CIOs, Community Source, and the New Management

Here’s another post from frequent guest poster Jim Farmer. For those of you who are eagerly awaiting news of the Blackboard v. Desire2Learn trial, Jim will be in East Texas next week and has promised at least one blog post regarding the trial.

Several weeks ago Luke Fernandez, Weber State University, asked should knowledge of “community source” be a criterion for selecting a CIO. Posting on the Sakai Advocacy list, he wrote:

My guess is that including criteria which prompt a committee to consider whether the candidate has experience leveraging the power of community source (or, more broadly speaking, “knows how to globalize”–to borrow from Thomas Friedman) might eclipse a broader more representative set of criteria that need to be articulated when considering a CIO. But I’m not sure about this–I’ll know better once we’ve met.

If anybody has conducted hiring (especially at the executive level) that includes some consideration of open source in the hiring criteria I’d be interested in how that criteria was articulated/included.

My suggestion, off list, is provided here in an edited version.

The skills associated with open source may also become an important factor in selecting technology managers in business. Two “graduates” of the uPortal project have worked for large corporations employing the style they learned. Both were named “critical talent” by top management— individuals so important to the firm that retaining them was a top priority. Both attribute their success to uPortal project experience and what they learned from the uPortal Board.

To summarize what I believe was the key to their [Sakai and JA-SIG Board members] success, a job description could include this requirement:

Demonstrated ability to successfully lead initiatives and projects with uncompensated contributors from other universities and other environments.

An community source leader must understand the environment of each potential contributor, know and follow whether that person’s contribution is benefiting both the project and the institution employing that person, and motivate that person to contribute without control of compensation. This is much more complex and subtle than “directing” an employee. It requires understanding a broader and more complex environment, and the motivations of individual potential contributors. Yale’s Howard Gilbert described the complexity of the employer and the project to the JA-SIG developers:

But [Howard Gilbert] has made it clear, he works for Yale University and follows the University’s priorities. The decision to contribute [to uPortal] was based on that perspective and the analysis that followed [demonstrating the value to Yale University as well as uPortal].

Yale’s contribution satisfied objectives both the employer and the project. The same applies to assessing the motivations and interests of project leaders in enterprise projects like Kuali. This assessment of participation in the initiative includes all participants not just the institution.

There may be a broader need for this skill. Newsweek reporter Andrew Romano’s wrote:

According to Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, authors of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics,” millennials “aren’t confrontational or combative, the way Boomers (whose generational mantra was ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30’) have been.” Instead, millennials belong to what social scientist William Strauss calls a “civic generation,” drawn to issues of “community, politics and deeds, whereas the boomers focused on issues of self, culture and morals.”

“Community” may be the defining difference between older workers and those entering the workforce, and similar to those in open source projects. Community implies broad, open and continuous communication.

I am seeing the same requirement in research projects. When interviewing research project leaders in the U.K. [for JISC’Virtual Research Environment projects] I asked why their projects included researchers from other countries. They said the team has to have different expertises and some are available only outside the country. Without saying what this means, most of the project leaders had developed the types of communication needed to support diverse participants in diverse environments—the reason collaboration tools were critical to their projects. (And Charles Severance’s focus on collaboration in Sakai). More communication, more thought about the culture and environment of the reader or listener, and more carefully drafted messages and reports.

In environment where there are competitive demands for increasing limited resources, success with open source, or more broadly, collaborative projects, may not be sufficient. Former Sakai Board member Brad Wheeler, recently appointed as CIO at Indiana University, is an example of the “new” CIO. He has four sets of skills: Success in academe (as a professor) which translates in business terms as “industry knowledge.” Success in collaborative management evidenced by open source and university research. Organizing Kuali is an example of how he applied his experience and knowledge from Sakai. Business skills in an “industry” where few managers know accounting, costing, and relevant economics. Note Indiana’s data on utilization and performance in their posts. And the ability to communicate technology to those who are not familiar with the technology. Such as explaining to a legislator why you are investing in eLearning.

As I listen to presentations here in Washington I find the “Trust me, technology is a good thing” is no longer convincing to those concerned about higher education’s rapidly raising tuition and costs. A recent example of an effective argument, as I recall it, was:

Using online math drill and practice, where each student is continuously assessed and provided more problems where more learning is needed, leads to 20% more students completing the course satisfactorily. This saves the institution an average of $800 per student enrolled in Math 101. It also improves graduation rate of all students by about 4%.

This type of explanation is a very successful argument for eLearning. Such communication requires the ability to see the issue from the audience’s point of view and then communicate in terms that are important and understood by them. The skill of communicating to diverse external, and sometimes hostile, audiences is new and needed, and should be a requirement for a university CIO.

In summary, today’s higher education manager must be able to lead collaborative efforts of diverse contributors and must be able to communicate with non-traditional audiences as well as have the traditional skills of “business” managers and experience in academe.

And a sense of idealism to be willing to serve in a difficult time with less compensation than those skills, currently in high demand, receive in industry.