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Seeing Our Future in an Evolutionary Context

The paradigm shift that we are currently navigating is, of course, not the first such change our institutions have experienced, nor, probably, will it be the last. The leap forward we need to make now is not unique to higher education or to information technology, but is related to a set of changes working their way through all organizations in our society as we pass from the Industrial into the Information Age. To understand where we need to go, it is helpful to put our current changes into historical perspective.

Where we have been

Table 2 provides such an historical perspective, describing our views of at least three phases in the evolution of information technology support within higher education institutions. We see these stages as developmental, requiring a passage through the Industrial Age, for example, before entering the Information Age. They are also cumulative in that an Information Age support structure contains the elements listed in the last column, in addition to those in the first two columns. For the Information Age, the focus of new development is on the institutional processes, but such organizations of course still rely on technology and customer focus as well. Passage through these stages seems to be partially independent of "calendar time," in that there are still organizations exhibiting many of the Iron Age attributes today at the same time that others are emerging into the Information Age.

Table 2
The three ages of academic information technology support

	Iron Age	Industrial Age	Information Age
Focus	Technology	Individual customer	Institutional process
Approach	Explorer and missionary	Caretaker; respond to needs	Partner, anticipate needs, architect and manage environment
Product	Neat technology, crunched numbers	Excellent service	Superb environments
Modus operandi	Build fires	Put out fires	Prevent/manage fires
Personnel value	Technical expertise	Customer orientation	Whole-systems thinking
Scope	Individual	Institutional	Global
Organization	Centralized	Dispersed	Distributed, integrated

In the Iron Age (or, perhaps better, the Age of Craftsmen), individual technology artifacts were created one at a time by individual, highly skilled workers. Their products were uniquely and beautifully attuned to the specific requirements of an individual user. This era was typical of the mainframe, time-sharing style of computing. Information technology organizations were called computer centers, and users went to the center to do most of their work. The computer centers were usually the province of expert scientists and engineers and administrators. Their focus was technology and making it work. They were exploring new frontiers and proselytizing about the wonders they found. Their products were neat technologies, interesting in their own right, and masses of numbers manipulated in various ways. Staff in computer centers were often breaking systems as fast as they fixed them, but this was more or less tolerable because the users were hearty and forgiving. The single most prized attribute of staff was brilliance. The focus of computing was on individual users projects. All of this was well supported by one or two centralized organizations.

The focus of the Industrial Age changed with the arrival of personal computers and networks. Instead of a total focus on technology, we realized that we also should be thinking about customers. No longer was it sufficient to explore and bring home neat tools. We also needed to spend time taking care of groups of users and being responsive to the needs they identified. We became driven by customers and technologies, rather than technology alone. Excellent service, such as the help desk, was required in addition to neat technology and the results of number crunching programs. Our users expected us to be wizards at putting out fires and fixing the environment when it broke. We still valued our technical experts, but new staff entered our organizations. They brought little technical knowledge, but they had a keen sense of service and responsiveness to customers and they were excellent communicators. Managers worked on structures and processes that spanned our institution. Because of the proliferation of personal computers, computer support organizations sprouted all over the place. (Remember the epidemic of VAXes and little centers to tend them?) Mostly this process was driven by whoever had the money to invest.

Where we are going

Today, many of us are teetering between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. In order to facilitate the transformations going on in our institutions, we need to get our organizations to focus on institutional processes, such as learning or managing a department. We will have to accomplish this by partnering with faculty or administrators-those with the content and functional expertise. Reacting to demonstrated needs is both insufficient and impossible. It is insufficient because the problems that surface are so seriously damaging that the best hope for resolving them is to prevent them in the first place. It is also impossible because the number of needs, taken singly, is completely beyond our ability to respond. This requires designing environments to be managed rather than fixed. Our products are whole, institutional environments that work in an integrated fashion. Many of the resources we "manage" are not under our control and may be located anywhere in the world. Our support organizations need to be distributed broadly, but they cannot be composed of anarchic fiefdoms.

The Information Age challenge is to conceive and manage a whole, complex system in which most of the human and technological parts do not "belong" to us. Doing so requires very different organizational models and personal skills. The greatest challenge in making this leap is to bring our Industrial Age mind sets forward, either by expanding the way individuals see themselves and their roles, or by instilling respect and tolerance for the roles and skills of others that are very different from our own. We doubt that any professions have experienced the dramatic transformation within the lifetime of individual workers that ours now faces. Given the massive change and progress of the last twenty years of information technology in education, we are confident that we, and our institutions, will rise to the challenge.

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