Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Improving IT
Performance
Leading CTOs and CIOs on Balancing Maintenance
and Innovation, Identifying Cost Reductions,
and Exploring New Solutions
©2009 Thomson Reuters/Aspatore
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in
a database or retrieval system, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act,
without prior written permission of the publisher. This book is printed on acid free paper.
Material in this book is for educational purposes only. This book is sold with the understanding that
neither any of the authors or the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, accounting, investment, or any
other professional service. Neither the publisher nor the authors assume any liability for any errors or
omissions or for how this book or its contents are used or interpreted or for any consequences resulting
directly or indirectly from the use of this book. For legal advice or any other, please consult your
personal lawyer or the appropriate professional.
The views expressed by the individuals in this book (or the individuals on the cover) do not necessarily
reflect the views shared by the companies they are employed by (or the companies mentioned in this
book). The employment status and affiliations of authors with the companies referenced are subject to
change.
Aspatore books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information,
please email West.customer.service@thomson.com.
If you are interested in purchasing the book this chapter was originally included in,
please visit www.west.thomson.com.
Leading and Aligning
IT Innovations in
Higher Education
Thomas Skill
Associate Provost and Chief Information Officer
University of Dayton
Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books
IT at the University
Two other major factors that have emerged along with robust availability
are security and disaster readiness. Because there have been so many
Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill
The big challenge is that I do not believe that the resources have yet been
identified to fully address a robust security and disaster readiness system
across the board. Obviously, those institutions that have experienced major
data breaches or a major disaster of some type have been shocked into
providing those resources; however, from the perspective of a CIO at an
institution that has had neither, I know that we are working very, very
vigorously on those issues, but we have not as yet been able to identify the
full range of resources necessary to achieve those objectives.
Improving performance has pretty much been the focus of my tenure in the
IT leadership role. My first goal was to look at a mature IT organization
that had been in place with similar roles and responsibilities for probably
fifteen or twenty years. Our management team began with a full-scale
reorganization, which was difficult and painful in many ways because it
involved tearing apart an established organization, rebuilding it from the
ground up, and moving many things around in the process.
for various functions. If I had to identify the one thing that has happened in
the past five years that has improved our performance, it was our
organizational realignment.
The third top challenge is the desire to add productive enhancements to our
IT systems. For example, many institutions are struggling with how they
can fund a robust wireless infrastructure. Everybody is going wireless now,
but the problem is that as you get to a certain point of what might be
considered the saturation of wireless, you then have the same trouble you
Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill
have with any kind of system: you have to be able to manage it effectively
and optimize that system while controlling your costs, and how do you
grow and add enhancements in a budget environment that is always limited?
The fifth and final issue is aging facilities. We have a data center that was
built in the mid-1970s, and it is well past its best days. We are now in the
process of planning to build a brand new data center that would allow us to
have uptime during the most difficult circumstances of power loss and
other kinds of disasters. The cost of actually building and moving to a new
data center is phenomenally expensive if you want to have one that is
second- or third-tier in terms of its sustainable capacity.
to do it, we planned at the same time to put into play a disaster recovery
strategy around those systems. When we began the budgeting, we said that
we would not buy just one new computer system to host—we would buy
two and locate them in different places so that we could have one back the
other up, so if we have a disaster, we can move to the other system. In
some ways, then, we are trying to leverage existing priorities and back into
things like disaster preparedness and security.
The other issue in security is that as we bring up this new ERP system, we
are placing a major emphasis on making sure we have all the change
management and security protocols and policies in place so that we do not
have to go back and put that in later at a cost to us. We are trying to wrap
those costs together.
What we are trying to do with our renewal and replacement (R&R) budget
is explore other revenue streams that might help us fund some of the things
we cannot get from traditional university funding sources. We are looking at
what kinds of enhancements we can offer as attractive options that students
might like to consider. Would they consider an attractive cell phone offer if
we were to provide it and if we could pair that cell phone with special kinds
of university services like emergency notification? For instance, if as a
student I could set my cell phone while I am walking home at night alone,
so that if I do not check in at a certain point, it will ring back and notify
campus security—would that be valuable to me? Those kinds of
enhancements might make that cell phone worth buying through us, and we
would make some money on it.
Our users are our customers, and in many ways, the feedback we get from
them is precious and most important. Our reputation as a high-performing
Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill
organization is built on the words they share both publicly and privately
about us. So we try to stay in constant conversation with our users.
We frequently try to help them understand how our systems can support
and enhance their work. We also frequently help them resolve problems
that are either self-imposed or externally imposed on them.
Most organizations typically experience this: you will get a business unit that
will come to you and say that because you did not do this or because you
did do this, you have negatively affected the work of my business unit.
Obviously, we are hypersensitive about the extent to which our operations
touch every other operation on campus.
What we try to do in that regard is minimize down time. One of the things
we have to do is plan for most of our major system upgrades and changes
to occur during off hours. That is one way of optimizing the university’s
business, but it makes it difficult for us because it puts an extra burden on
our IT staff to work weekends and holidays and other kinds of odd hours
to keep our systems current and running. We are sensitive to the fact that
our role at this institution is to enable others to do their work as efficiently
and as productively as possible. We are sensitive to the fact that we really
need to be bending to them, and we do that in a way that hopefully does
not overextend our costs.
This is another piece that is a big difference between higher education and
other businesses. We are looked upon as providing services and support so
that we can further enhance the work of others, and we have to spend a
tremendous amount of time setting limits on that because we could spend a
good deal of money providing all kinds of enhancements to the point of
putting the university into the red. We produce a positive budget every year,
but at the same time, we try to channel our resources in a way that
Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books
There are some real advantages to collaboration, but the key is that our best
practices for new innovation come both from paying attention to what is
out there on the horizon and also from recognizing what best fits with our
organization’s mission and culture. Innovation tied to the realization that it
matches the institution’s culture and capacity for change is a key piece that
my directors and I are always balancing.
Innovations at Dayton
At the same time, we had a requirement that all our students had to have a
notebook computer, and as we moved into the 2003-2005 era, we made
Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books
Then, tied to that, we had many initiatives that focused on our institutional
mission, which is basically about integrating learning and living within a
community setting. In that sense, technology has to be not just around the
core campus; it has to support what you are doing in all your student living
areas. Our assumption in installing wireless in our student housing was that
learning is equally important away from the classroom as in the classroom.
If you are able to support learning anywhere, it will take place, and we
consider that success. It helped us in how we were externally viewed by our
peers and by others who saw what we were doing, and it helped us on-
campus as well, because our reputation as a forward-thinking IT operation
began to develop and helped us become an even better organization.
what they would like to see IT produce. I am, as I said, the boundary
spanner. I need to be able to walk and talk in all those different contexts
and help everybody understand so that we do not end up in unnecessary
misunderstandings or disagreements.
Factors in Success
Finally, the last factor in our success was our ability to connect with
students in ways that allowed them to recognize that we were a responsive
organization and that we saw them as customers as much as we saw the
faculty as customers.
Measuring Success
The other way we measured success was in the extent to which our
colleagues outside the university saw the work we were doing as innovative
and important. Our participation at conferences—where we presented
competitive papers and panels on the ways we have developed new
technologies and new innovations, as well as the way that we reorganized
ourselves—became a major focus for us.
Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books
We also focused on certain things that were measured and rated. At one
point, Yahoo Magazine ranked institutions of higher education based on
which were the most wired, a ranking that was not based purely on the
number of wired outlets, but had much to do with services and other IT
elements. We managed to become recognized nationally; we were in the top
twenty-five “most wired” universities for several years, and those rankings
helped us.
The other issues are always financial. We always need more money for R&R
and things of that nature, but the elements that we have more control over
are policies, procedures, documentation, and staff development.
Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill
In the next year, we will hit the midpoint of our ERP implementation,
which is a thirty-six month project. If everything continues to go the way it
is currently, in another two-and-a-half years we will celebrate a successful
implementation. We are investing $7 million in the system, which is our
largest single IT investment since 2000, so it is obviously a major risk factor
for us. What I am spending my time doing right now is going around the
university to the various units and explaining to them what we are doing in
replacing all of our major IT systems with a single central core system. Part
of my goal is to explain to them both the struggles we will face and the
benefits we hope to achieve—what we gain with this new system and how
it will provide them with greater services. Once they get accustomed to the
new system, they will be more productive and more efficient. It will give
them information in the ways that they need it and on their terms, which
they historically have not had.
I think that anytime you move to an ERP system, the opportunity to talk
to and point to performance is always there. The risk is the horror stories
you hear, about other institutions that have not been successful in
implementing an ERP system in a timely way. I face those questions
constantly because we have many people who came to our university
from other places where they had an implementation that did not go so
well, and I spend time reassuring them that we believe we have done all
the right things in terms of planning and support of the people involved.
One of my biggest messages is that this is not an IT project. This is a
university project that is being led by the business unit people, and IT is
the enabler for those people. We are not making all of the decisions; the
decisions on how the system goes forward are being made by the business
units and the faculty.
Thomas Skill is associate provost and chief information officer at the University of
Dayton. He joined the provost’s office in 1997. His role in the provost’s office has been to
develop and lead the strategy for integrating technology-enhanced learning across the
university. This strategic initiative strives to enrich teaching and learning within and
beyond the classroom through innovative applications of technology.
Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books
Mr. Skill has more than twenty-five years of computing and communications technology
experience in higher education. He has been on the faculty at the University of Dayton
since 1984 and currently holds the rank of professor in the department of communication.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Skill served three years as associate provost for
educational innovation and technology, three years as assistant provost for academic
technology, and four years as chair of the department of communication, the largest
undergraduate academic program at the university.
Mr. Skill also has served as director of graduate studies in communication for seven years,
interim dean of the graduate school for two years, and lead researcher in the School of
Business Administration’s Information Systems Laboratory from 1986 to 1993.
Mr. Skill earned a Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1984.