Part 2: A Management Perspective
The combination of a laptop requirement and a fully networked educational
environment create many innovative management challenges. I'd like
to address some of the issues from the perspective of the individual charged
with overall responsibility for managing The Anderson School's investments
in computer, communications, and information technologies.
Great Expectations
The single most pervasive and frustrating issue is managing user expectations.
New gizmos and applications are appearing every day. Everyone is exposed
to a constant barrage of hype-filled marketing (mis)information regarding
what the new technologies will do. The term "vaporware" has been used to
describe the fact that a good number of these ideas never reach the market
place. In movies and on TV, no one ever makes a typo, and heroes and villains
alike can access the most incredible information from anywhere, any time.
We see and hear all this, yet even when we question the credibility of
information sources, we (including me) still want it all, and now. Even
when our needs are otherwise reasonable, our demands and expectations for
what technology should be able to do far exceed reality. Given these conditions,
the best we can do is aim to set lower expectations, and deliver above
our targets.
One of our most significant long-term challenges was to create an organizational
structure which would match the emerging technological opportunities to
the School's goal of managerial leadership through academic excellence.
In 1985, I began a dialog between the Management Library (the information
repository) and Computing Services (the information delivery systems).
In July 1997, a new organizational structure, Anderson Computing and Information
Services (ACIS), emerged from the two former groups. We focus on a common
mission: to provide professional, high-quality information support services.
A major continuing challenge for us as groups who have traditionally had
different cultures, training, and objectives- is to evolve into a single,
unified team. Over the years, the job descriptions of many of the ACIS
staff members have been modified to incorporate thinking about solutions
to problems which never before existed. Many of these problems require
dogged, old-fashioned hard work, thinking through options and alternative
paths, and trying to strategize about fall-back and fail-safe positions-e.g.,
enabling 325 students to print their final exams from their classroom seats.
Other problems have been extremely complex and challenging even to highly
trained computer scientists and engineers-e.g., creating a 3000-node network
for hundreds of highly mobile computer users. Still other challenges have
called upon skills developed over decades but requiring the use of new
tools-e.g., the industry and company research strategies available on the
Rosenfeld
Library Web site.
Lost-Key Syndrome
Ever misplace your keys, then feel foolish when you find them because it
was obvious where they were all along? That's frequently how many solutions
to complex problems appear in retrospect; they're completely obvious after
the fact, but getting to that point often involves hundreds of people-hours-e.g.,
how do we balance individual hardware choices with our ability to support
them? When reaching for solutions, we try whenever possible to involve
the user community we serve via the faculty and/or student computing committees-e.g.,
what kind of training, and how much, should be provided to the entering
students? Some problems have required "inventing the wheel" when there
was no place to look for real, meaningful prior experience-e.g., what is
"appropriate support" in an environment like ours? Some problems have opposed
two powerful technologies in direct conflict-e.g., do we use our network
for information dissemination (via the shared drives), or do we rely instead
on the Web?
Given the role of the ACIS organization, many of our decisions exert
dramatic impacts on every user in the School-e.g., how do we decide when
to move to a new e-mail system, given that standards are still emerging?
Others decisions are more limited, such as requiring all entering students
to attend a personal connectivity session to assure network compatibility.
A question that frequently arises in our decision process is, "Should we
wait a year, or take the plunge now?" For example, we're currently in the
midst of evaluating several Web-based course support tools. We know that
next year, many more packages will be available-featuring much-improved
interfaces. But we have requests for the tools now, so what do we do? Then
there are issues that are completely out of our hands, even though we're
perceived as being responsible - e.g., faculty and student decisions regarding
which software to use ("do I go with Office 95, or Office 97?"). Finally,
some issues are constantly-moving targets which require continuous re-evaluation
- e.g., what should be included in our training program, and what do we
do about software standards: "Do we switch to Windows 98 when it's released
this coming May? Should we focus on Netscape Navigator, or MS Internet
Explorer?"
Managing a Highly Innovative Environment
On a more personal level, here's what "being the first" means to me:
-
The opportunity to define the future to explore paths and solve problems,
both trivial and complex, which have never been encountered before;
-
Having to keep on my toes to identify potential problems and to minimize
their occurrence or impact;
-
Needing to deal with constant change while constantly changing myself;
-
Learning from mistakes and evolving new options and alternative solutions
to minimize their reoccurrence;
-
Encouraging all the people involved (even beyond the ACIS staff) to have
confidence in themselves and to believe that taking risks is OK;
-
Living with ambiguity and having enough self-confidence to believe you
are/I am moving in the right direction;
-
Building relationships and negotiating ideas with the critical professionals
who make the environment work;
-
Having the support of the larger organization where the new ideas are being
tried;
-
Not quite knowing what to budget for, or how large a budget to request;
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Deciding how best to deploy resources to get the most "bang for the buck;"
-
Providing leadership to the broader business school and university communities
by teaching others about what we're doing so that they can benefit from
our experiences;
-
Planning for the future while meeting today's needs;
-
Finding and supporting staff who are up to these challenges; and
-
Having a legitimate reason to read sci-fi.
My discussions with business school educators from around the world clearly
confirm that The Anderson School's use of technology in management education
is being closely watched. By combining the talents, interests, and
skills of our faculty, students, and staff we are moving into this exciting
and ambiguous future, defining it as we go along. As Alan Kay, one of the
founding fathers of the microcomputer, so eloquently put it, "the best
way to predict the future is to invent it." That's precisely what we're
doing at Anderson.
Part 1: Goals
Part 2: A Management Perspective
Part 3: Faculty Perspectives
Part 4: Student Perspectives
Return to Jason Frand's research page
jason.frand@anderson.ucla.edu
April 30, 1998