a strong emphasis on the study of IT governance. How did you become interested in IT governance? Large universities are usually highly decentralized organizations in which departments and individual faculty members have a great deal of autonomy. The same is true of many smaller colleges. At the University of California, Berkeley we observed that because of our highly decentralized structure, it was often difficult to develop and to implement important information technology policies and practices that would apply across the board—to every staff and faculty member and to all students. I noticed the same situation on several campuses where I had the privilege of serving as an outside consultant.
At Berkeley, we decided to conduct a thorough review of the way that we govern the IT enterprise and to develop a new model that would fit our current situation better than the one that has evolved over the past couple of decades.
Is there a difference between governance and management or administration? Management differs from governance in that its primary focus is on the implementation of decisions made through the governance process. When I speak of IT governance, I mean the process that clarifies strategic directions, identifies priorities, and exerts sufficient control to manage outcomes. More informally, governance describes who makes which decisions, who provides inputs and analyzes the issues, who sets priorities, who implements the results of the decisions, and who settles disputes when there is no clear consensus. Good governance processes will foster timely decisions, responsible actions, and alignment of an organization's IT strategy with its overall mission and goals.
How have IT organizations changed over the past few years in terms of governance? Many colleges and universities are currently examining their IT governance structures. My hypothesis is that many organizations have simply evolved to their current governance structure. They have never taken a disciplined look at how they should govern information technology with all the technological, economic, and political changes that have occurred over the past 40-50 years. Security, privacy, increased importance of IT in all disciplines, increased governmental reporting requirements, and more attention to IT budgets are all topics that signal that it is time for a fresh look at how the 21st century college or university governs its IT enterprise. In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today. The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates. At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features. The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning. Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development. Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
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