The technology dilemma

In the last twenty years college campuses went through an extraordinary revolution. Here is how RIC home page looked on November 13, 1996; nothing before that survived. Anyone remembers Gopher? Mouseless Word? Registering for classes by phone?  IT departments grew in size and sophistication, the information infrastructure has been evolving, and there is no end in sight. Right now, we live through a peculiar moment, with some unique tensions. I am an outsider, not a part of the IT world, so you should not take my comments too seriously.

One relatively recent big shift was adoption of integrated data management solutions that include human resources, financial management (purchasing and payroll), records, financial aid, admissions, reporting, and almost anything else, including custom applications. There are two main competitors: PeopleSoft (Oracle) that we use at RIC, and Banner (SunGard); there are probably others, as well as home-built systems. They address the mind-boggling challenge of multiple data systems that colleges were and still are suffering from. Heroic IT teams all over this country have more or less tamed the beast, which is very difficult even with the help of either of the two commercial providers.

But here comes the dilemma. The comprehensive data management systems are so complex, you need to have specialized knowledge to mess with them. This is not just because of security (which is very important). Allowing many non-specialists deeper level of access can clog the system with repetitive and bloated quires, create redundant and improperly related fields, and generally destabilize the system. It’s like letting airline passenger kids play with flight controls. However, faculty and administrators on campuses got used to instantly available data, online workflows and forms, and functional websites. They do not understand why cannot be more of this stuff. But because everything is locked into one or two data management systems with little backroom access, all requests go to the same few exhausted IT people. They become the organizational bottlenecks unintentionally, and at no fault of their own. Of course, those on the academic side usually cannot even comprehend what sort of challenges the IT deals with, so there is often disconnect.

Here is an example. I received an e-mail today from one of our partner schools; their new hire for second grade fell through, and they wanted to find a year-long sub with permanent prospects, preferably within a few days. I am thinking, all I need to do is to export the class roster of those who did Elementary student teaching in the Spring, and send them an e-mail. One of our grads may land a great job, and we may help out a partner. OK, but the course ID number from Spring Semester is not available on schedule, at least I could not find it. NO roster can be exported without an ID. This is Friday afternoon; by the time I get someone at IT to do it, it will be a few days, and too late to be helpful. And besides, I cannot afford to spend my time, and commit the IT resources to this task. And what is frustrating – the data I need is right there; potentially at my fingertips.

Another example is the websites. They are not easy to figure out, as I have mentioned before. You need to try, to experiment, preview every step, tweak, play; it is a dynamic and highly interactive learning process. All of this is very time consuming as it is. However, if you add to the task the need to schedule a meeting with someone else (a web master), sit down and explain your needs, then check how it turned out, and ask for fixes and revisions – if you add all this, it becomes simply impossible. Most academic departments just give up; they type up whatever they need to publish, and ask these files to be uploaded. They print out handouts, and just keep them in the front office. Students come in, take them, and the life goes on. The web site in the meanwhile becomes a graveyard of past projects and old announcements that no one remembered to remove, and did not have time to update. So, students learn to mistrust the sites; they learn to come and ask someone at the office, or send an e-mail; just to make sure. As a result, chairs, advisers and secretaries become burdened with volumes of unnecessary advising, and hundreds of e-mails a day. They get so busy, there is even less time to update websites; the task becomes a chore rather than a way to communicate more efficiently.

What’s next? I am quite convinced the next will be the devolution of access. Many more people on campus will have to be able to edit websites, create queries, put together online forms, collect data, and collaborate online. There is just too much of it for a few IT types to handle, and I don’t see a sudden hiring splurge. The cycle is going to repeat itself: from chaos to centralization, and back. Hopefully, it will be done with less chaos than in the earlier age of information technology. But we need to learn to accept a little more risk in exchange for access. We also need to accept more fragmented and less coherent solutions. We must re-think our over-reliance on the comprehensive, complex, and by definition fragile informational superstructures, and look into outside providers. It is already happening, and will happen regardless of what we decide. It is much better to control the process somewhat, rather than just let it happen.

In our School we already use several unrelated platforms: People Soft, SurveyGizmo, Chalk and Wire, Google Docs, SharePoint, Twitter, Blackboard, Face book, networked drives with Access, Nabble… there may be a few more I cannot remember. They all suffer from inability to link data easily from one to another. None of the products (except PeopleSoft) are professionally designed and carefully edited. They are buggy, glitchy, have typos and possibly factual errors. But so what? The other option is stagnation, relying on the involuntarily bottlenecks, the loss of dynamism. We all did manage to use word processing, spreadsheets, email and online shopping. Now it’s time we all learn to build websites, surveys, forms, collect information, share it, and most importantly – maintain clear, simple and accurate information flow to benefit our students and ourselves. The overworking is self-inflicted; we need not to work more, but work smarter.

Technology does not move forward only. Just this week, we figured out it would be simpler and less work to collect hard copies of OPR, and have our work-studies to enter the data manually, then to train and support hundreds of cooperating teachers to use Chalk and Wire. The same goes for faculty – they all can, of course, enter the data online, but then again, perhaps they are over-qualified for this kind of work? It is still hard to take a laptop into classroom for observations, so most take written notes, and then enter on-line. It is really not hard, but subjectively may feel a little boring and unproductive. But then, others may do some thinking and writing when they fill out the form online. Anyway, there will be a choice for people and an experiment for us.