The Hicks, Oervan & Oeriin (2012) reading on Blackboard is about IT governance at Australian universities. It identifies a number of significant issues that arose as a result of the “unplanned evolution” at eight universities.
From the issues identified, which do you think is the most significant and why?
If you were the CIO of a university that was facing this issue, how would you go about addressing it?
The most significant one I found was the lack of control and accountability of IT. This stems from the fact that people in organisations and top management regard IT as just being a ‘support’ function and not see it as an opportunity for sustainable development and competitive advantage. Controlling IT resources and establishing accountability measures will enable universities to better utilise IT resources and achieving maximum benefits on their investments.
ReplyDeleteThis could be addressed by proposing a centralised IT function to the Pro-Vice Chancellor, once successful, IT and people resources could be merged making it easier for CIO to control and manage the university’s IT investments and aligning their goals to that of the organisation’s such as improving student experience and ways of enhancing learning.
It seems that the aggregated description presented here shows self inflicted technological anarchies occuring independently throughout and across the sample. I would argue that people choose university jobs for primarily 2 reasons, they could work in the private sector but value their time too highly or they opted for the insular environment offered by a career of academia because of the risks they would have to take in the private sector. Ergo, university staff are prone to doing what they want and are generally well educated to the point that they believe they work best in autonomy. These conditions would bring about the results described in the paper on Australian universities. Another point is the opacity of teaching, it is very difficult to gauge someones ability to reliably transfer knowledge. This paper focus too much on IT as if it were a function independent of the product offered by the universities. Their commonality is their product, not that they use computers. So while the similarities in issues may be related to the type of person who opts for an academic career, the inability of these institutions to reliably mesh technilogy and product is really what holds them back. As CIO my first aim would be centralise common resources for wider functionality at lower cost. Have cemented my control of basic IT assets I would give secondary control for non critical resources to heads of departments and encourage business group type innovation based on that freedom with an eye to adopting successful measures across the university. Finally I would ignore the pressure to buy more tchnology and instead focus on the future of learning and making it accessible and reproducible at minimal cost while retaining effectiveness. Also I would pursue the integration of research topics with the interests of local business and government because effective R&D would bring in more money than any number of students.
ReplyDeleteThe most significant issue was the lack of management and accountability of IT. This issue is a result of the decentralized structure of the given organizations. Stated in the case, decentralized organizations, such as universities “need to conduct regular reviews to update their IT governance structures to take into account changes in technology and the business environment.” When this does not occur, it can lead to inefficiencies and other issues, which is precisely what transpired among the cases that were reviewed. The lack of management amongst these decentralized structures led to a duplication of IT resources, inconstant IT architectures, and IT expenditure that could not be traced or even identified. Evidently, top-level management was not seeing IT as an opportunity for sustainable development and competitive advantage. Instead IT was regarded as a mere ‘supportive’ function- as mentioned above.
ReplyDeleteAs CIO I would adopt a centralised structure for wider functionality at lower cost. A centralized structure would involve a single point of responsibility for IT across the organisation, which would aim to improve management of the organization. Furthermore, there would be a central control and coordination of IT.
As identified in the case multiple times, I believe the key issue stated is the limited alignment of the accountability and management of IT within the organisations. This may be credited to the decentralized state of the universities structures leading to an overall inability to preform tasks and preform efficiently. As a result it has been stated that limited resources are used inefficiently, the IT structures are said to be unstable and the overall IT section is no longer a support of the university functions let alone the desired competitive advantage.
ReplyDeleteIdeally in the long term it may be suggested that a centralized system is implemented. Once this system is successfully implemented, this will allow for the architectures and resources to be equally and evenly distributed to ensure IT is once again the stable supporting systems the university desires. This should in turn provide the universities a stable platform to continue to develop the desired competitive advantage.
As mentioned in the study, performance monitoring and feedback of IT governance activities in all the cases appeared to be relatively immature. I thought this was a significant issue that appeared at the universities as it was shown that this was a major contributing factor to the delay in resolving emerging issues in the IT governance structure. This is clearly a problem since issues should be fixed as soon as possible to prevent or minimise any negative events that come from them. To fix this better executive support would be needed as the report details that the person who the issue is reported to can at most take limited action. A centralised approach would give control of IT to a specific point which will mean decisions can be made quickly as this point essentially has significant power to make any changes. Centralising would also improve communication between the other units in the university since there would be no independent IT governance, however the side effect is that a lack of flexibility will occur at the
ReplyDeleteIn this case, I found that the issues were all connected, effectively each being a cause and effect of each other. The 'inefficient use of IT resources, including widespread duplication" was a result of having "decentralized IT operations and lack of accountability", which in turn is a result of the company being "unable to support core business activities". The last issue is the lack of management of IT risk in these decentralized IT operations, which is attributed to the operational structure itself..
ReplyDeleteEven if IT units are decentralized, as long as there is an accountability present, there will be a positive cascade effect upon other issues. Once you fix one, the others will begin to notice positive improvements.
As the CIO, I would fix the issue of having decentralized IT operations by centralizing them. I would be responsible for any emerging issues which should all be addressed to be me before committing to any solution. I would employ a person for day to day operations and another for future states so that when the new fully integrated systems are implemented, there would be minimized disruptions in day to day operations.
The most significant issue is the failure of IT to support the core business activities of research and teaching because the alignment of IT with other business activities could easily mitigate the risk and improve the quality of IT governance structure. To reduce IT risk, there must be clear roles and objectives between different business processes otherwise the IT governance would not be successful.
ReplyDeleteI would address this issue by aligning the IT with business objectives. This can be enhanced by the use of an IT Strategic plan, processes to engage users in decision making, matching of IT and business planning cycle, and high level support for IT.
The unplanned evolution has lead to IT anarchism which in turn leads to low security as the system will only be as secure as its weakest point. A quick and easy way to fix this would be to make heads of department accountable for any leak or hack from their department. Essentially turning them into feudalism systems. They will very quickly ensure that the systems their department are using are secure. This won't be popular with the users or with the heads of department but there would need to be a complete over haul of the systems anyway to create a secure system that actually suits the needs of the users and the business needs. The dislike of the feudalism systems will encourage people of all levels to support the change.
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