This week three meteors of illuminating insight flashed across my virtual sky. They suggest how transformative alternatives to traditional higher education and traditional job training are gathering pace, in ways that we can all build upon and certainly all need to recognize.
Meteor #1. A step change in availability, awareness and use of free courses
The Chronicle of Higher Education came out with an article on “Obama’s Great Course Give Away”. It described the possibility of the Obama administration directing $500 million of its community college initiative funding toward supporting a free library of online course materials, and resources, ready to deploy and available free to colleges nationwide. These materials would come from the trove of Open Educational Resources (OERs) that have been funded by the Hewlett Foundation and developed by others, such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare Initiative and Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative.
Such materials could be used to address a variety of needs:
• Serving people of high school and college age who are not able to pay for college courses but would like to learn in their own time, and others who can experiment with learning and build competence independent of institutions;
• Upgrading the quality and value of offerings for international and emerging institutions through sharing and development;
• Providing lower cost and more flexible versions of existing course offerings in many institutions – especially community colleges, four-year public institutions, and some proprietary schools, and even in private schools wishing to control costs – an outcome especially attractive to skeptics like Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, who sees this as a rare example of using technology in education to reduce costs rather than raise them; and
• Furnishing the protoplasm for the gestation and evolution of free-range, Web 2.0 approaches to learning, using social networks, wikis, and other 2.0 media to create sustainable learning environments. Such alternatives may compete with traditional institutions for learners at some point in the not-too-distant future.
This is not just about reinventing content. It’s also about reinventing patterns of engagement and interaction. And means of assessment. And means of demonstrating competence, directly. It’s that open processes lead to viable alternatives to existing academic patterns and practices, deconstructing the traditional roles of individual faculty as content expert, instructor, evaluator, and certifier, all in one. Moreover, it’s that technology can be used to reinvent educational practices in ways that can dramatically less expensive and more flexible and open than traditional education.
Meteor #2. Open Educational Resources become the new mainstream
Fast Company published a gem of an article by Anya Kamenentz, “Who NEEDS Harvard?” that outdid Meteor #1. Ms Kamenentz describes in even greater detail the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement and its capacity to begin the creation of alternative, Web 2.0 paths to education and competence building.
She refers to the innovators in the metaphorical garage workshops of open education as “edupunks” and describes how the pieces of alternative learning and competence building environments are coming together. She introduces us to innovators such as David Wiley at Brigham Young University, Neeru Paharia, CEO of Peer2Peer University, Jose Feireira, CEO and founder of education startup Knewton Education, and Thomas Mendenhall of Western Governors University. All are part of the new mainstream (the next big thing) in education: Web 2.0-based structures and practices that deconstruct and reconstruct the elements of content, social networking and engagement, and assessment and certification to suit the patterns and cadences of the 21st century economy and the need to use technology to improve the value and reduce the cost of learning and competence.
The point of this article is that over time, innovators will “hack together” and “mash up” combinations of open content, social networking platforms, open and community assessment, and other tools that will form the basis for tomorrow’s perpetual learning environments will come together to create viable alternative to traditional colleges and universities. These combinations will evolve in an expeditionary manner, creating flexible structures, processes, and practices. Three to five years from now, models will have evolved, mutated, and mutated again in ways that cannot be accurately described today.
“If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them, universities will be irrelevant by 2020,” says professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University. More than ten years ago, the late Peter Drucker anticipated the rise of corporate and online alternatives, when he made similar comments about the need for universities to rethink their face-to-face model and to stop building classrooms, which he felt were not appropriate for the 21st century.
Western Governors University is mentioned favorably in this article for its contributions in assessment and accreditation, in which it is today’s gold standard. WGU offers online learning to 12,000 students in 50 states running entirely on tuition of $2,890 for a six-month term. WGU uses technology to disaggregate the traditional faculty functions - convey information, mentor, evaluate. WGU faculty fulfill the mentor role; they are there to guide, direct, coach, counsel, encourage, motivate, and keep on track. Content and evaluation/assessment are handled automatically.
Robert Mendenhall, President of WGU, is impatient with those who argue that what he’s doing with technology is unworkable. “Technology has changed the productivity equation of every industry except education,” he says. “We’re simply trying to demonstrate that it can do it in education – if you change the way you do education as opposed to just adding technology on top.”
Keep an eye on the companies and edupunks cited in this article.
Meteor #3: Major talent meltdown ahead, affecting job-creating sectors most
In an article in The Futurist, “The Global Talent Crisis” Edward Gordon contends that even in the midst of the global recession, there is a global talent shortage, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) specialties. When growth resumes, this situation will worsen, exacerbated by the demographic declines in many nations.
Gordon contends, “Without drastic talent creation changes between 2010 and 2020, the United States will experience a major talent meltdown with 12 to 14 million vacant jobs stretching across the U.S. economy. Businesses will leave the U.S. searching for scarce talent wherever they can find it. The U.S. Economy will stagnate or shrink. For example in the late 1990s, Advanced Micro Devices wanted to build a new high-tech plant. They looked in Texas and California, but company officials felt the communities they investigated could not produce enough entry-level technicians for their needs. The company went to Germany.”
As that example shows, signs of talent shortages were apparent years ago but were largely ignored. There is still time to avoid the 2010-20 talent shortage, for example colleges can use the stimulus funding to begin to fill the gaps and if we all take account of key factors:
• Global demographics. The workforces in many developed countries will decline in coming years.
• The skills gap. American education has been under fire since publication of A Nation at Risk. As has been demonstrated in earlier blogs, America is suffering a skills gap in comparison with our competitors.
• A cultural bias. Gordon contends that the bias seems to be not against technology itself, but the training needed for science and technology jobs.
Gordon asserts that “Advancing technologies are transforming the nature of occupations, including the skilled trades. The number of new technologies introduced over the next decade will likely be equal to those invented over the past 50 years. Yet the current breakdown in the global talent-creation systems does not bode well for the future.” Across America, the education-to-employment system needs to be retooled. Gordon reports that community based organizations (CBOs) and non-government organizations (NGOs) have been working to expand business-education partnerships to address the talent gap and rebuild talent pipelines in their communities.
These three meteors come together for me. Rebuilding America’s talent pipelines will require flexible, organic networks that enable individuals to engage in active, learning experiences early in their learning careers. Traditional approaches to learning and training and workforce development too easily become misaligned with workforce and personal needs. For tomorrow’s talent pipeline, we need competence building communities that display the characteristics being invented by the edupunks.
Tomorrow’s blog will explore the impact of Dislodging and Disrupting Events in Higher Education.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
Some Thoughts about Achieving Financial Sustainability
Guest Blogger: Marcia Bromberg, former CFO at Tulane University, the University of Wisconsin System, and Wesleyan University.
I begin with a simple premise: “The Glass is Half Full.” The recession offers an opportunity to identify base resources required to provide academic services at all levels of education. Moreover, the recession provides institutions the opportunity to assess what is needed and what isn’t in order to operate and to identify operational efficiencies and inefficiencies.
Identifying the Revenue Base. The lowest point of income from all revenue streams reached during the recession should be used as the base-line for financial planning. This low point should exclude all one-time resources such as stimulus funds, special gifts, and accounting bonuses.
Institutions should manage growth incrementally from that low point:
• For private institutions this means modifying use of endowment proceeds as endowments begin to grow again by reducing payout formulas and using longer smoothing formulas (perhaps five rather than 3 year averages). It also means modifying tuition increases by using gift proceeds and other revenue streams (more about that later) to replace tuition revenue.
• For public institutions it means negotiating with states for a new “base plus increment” model of funding where increments reflect both enrollment changes and inflationary forces but are not tied so tightly to either that the academic mission is compromised.
Efficiency of Operations or Using Analytics to Lift out of Recession. In the very short term, expenditure reductions to meet reduced revenue streams will be expedient and, often, short term in nature.
An in-depth analytical review of expenditures will help identify longer term operational efficiencies and the changes required to implement these efficiencies. This is only a first step as efficiencies must be assessed as to whether they are desirable and attainable. (Note: without institution-wide understanding and acceptance of the reason for changes and impacts of changes the best ideas can be undermined).
A part of any analytic review will be to measure institutional performance against industry benchmarks. This is where the opportunity lies to truly transform educational support services and take the next steps beyond the types of outsourcing begun at the end of the last century. Rather than try to just replicate the “best of breed” or adopt methods of the most efficient institutions, organizations and businesses, institutions can begin to contract with those entities to actually provide those services. Examples include: enrollment management; accounting services; endowment management; purchasing and distribution; construction services and many more. In some cases these services can be provided at a distance through use of technology. In other cases clusters of institutions can share expert personnel.
The change from a single institution providing all services to one where services are provided from a myriad of near and distant sources based upon efficiency, quality and cost will require ongoing review to ensure services continue to meet institutional needs and expectations. More and more the role of institutional staff will be to monitor and manage rather than provide services using the analytic framework developed early in the process.
New Revenue Opportunities. While moving away from a campus-based model for support services offers an opportunity for reducing costs, it also offers an opportunity for those institutions which already excel in certain service areas to become income generators by providing those services to other institutions. In some cases several institutions might pool resources to form a central service center which can expand its operations to sell those services more broadly.
As part of an analytic review of institutional strengths and weaknesses all resources should be assessed for revenue potential including physical space (campus grounds and well as buildings), academic and non-academic expertise, technology resources, and efficient services (as noted above).
The potential for exploiting revenue opportunities can expand beyond higher education to other levels of education, non-educational nonprofits and for profit businesses.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Leadership in Innovation and Reimagination
Reactions to an Interview with Leon Botstein, President of Bard College in May-June issue of Miller-McCune magazine.
In reimagining institutional futures, active leadership is key. In an article in Miller-McCune magazine, President Leon Botstein of Bard College reveals some of the approaches he has taken at Bard College over the years and the results achieved.
In President Botstein’s view. Leadership at leading universities has been too insular. They have been focusing on themselves and not their place in the world of education and the world at large. In Botstein’s view, there are major problems with the way American society deals with adolescence, learning, and mentoring young people on what it means to be an adult.
“The real problem in American education is how we deal with adolescence. For all the talk of early childhood and preschool, the real locus of crisis in America if from the onset of puberty to the early 20s. That is a kind of black hole for everyone except the very, very gifted and talented. Even with them we’re not doing as well as we could. We haven’t figured out how to inspire real ambition and a love of learning in the adolescent group, starting with middle school to really the end of college.”
Dr. Botstein’s prescription: Consider a variety of fundamental changes, and do something to change the status quo.. For example, he suggests we could eliminate middle school and start high school work in grade 7, enabling students to finish by age 16. As he puts it, “I think universities have a real responsibility to improve secondary education in the United States. The president needs to turn to the university community and say, “Do something about the high schools,” the same way that university hospitals took over public hospitals.” His advice - Do something.
Bard has done something. They have established Bard Early College High School, which consists of two high schools in New York, one in the Lower East Side and one in Queens. Each enrolls 500-600 students, and for the 160 entering slots, 3,000 applicants, assessed and selected by an interview process not standardized tests. By the end of high school, these students have a NY Regents degree and an Associate of Arts degree. These students are representative of the population of New York and go on to good colleges.
Other public and private colleges and universities are sponsoring early college high school programs, making a commitment to doing something. So have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other foundations. These efforts are all part of the mult-faceted narratives from communities across the nation about reimaging PK-20 and doing something serious about the parlous state of K-12 education and its impact on student success in PK-20.
Bard has also undertaken community-based learning programs in California and has opened the only liberal arts school in post-Communist Russia.
In reimagining institutional futures, active leadership is key. In an article in Miller-McCune magazine, President Leon Botstein of Bard College reveals some of the approaches he has taken at Bard College over the years and the results achieved.
In President Botstein’s view. Leadership at leading universities has been too insular. They have been focusing on themselves and not their place in the world of education and the world at large. In Botstein’s view, there are major problems with the way American society deals with adolescence, learning, and mentoring young people on what it means to be an adult.
“The real problem in American education is how we deal with adolescence. For all the talk of early childhood and preschool, the real locus of crisis in America if from the onset of puberty to the early 20s. That is a kind of black hole for everyone except the very, very gifted and talented. Even with them we’re not doing as well as we could. We haven’t figured out how to inspire real ambition and a love of learning in the adolescent group, starting with middle school to really the end of college.”
Dr. Botstein’s prescription: Consider a variety of fundamental changes, and do something to change the status quo.. For example, he suggests we could eliminate middle school and start high school work in grade 7, enabling students to finish by age 16. As he puts it, “I think universities have a real responsibility to improve secondary education in the United States. The president needs to turn to the university community and say, “Do something about the high schools,” the same way that university hospitals took over public hospitals.” His advice - Do something.
Bard has done something. They have established Bard Early College High School, which consists of two high schools in New York, one in the Lower East Side and one in Queens. Each enrolls 500-600 students, and for the 160 entering slots, 3,000 applicants, assessed and selected by an interview process not standardized tests. By the end of high school, these students have a NY Regents degree and an Associate of Arts degree. These students are representative of the population of New York and go on to good colleges.
Other public and private colleges and universities are sponsoring early college high school programs, making a commitment to doing something. So have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other foundations. These efforts are all part of the mult-faceted narratives from communities across the nation about reimaging PK-20 and doing something serious about the parlous state of K-12 education and its impact on student success in PK-20.
Bard has also undertaken community-based learning programs in California and has opened the only liberal arts school in post-Communist Russia.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Efficiency and Innovation in Preparing for the Recovery
In an Executive Briefing reported June 22 in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Dr.Vijay Govindarajan, an expert on innovation at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University, described a “three box” metaphor for the strategy needed during coping with recessionary times. This metaphor applies to enterprises in all industries – including higher education and health – but with obvious nuances.
Box 1: Improving the Efficiency of Today’s Businesses. Becoming leaner, smarter, and more efficient is critical in a recession. Indeed, many innovations are directed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, yielding dividends in both existing lines of endeavor and new areas. Dr. Govindarajan points out that recessions are followed by periods of expansion and by changes in the competitive landscape. The benefits of these conditions are captured by nimbler, leaner competitors.
During normal times, Dr. Govindarajan recommends enterprises spend 50% of their energies on harvesting efficiencies and economies. During recession, he recommends increasing this percentage to 70% because resources are diminished and the penalty for mistakes is greater.
Box 2: Forgetting the Past, Selectively, Identifying the Concepts and Folk Wisdoms That Must be Abandoned in order to Achieve a Prosperous Future. William Faulkner once remarked, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” What was true for fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Faulkner’s world is also true for colleges and universities. But to assure vibrant futures, colleges and universities need to revisit concepts carried forward from the past, embracing those that are timeless, reframing or abandoning others.
Needed change will be uncomfortable for those faculty who say: “Just give us the resources we need to do our jobs and get out of the way. We know quality and can do the job.” In public colleges and universities, the mantra takes a fresh twist, “Just give us the resources promised in the formula funding that always falls below the normative level and then gets cut during recessionary times.”
The harsh truth is that the halcyon days of unreflective autonomy and generous public funding will not return. They are past. Public funding will continue to be insufficient and institutions will need to aggressively reinvent, tweek, and reimagine and be more transparent and accountable about it.
This is a conversation that is occurring across American higher education. Sage leaders are reframing the saga of their institutions, post-recession and engaging faculty and staff in engaging fresh views of the future.
Box 3: Creating New Lines of Business that Are the Enterprise’s Future. Dr. Govindarajan proposes than enterprises spend 30% of their energy developing and migrating new lines of business, 25% into adjacent businesses close to current practice and 5% in genuine break thorough endeavors. These new endeavors require forgetting things about the past and spinning new sagas about the university of the future.
What are some examples of institutions that are reframing their future saga:
• Oregon State University (including its Extension Division) has partnered with several community colleges, local businesses, community governments and organizations, hospitals and other agencies to create Oregon Open Campus, a new model for creating community-based learning, embedded in community organizations
• Michigan State University is utilizing MSU Global to create new, online learning and development communities to discover what it means to be a “World Grant University”.
• Bard College is reaching out through Bard Early College High School to discover new partnerships to reinvent high school and change relationships between K-12 and and postsecondary education (more about this in tomorrow’s blog).
• In planning for new campuses in Loudoun county Virginia, George Mason University, Northern Virginia Community College, and Loudoun County Public Schools jointly planned for distributed operations and joint programming and for serving the students with half the square footage needed today.
Dr. Govindarajan believes in visioning a future strategy, not formulating a hard-and-fast plan. As he says, “You cannot plan for the year 2025, but you can prepare for it.” Expeditionary innovation can be used to discover the future, one successful experiment at a time.
John Seely Brown calls such an approach “radical incrementalism,” necessary in proceeding down the path to the “Big Shift” escribed in earlier blogs.
The Challenge for Institutional Leadership. Over the past decades, effective institutional innovators like Dr. George Johnston, President of George Mason University, relied on “driving wedges” into the prevailing academic culture and using special institutes and programs as “skunk works” to create and test innovations. This is still an effective strategy for launching innovations, but the stakes for innovation are higher and the pace of experimentation must be greater. Institutions must find ways to rethink their value propositions and release the latent value imprisoned in current practices. We don't have time for a leisurely approach to innovation and transformation.
Box 1: Improving the Efficiency of Today’s Businesses. Becoming leaner, smarter, and more efficient is critical in a recession. Indeed, many innovations are directed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, yielding dividends in both existing lines of endeavor and new areas. Dr. Govindarajan points out that recessions are followed by periods of expansion and by changes in the competitive landscape. The benefits of these conditions are captured by nimbler, leaner competitors.
During normal times, Dr. Govindarajan recommends enterprises spend 50% of their energies on harvesting efficiencies and economies. During recession, he recommends increasing this percentage to 70% because resources are diminished and the penalty for mistakes is greater.
Box 2: Forgetting the Past, Selectively, Identifying the Concepts and Folk Wisdoms That Must be Abandoned in order to Achieve a Prosperous Future. William Faulkner once remarked, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” What was true for fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Faulkner’s world is also true for colleges and universities. But to assure vibrant futures, colleges and universities need to revisit concepts carried forward from the past, embracing those that are timeless, reframing or abandoning others.
Needed change will be uncomfortable for those faculty who say: “Just give us the resources we need to do our jobs and get out of the way. We know quality and can do the job.” In public colleges and universities, the mantra takes a fresh twist, “Just give us the resources promised in the formula funding that always falls below the normative level and then gets cut during recessionary times.”
The harsh truth is that the halcyon days of unreflective autonomy and generous public funding will not return. They are past. Public funding will continue to be insufficient and institutions will need to aggressively reinvent, tweek, and reimagine and be more transparent and accountable about it.
This is a conversation that is occurring across American higher education. Sage leaders are reframing the saga of their institutions, post-recession and engaging faculty and staff in engaging fresh views of the future.
Box 3: Creating New Lines of Business that Are the Enterprise’s Future. Dr. Govindarajan proposes than enterprises spend 30% of their energy developing and migrating new lines of business, 25% into adjacent businesses close to current practice and 5% in genuine break thorough endeavors. These new endeavors require forgetting things about the past and spinning new sagas about the university of the future.
What are some examples of institutions that are reframing their future saga:
• Oregon State University (including its Extension Division) has partnered with several community colleges, local businesses, community governments and organizations, hospitals and other agencies to create Oregon Open Campus, a new model for creating community-based learning, embedded in community organizations
• Michigan State University is utilizing MSU Global to create new, online learning and development communities to discover what it means to be a “World Grant University”.
• Bard College is reaching out through Bard Early College High School to discover new partnerships to reinvent high school and change relationships between K-12 and and postsecondary education (more about this in tomorrow’s blog).
• In planning for new campuses in Loudoun county Virginia, George Mason University, Northern Virginia Community College, and Loudoun County Public Schools jointly planned for distributed operations and joint programming and for serving the students with half the square footage needed today.
Dr. Govindarajan believes in visioning a future strategy, not formulating a hard-and-fast plan. As he says, “You cannot plan for the year 2025, but you can prepare for it.” Expeditionary innovation can be used to discover the future, one successful experiment at a time.
John Seely Brown calls such an approach “radical incrementalism,” necessary in proceeding down the path to the “Big Shift” escribed in earlier blogs.
The Challenge for Institutional Leadership. Over the past decades, effective institutional innovators like Dr. George Johnston, President of George Mason University, relied on “driving wedges” into the prevailing academic culture and using special institutes and programs as “skunk works” to create and test innovations. This is still an effective strategy for launching innovations, but the stakes for innovation are higher and the pace of experimentation must be greater. Institutions must find ways to rethink their value propositions and release the latent value imprisoned in current practices. We don't have time for a leisurely approach to innovation and transformation.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Focusing on Value, Not Just Quality (2)
Leveraging the Elements of the Value Web. The following graphic from The Business Value Web portrays the elements of value.
Focusing on the value web encourages leadership to deconstruct sequential processes and enhance value at all stages of relationships and services. Value has limitless potential. Productivity enhancement, innovation, process reinvention, and creative combination of these can always be used to enhance or even radically alter the value proposition that universities and professional schools offer to students and other stakeholders.
The latent value embedded in a university’s assets can be a powerful driver of strategic differentiation and growth, if it can be mobilized. The challenge to leadership is to marshal new resources and unleash the latent power of existing assets, combining these actions in pursuit of a unifying statement of strategic intent. Thinking in terms of the value web can enable extraordinary leveraging of resources, relationships, and innovations.
Focusing on value emphasizes imagination rather than merely adding additional resources to existing programs and practices. Instead of relying on simple addition, value maximization during tough times involves identifying, leveraging, repurposing, reusing, and creating new value combinations. It also involves creating ambitious stretch goals to stretch the imagination of stakeholders and to warrant new investments of resources.
Avoiding the Value Gap. Many colleges and universities are teetering on the brink of a “value gap” vis-à-vis their publics, a gap created by five factors:
• Misalignment between institutional purposes and the purposes of individual stakeholders, workforce needs, and public expectations. Most publics believe a realignment is necessary for many institutions.
• Placing power in the hands of autonomous professionals who can effectively veto attempts to realign individual, departmental, colleges, and institutional activities. This may be the single greatest barrier to innovation and will be discussed in a blog later this week.
• Agile deployment of resources is a core capability of tomorrow's winning institutions. Today by contrast there are widespread difficulties in mobilizing, leveraging, and repurposing the value that resides in the resources of colleges and universities. Most institutional resources are unavailable for agile use because they are fully booked through existing ways of doing things. More on this in tomorrow’s blog.
• Reductions in institutional offerings and disappearing slack resources in the face of financial hardship. The reductions and cutbacks caused by the recent recession have devoured any slack resources that remained and further reduced services to stakeholders, especially in places like California.
• Increasing relative costs, escalating debt burdens, and decline in family/learner resources, post-recession. Recent dramatic rises in tuition cost and cutbacks in colleges and university offerings create the potential for an even greater perceived value gap in the future, which colleges and universities must act decisively to avoid. Closing the perception of a value gap will require continuous efforts to align with stakeholder needs, improve outcomes and experiences, and control/reduce costs.
The tension/balance between outcomes, experiences, and costs must be a continuing issue for colleges and universities that hope to enjoy the confidence of students, parents, and the American public. Focusing on value will enable institutional leadership to assure they deliver on that promise.
Maximizing Value Through Efficiency, Forgetting the Past, and Creating the Future. Tomorrow’s blog will explore the principles espoused by Dr.Vijay Govindarajan, expert on innovation at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. Dr. Govindarajan spins a “three box” metaphor for the strategy needed during coping with recessionary times:
• Box 1: Improving the efficiency of today’s businesses;
• Box 2: Forgetting the past – selectively identifying what concepts and folk wisdoms do we need to move beyond in order to have a prosperous future; and
• Box 3: Creating new lines of business that are the enterprise’s future.
Focusing on the value web encourages leadership to deconstruct sequential processes and enhance value at all stages of relationships and services. Value has limitless potential. Productivity enhancement, innovation, process reinvention, and creative combination of these can always be used to enhance or even radically alter the value proposition that universities and professional schools offer to students and other stakeholders.
The latent value embedded in a university’s assets can be a powerful driver of strategic differentiation and growth, if it can be mobilized. The challenge to leadership is to marshal new resources and unleash the latent power of existing assets, combining these actions in pursuit of a unifying statement of strategic intent. Thinking in terms of the value web can enable extraordinary leveraging of resources, relationships, and innovations.
Focusing on value emphasizes imagination rather than merely adding additional resources to existing programs and practices. Instead of relying on simple addition, value maximization during tough times involves identifying, leveraging, repurposing, reusing, and creating new value combinations. It also involves creating ambitious stretch goals to stretch the imagination of stakeholders and to warrant new investments of resources.
Avoiding the Value Gap. Many colleges and universities are teetering on the brink of a “value gap” vis-à-vis their publics, a gap created by five factors:
• Misalignment between institutional purposes and the purposes of individual stakeholders, workforce needs, and public expectations. Most publics believe a realignment is necessary for many institutions.
• Placing power in the hands of autonomous professionals who can effectively veto attempts to realign individual, departmental, colleges, and institutional activities. This may be the single greatest barrier to innovation and will be discussed in a blog later this week.
• Agile deployment of resources is a core capability of tomorrow's winning institutions. Today by contrast there are widespread difficulties in mobilizing, leveraging, and repurposing the value that resides in the resources of colleges and universities. Most institutional resources are unavailable for agile use because they are fully booked through existing ways of doing things. More on this in tomorrow’s blog.
• Reductions in institutional offerings and disappearing slack resources in the face of financial hardship. The reductions and cutbacks caused by the recent recession have devoured any slack resources that remained and further reduced services to stakeholders, especially in places like California.
• Increasing relative costs, escalating debt burdens, and decline in family/learner resources, post-recession. Recent dramatic rises in tuition cost and cutbacks in colleges and university offerings create the potential for an even greater perceived value gap in the future, which colleges and universities must act decisively to avoid. Closing the perception of a value gap will require continuous efforts to align with stakeholder needs, improve outcomes and experiences, and control/reduce costs.
The tension/balance between outcomes, experiences, and costs must be a continuing issue for colleges and universities that hope to enjoy the confidence of students, parents, and the American public. Focusing on value will enable institutional leadership to assure they deliver on that promise.
Maximizing Value Through Efficiency, Forgetting the Past, and Creating the Future. Tomorrow’s blog will explore the principles espoused by Dr.Vijay Govindarajan, expert on innovation at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. Dr. Govindarajan spins a “three box” metaphor for the strategy needed during coping with recessionary times:
• Box 1: Improving the efficiency of today’s businesses;
• Box 2: Forgetting the past – selectively identifying what concepts and folk wisdoms do we need to move beyond in order to have a prosperous future; and
• Box 3: Creating new lines of business that are the enterprise’s future.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Focusing on Value, Not Just Quality (1)
Analytics helps stakeholders to focus attention on the things that matter to them, and compare results across institutions/enterprises. When dealing with learning and workforce development, the key issue today is value.
Several years ago, Mark Olson (currently with IBM) and I wrote a book called The Business Value Web for the National Association of Business Officers (NACUBO). It suggested that maximizing value could be an effective unifying principle for leveraging all of the resources available to colleges and universities.
Value Is Different from Quality. A focus on quality typically seeks more and more resources for enhancing reputation based on traditional measures. In such a setting, greater expenditure of resources is often seen as a surrogate for quality in itself. Insufficient energy is placed on the creative reduction of costs while maintaining levels of performance. Quality measures often emphasize inputs, rather than outcomes (i.e., taking standardization of inputs as a proxy measure for standardization of outcomes). They focus on what can be measured and compared easily and aggregated to an institutional total, rather than being guided by what is important to stakeholders. Such measures of quality are typically seen through the eyes of the providers or external assessors of reputation and distinction.
Value Is Seen Through the Eyes of Stakeholders. Value is a dialogue between each stakeholder and the institution/enterprise. Quality is a monologue spoken by the institution or assessors of reputation. Value balances three factors:
• Nature of outcomes and their congruence with learner needs and the providers promise,
• Essence of the experiences through which the outcomes are achieved, and
• Cost/price.
Like the potential energy in the coils of a spring, latent value resides in the knowledge resources, programs, processes, relationships, infrastructure, and competencies of faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders. The manner in which these resources are combined and engaged determines the value experienced by each individual stakeholder.
Value Distinguishes Institutions from Each Other – in the Eyes of Partticular Stakeholders. Delivering greater value for learners and other stakeholders can create strategic differentiation for individual colleges and universities and/or other providers of education, training, and workforce development. This is complicated by the fact that some institutions – like R1 research universities – serve many stakeholders at many different levels and in many different ways, while other educational enterprises – like for-profit learning enterprises or a graduate school of business – serve a more targeted stakeholder group.
Two institutions with similar “quality” of programs can have substantially different value propositions for particular learners and other stakeholders. Enhancing the value proposition for particular stakeholders often requires greater levels of collaboration, innovation and creativity, at all levels – individual, departmental, institutional, and inter-institutional.
Given resource scarcity, discerning and piecing together distinctive clusters of hidden value is emerging as a newly appreciated form of innovation. Innovation and creativity can release and enhance the latent value residing in institutional assets and resources of all kinds, creating new experiences for learners and other stakeholders.
Superior Value Propositions Based on Excellent Outcomes, Convenience, and Good Experiences. Consider the example of the University of Phoenix, Walden University, Capella University, and the growing cluster of for-profit learning providers. By 20th century measures of reputational quality, the research offerings of these institutions are undistinguished. But these institutions have fully grasped the value proposition required today by their key audiences. They have created world-class, convenient support services; treatment geared to adults, not adolescents; and accelerated, job-relevant learning offerings in both classroom and online settings. Typically these offerings are 6-8 weeks in length rather than following the traditional semester and are taught by seasoned practitioners rather than content experts. These offerings provide consistent, outcomes that are learner-centric and are tailored to workforce needs.
In consequence, adult learners have found the outcomes and experiences of the for-profit to be very appealing, generating tremendous growth for these enterprises. Moreover, adult learners have been willing to pay a premium price for these offerings, compared to public and even private universities. Since the for-profits have also figured out how to reduce the cost of faculty, on-line learning resources, and support services (in comparison with public and private institutions) they have generated substantial net margins that have been deployed in new product development, marketing (substantially more than not-for-profit education), and profit.
Coming Next, Aggressive Price Competition from For-Profit Providers and New Competitors. We’ve already commented on the price competition from providers such as Lamar University, partnering with a for-profit provider to provide on-line learning at a market-busting price. As the financial affordability crisis worsens, we will see more of this behavior.
Tomorrow’s blog will explore more about focusing on quality – how to leverage elements of the value web.
Several years ago, Mark Olson (currently with IBM) and I wrote a book called The Business Value Web for the National Association of Business Officers (NACUBO). It suggested that maximizing value could be an effective unifying principle for leveraging all of the resources available to colleges and universities.
Value Is Different from Quality. A focus on quality typically seeks more and more resources for enhancing reputation based on traditional measures. In such a setting, greater expenditure of resources is often seen as a surrogate for quality in itself. Insufficient energy is placed on the creative reduction of costs while maintaining levels of performance. Quality measures often emphasize inputs, rather than outcomes (i.e., taking standardization of inputs as a proxy measure for standardization of outcomes). They focus on what can be measured and compared easily and aggregated to an institutional total, rather than being guided by what is important to stakeholders. Such measures of quality are typically seen through the eyes of the providers or external assessors of reputation and distinction.
Value Is Seen Through the Eyes of Stakeholders. Value is a dialogue between each stakeholder and the institution/enterprise. Quality is a monologue spoken by the institution or assessors of reputation. Value balances three factors:
• Nature of outcomes and their congruence with learner needs and the providers promise,
• Essence of the experiences through which the outcomes are achieved, and
• Cost/price.
Like the potential energy in the coils of a spring, latent value resides in the knowledge resources, programs, processes, relationships, infrastructure, and competencies of faculty, staff, students, and other stakeholders. The manner in which these resources are combined and engaged determines the value experienced by each individual stakeholder.
Value Distinguishes Institutions from Each Other – in the Eyes of Partticular Stakeholders. Delivering greater value for learners and other stakeholders can create strategic differentiation for individual colleges and universities and/or other providers of education, training, and workforce development. This is complicated by the fact that some institutions – like R1 research universities – serve many stakeholders at many different levels and in many different ways, while other educational enterprises – like for-profit learning enterprises or a graduate school of business – serve a more targeted stakeholder group.
Two institutions with similar “quality” of programs can have substantially different value propositions for particular learners and other stakeholders. Enhancing the value proposition for particular stakeholders often requires greater levels of collaboration, innovation and creativity, at all levels – individual, departmental, institutional, and inter-institutional.
Given resource scarcity, discerning and piecing together distinctive clusters of hidden value is emerging as a newly appreciated form of innovation. Innovation and creativity can release and enhance the latent value residing in institutional assets and resources of all kinds, creating new experiences for learners and other stakeholders.
Superior Value Propositions Based on Excellent Outcomes, Convenience, and Good Experiences. Consider the example of the University of Phoenix, Walden University, Capella University, and the growing cluster of for-profit learning providers. By 20th century measures of reputational quality, the research offerings of these institutions are undistinguished. But these institutions have fully grasped the value proposition required today by their key audiences. They have created world-class, convenient support services; treatment geared to adults, not adolescents; and accelerated, job-relevant learning offerings in both classroom and online settings. Typically these offerings are 6-8 weeks in length rather than following the traditional semester and are taught by seasoned practitioners rather than content experts. These offerings provide consistent, outcomes that are learner-centric and are tailored to workforce needs.
In consequence, adult learners have found the outcomes and experiences of the for-profit to be very appealing, generating tremendous growth for these enterprises. Moreover, adult learners have been willing to pay a premium price for these offerings, compared to public and even private universities. Since the for-profits have also figured out how to reduce the cost of faculty, on-line learning resources, and support services (in comparison with public and private institutions) they have generated substantial net margins that have been deployed in new product development, marketing (substantially more than not-for-profit education), and profit.
Coming Next, Aggressive Price Competition from For-Profit Providers and New Competitors. We’ve already commented on the price competition from providers such as Lamar University, partnering with a for-profit provider to provide on-line learning at a market-busting price. As the financial affordability crisis worsens, we will see more of this behavior.
Tomorrow’s blog will explore more about focusing on quality – how to leverage elements of the value web.
Analytics in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (2)
Guest Blogger: Dr. Linda Baer, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs, Minnesota State College and Universities
The dashboard used at the system level by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities enables Systems-level administrators and members of the Board to follow the aggregated performance of the system on ten key variables.
These ten variables fall into four strategic directions for the MnScU system: 1) access and opportunity, 2) meeting state and regional economic needs, 3) quality programs and services, and 4) innovation and efficiency.
At the present time, six of these ten variables are being used actively: 1) percent change in enrollment, 2) net tuition and fees as a % of total income, 3) related employment of graduates, 4) licensure exams pass rates, 5) persistence and completion rates, and 6) facilities condition index. The other four measures, while important considerations that figure in the Board’s deliberations, have not yet been adequately defined in a “quantifiable” manner to be “lit up” on the dashboard.
The first page view of the dashboard is the aggregate for the entire MNSCU system. The familiar “speedometer” view. In addition, the user can “drill down” to examine the performance of individual campuses, as reflected in the second page view for Alexandria Technical College. In addition to the variables displayed on the second view, many other statistics can be portrayed and presented in graphical form.
The dashboard has proven to be an excellent mechanism for engaging the Executive Team and the Board in understanding summative performance against the high-level strategic directions of MnSCU and its 32 institutions. It is also the basis for judging the performance of the President and his team and these measures are part of the performance evaluation criteria .
But the use of measurement at MnSCU goes far beyond the high-level outcome elements of the dashboard. Individual MnSCU institutions have a rich set of measures which they use to get at the effectiveness of the processes and people that actually generate those outcomes. Many of these institutions utilize a rich palette of Baldrige and/or AQIP measures to understand, refine, and redesign the performance of their processes and people. This sort of continuous churning and improvement is critical to the effective use of analytics.
The dashboard used at the system level by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities enables Systems-level administrators and members of the Board to follow the aggregated performance of the system on ten key variables.
These ten variables fall into four strategic directions for the MnScU system: 1) access and opportunity, 2) meeting state and regional economic needs, 3) quality programs and services, and 4) innovation and efficiency.
At the present time, six of these ten variables are being used actively: 1) percent change in enrollment, 2) net tuition and fees as a % of total income, 3) related employment of graduates, 4) licensure exams pass rates, 5) persistence and completion rates, and 6) facilities condition index. The other four measures, while important considerations that figure in the Board’s deliberations, have not yet been adequately defined in a “quantifiable” manner to be “lit up” on the dashboard.
The first page view of the dashboard is the aggregate for the entire MNSCU system. The familiar “speedometer” view. In addition, the user can “drill down” to examine the performance of individual campuses, as reflected in the second page view for Alexandria Technical College. In addition to the variables displayed on the second view, many other statistics can be portrayed and presented in graphical form.
The dashboard has proven to be an excellent mechanism for engaging the Executive Team and the Board in understanding summative performance against the high-level strategic directions of MnSCU and its 32 institutions. It is also the basis for judging the performance of the President and his team and these measures are part of the performance evaluation criteria .
But the use of measurement at MnSCU goes far beyond the high-level outcome elements of the dashboard. Individual MnSCU institutions have a rich set of measures which they use to get at the effectiveness of the processes and people that actually generate those outcomes. Many of these institutions utilize a rich palette of Baldrige and/or AQIP measures to understand, refine, and redesign the performance of their processes and people. This sort of continuous churning and improvement is critical to the effective use of analytics.
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