Gartner on Higher Education: a Conversation at Georgetown University

This is a guest post by Paul Heald. Paul is a teaching faculty member at George Washington University completing his master’s program in information systems technology in May 2010. Paul earned his Master’s degree in education from the University of Manchester and Bachelor’s degree from Keele University. He has taught and served as an administrator in public and private high schools. Upon graduation he will be joining the staff of Sigma Systems Inc., where he will focus on the networked applications design.

Gartner’s Jan-Martin Lowendahl has authored several insightful analyses on information technology in colleges and universities.1 These include “Key Issues for Higher Education, 2010” published in February. Here, Lowendahl and his colleagues wrote:

Gartner will continue to help CIOs keep up with current technological trends so as not to be caught in a dead end and to avoid costly changes in strategy. The 2010 research will include continued coverage of student trends, identity and access management (IAM) and standards.

Lowendahl briefed members of the Georgetown University faculty and staff and invited Washington, DC area higher education CIOs and their staff on March 18th.

Although the meeting was brief, Lowendahl covered a great deal of material, engendering considerable discussion among the assembled group.

The major higher education trend he identified was the conflict between IT’s role in promoting organizational efficiency versus its role in promoting personal productivity. Organizational efficiencies often come at the expense of the administrative freedom of students and professors. As a result, these groups, whose buy-in is essential to the realization of organizational efficiencies, have a cultural bias against such organizational efficiency when it affects their personal productivity tool choices.

Below, Gartner illustrates this tradeoff:

As a planning aid to better understand who is being served, Gartner suggests CIOs locate their projects among the quadrants.

In addition, the presentation included the identification of several ‘megaforces’ critical to higher education. These included:

• The death of distance – in an increasingly connected world, physical distance becomes ever less relevant to the choices we make.
• The removal of time constraints – with 24/7 access to learning, administrative systems, etc., the time constraints once associated with working are no longer as pressing. Conversely, this suggests that students now expect university services to be available 24/7.
• Web 2.0 and the use of social software – the role of collaboration and the web being a two-way medium.
• Segregation through world communities – while old forms of segregation collapse under the force of the networked world, newer forms of separation evolve among world communities.
• Organization-centric versus people-centric consumerism and the proliferation of free services have changed the balance of power.

Lowendahl characterized the current change in IT as “Defining Services to Offer and the CIO Role: From the ERP Era to the Consumerization Era.” One perspective on organizational efficiency improvement he noted was the “automation/virtualization of Cow Paths,” suggesting this was an ineffective means to business process improvement. Among “Areas of opportunity in the near (?) future,” Lowendahl included “Total Recall, Augmented Collaboration and Instant Visualization.”

In the 2009 version of the Gartner Education Hype-cycle, Lowendahl concluded that open-source e-learning, federated identity management, Wikis and Social Networking had passed the “Trough of Disillusionment” to reach the “Slope of Enlightenment.” Open-source student information systems were at the beginning of the cycle—the Technology Trigger. General adoption is expected over 5 to 10 years.

Lowendahl discussed several items from the hype-cycle. Of particular interest was the tablet PC, which is entering the slope of enlightenment. Although the tablet PC is relatively old technology, it seems likely that it is gearing up towards mainstream adoption. With the advent of the iPad (which is not technically a tablet PC), new Windows 7 tablets, rumors of the Microsoft Courier, and other such devices, it seems likely that more of these devices will achieve mainstream adoption in higher education in the coming years. Considering hype cycle devices more generally, it seems reasonable to assume that those that bring about convergence of many other items on the hype cycle (electronic textbooks, social networking, lecture capture and retrieval, etc.) will be the biggest winners. While online learning, as in the number of courses offered with an hybrid or pure e-learning platform component, has remained fairly stagnant, examples such as livemocha2 demonstrate the power of social networking in an educational environment, and will likely spur the next wave of growth in online learning. However, enrollment in pure online courses are increasing rapidly as shown by a recent SLOAN report. See “Gartner Higher Education E-Learning Survey 2008-2009: Poised for the Next Step?”

Another issue the group discussed was the question of electronic identity management: how does an educational institution enforce identity requirements in an increasingly mobile and online world? While there were no clear answers to this problem, Lowendahl referred to a paper he is writing titled “The Three Paradigms of Identity Management”. He mentioned that it will be forthcoming in the next several weeks, and I-for one-will be watching closely for its publication.

In his 2009 presentation at EUNIS (European University Information Systems) RS3G Workshop, Lowendahl warned universities that they must build student identification infrastructure with validity sufficient to enable education records access, financial transactions, and distance learning. All of these transactions and communications are subject to government regulations. The challenge of conforming to such regulation has become more critical in the U.S. because of the December 2009 revision of the FERPA (Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act) regulations, whose NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) requirements exceed current practices.

Note that Georgetown University makes Gartner online materials available to all faculty, students, and staff using their university NetID. I spoke with Georgetown Principal Technologist Charlie Leonhardt last week regarding this decision. Leonhardt observed that faculty incorporate the Gartner service in their computer science and business curriculum. According to Leonhardt, it provides resources to students that they will also use in their subsequent careers. Making this information available to all faculty and staff—one of UIS (University Information Services) transparency initiatives—allows them access to the same information informing UIS decision-making, Leonhardt added.