Mark Greenfield

As we prepare for higher ed web development to get flattened, what is the one thing that can not be outsourced? The answer comes from my colleague Diane Kubarek from Cornell. When I posed this questioned to her during lunch at HighEdWebDev 2007, her immediate answer was institutional knowledge. Knowing the culture of the institution, how things get done, who to go to to solve specific problems, and building relationships around campus are the value that a web professional working on campus brings.

Last year I was one of several thought leaders who were asked by the 2006-07 National Association of Colleges and Employers Future Directions Task Force to write an essay on “how college students and employers will interact and connect in the year 2017″. Below is the essay I submitted. While the focus was on Career Advisors, the ideas are certainly applicable to higher ed web professionals. I’m convinced more than ever that our profession will undergo dramtic change in the next 10 years.

Here is a link to the full report called “Through the Looking Glass: The Future of College Recruiting”.

Higher Education Gets Flattened
By Mark A. Greenfield

2017. Welcome to the New World Order.

The World Is Flat, the seminal book written by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Thomas Friedman, describes the fundamental changes that happened at the dawn of the new millennium. Outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, and the other flattening forces have created a connected world, and business will never be the same. Exponential change is here. While higher education is notoriously slow to change, change will happen, and quicker than you think.

Globalization 3.0, the arrival of the technically adept Millennial Generation, and the ongoing Communications Revolution will create a perfect storm that will forever change the college campus. Rising tuition prices and increased competition for the best students and best faculty will require colleges and universities to operate more as a business. In addition to fundamental pedagogical changes, all support services will be subject to the forces that have flattened the business world. The services and processes provided by career centers will be disaggregated, distributed, produced, and reassembled with amazing efficiency. It may well be that many of the functions of the college career center will be outsourced. If placing orders today at the fast food drive-through is handled by a call center hundreds of miles away, anything is possible 10 years from now.

By 2017, providing guidance to college graduates as they make the transition from college to work will require a new paradigm. Many basic assumptions that exist today will no longer be relevant. How do we prepare our graduates for jobs that don’t exist yet? With the growth of free agency, more graduates will work for themselves or small companies instead of large corporations. Americans working for a foreign company may be as commonplace as working for an American company. (Defining an American company may be impossible). With the half life of knowledge now measured in months and years instead of decades and centuries, lifelong learning will become essential and nontraditional students may outnumber traditional students.

In this sea of change there will be an opportunity to redefine the role of higher education professionals and company recruiters. As Daniel Pink describes in his book A Whole New Mind, we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. As many services of the career center become even more virtual and automated, the key will be to focus on the value chain. Automation and outsourcing of the routine, lower level work will allow more time to focus on creativity, leadership, and innovation, and ultimately better services to students. The time to think about these issues is now, before higher education gets flattened.

2017. Welcome to the New World Order.

Part of my presentation on higher ed web development getting flattened explored the importance of developing your right brain. I came across this intriguing visual of a dancer. If you see her spinning clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of the time I see her spinning clockwise, but occasionally I see her spinning counter-clockwise.

How about you? Take a look and let me know what you see.

I just finished reading A University for the 21st Century. The author is James Duderstadt, President Emeritus at the University of Michigan. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in the challenges and opportunities for higher education in the new millennium.

I was particularly interested in the last two chapters which addressed many of the issues we discussed at my presentation at HighEdWedDev 2007. Here are some quotes from the book:

• The system of higher education that emerges in the century ahead will almost certainly be far different from today’s. Higher Education will either transform itself or be transformed as financial imperatives, changing societal demands, emerging technologies, and new competitors reshape the knowledge enterprise.
• Most colleges and universities are now looking for ways to control costs and increase productivity.
• In recent years, we have seen an explosion in the number of new competitors in the higher education marketplace. It is estimated that in 1998 the revenues of for-profit and proprietary educational providers were in excess of $3.5 billion and growing rapidly.
• Higher education is an industry ripe for the unbundling of activities. Universities will have to come to terms with what their true strengths are and how those strengths support their strategies - and then be willing to outsource needed capabilities in areas where they do not have a unique advantage.
• Universities are under increasing pressure to spin off or sell or close down parts of their traditional operations in the face of new competition. They may well find it necessary to unbundle their many functions, ranging from admissions to counseling to instruction and certification.

I would add web development to that last list.

Many people who hear my presentation on “Higher Ed Web Development Gets Flattened” leave thinking that none of us will have jobs five years from now. That is not my intention and I don’t believe that will be the case. In fact, I think the opposite is true. The role the web plays on college campuses is undervalued. When the time comes to disaggregate the functions of the university, the forensic accountants will quickly see that the web provides true value and should get more resources, not less. That being said, I do think our jobs will change dramatically. The best approach is to think about this proactively not reactively. To quote Will Rogers - “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

I’ve had many people looking for more information on Pecha Kucha after using it for my presentation at HighEdWebDev 2007. A Pecha Kucha slide show consists of 20 slides for exactly 20 seconds each for a total time of 6:40. For more information see:

• Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down
• Pecha Kucha blog post from Seth Godin
• pecha-kucha.org

I recommend everyone experiment with this presentation style. The restrictions actually force you to be very creative in structuring your presentation. (Good exercise for the right brain!) More importantly, it makes you focus on the most important points. There simply isn’t time to stray off topic. And for those of you involved with writing for the web, I can think of no better exercise for writing concisely.

I’d like to see expanded use of Pecha Kucha at the next HighEdWebDev conference. Maybe a Pecha Kucha Night, or an hour set aside simultaneously in each track. Imagine the value in seeing 6-8 rapid fire presentations in an hour.

I would like to thank everyone for their participation and feedback at HighEdWebDev 2007. I had many requests for both the PowerPoint slides and the script for the presentation which are listed below. Time permitting, I will add audio to the PowerPoint and make that available as well.

• PowerPoint Presentation (PPT 4 MB)
• Presentation Script (PDF 35 KB)

I’ll be making the short drive down the Thruway to Rochester today for HighEdWebDev 2007

I would recommend that anyone attending my presentation on Tuesday look at my posts for the conference which can be found at markagreenfield.com/category/highedwebflat. I have also created a page for the site which can be found at markagreenfield.com/presentations/highedwebdev2007

After 6:40 seconds for my formal presentation, the rest of the session will be spent in discussion and dialog. Possible discussion topics include:

• What will our jobs look like 5 years from now? 10 years from now?
• How do you disaggregate the functions of the web team?
• What functions are most likely to be outsourced?
• Have you ever outsourced work? to a free agent? overseas?
• How do you measure the ROI of the web?
• Do you have a business plan?

If you have any other topics feel free to post a comment to this blog. See you in Rochester.

Stephen Covey is best known for his bestselling book The 7 habits of Highly Effective People. Over the years I have given numerous presentations on how to incorporate the 7 habits into customer service. For those of you not familiar with the book, here are the 7 habits:

1. Be Proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think Win-Win
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw

I have numerous ideas about how these habits can create the framework for highly effective web teams. Stay tuned, I can see a presentation at a future HighEdWebDev conference. For now, I’d like to focus on just a couple of ideas.

Habit One is “Be Proactive”. Our basic nature is to act, not to be acted upon. Effective web teams are proactive. They take the initiative. They are Web Evangelists. The are constant and relentless in advocating for the web.

Habit Three is “Put First Things First”. The idea is that you shouldn’t prioritize your schedule, you should schedule your priorities. As I mentioned in a previous post, effective web teams will focus their energy on projects that provide true value to their institutions. As the Pareto Principle states, 80% of the results flow from 20% of the activities. And for those of you familiar with Covey’s work, the most effective web teams spend as much time as possible in Quadrant II.

In 2004, Covey published The 8th Habit - from Effectiveness to Greatness. In the beginning of the book Covey chronicles the move from the Agriculture Age to the Industrial Age to the current Information Age to the coming Age of Wisdom. The transition to each new age brought about a dramatic downsizing of the existing workforce. He asks the question “Do you believe the Knowledge Worker Age will eventually bring about the downsizing of up to 90% of the Industrial Age workforce?

Covey believes it will. How about you?

For anyone thinking about the career skills that will be required to thrive in this era of globalisation I highly recommend reading “A Whole New Mind” by Dan Pink. Here is a description of the book taken from Dan’s web site:

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That’s what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate. That’s the argument at the center of this provocative and original book, which uses the two sides of our brains as a metaphor for understanding the contours of our times.

More from the book’s introduction:

“The book describes a seismic - though as yet undetected - shift now underway in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and society built on the inventive, empathic, bog-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.”

Pink describes two ways of thinking. The first is L-Directed thinking, exemplified by computer programmers, who are comfortable with logical, sequential, computer like reasoning. R-Directed thinking is characteristic of the right side of the brain - simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual and synthetic. Pink argues that while the Information Age clearly valued L-Directed thinking, the Conceptual Age will be driven by R-Directed thinking. Dependency and the left side of the brain will no longer be sufficient - we need a Whole New Mind.

Another quote from the book:

“The outsourcing of routine software work is putting a new premium on software engineers with high-concept abilities.”

Certainly food for thought for web professionals.

“There is no right way to do the wrong thing”

- Stephen Covey

All web sites must deliver value. This includes higher ed web sites. As higher education gets flattened, a valuable strategy will be to focus on the return on investment (ROI) that the web provides our institutions.

Measuring value can be a challenge and takes time and effort. Unfortunately you can’t measure ROI with a simple equation. It requires a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis and is often more art than science. I know many web professionals who say they don’t have the time for evaluation because they are just too busy, but regardless of how busy you are, this is time well spent. All of us should be able to quickly articulate the value our sites provide.

Focusing on ROI has many benefits. First, it can be used as the basis for a formal evaluation process for prioritizing projects. Too often, ad hoc decisions are made without a formal structure and process, resulting in an inefficient use of resources. Determining ROI prior to working on a project also sets expectations and helps determine if a project was successful. ROI also brings accountability into the equation by holding people responsible for the success or failure of a given project. Finally, web teams that use ROI are more valued and taken more seriously by management.

Recently we have been using our project management/work order request system to track the exact time we spend on both new projects and the maintenance of existing sites and applications. This allows us to better understand the ROI of each site and application we create. I was always able to provide fairly accurate guesstimates, but because we are now providing real numbers on the resources allocated to each project, our efforts are taken more seriously by management.