You raise a good point, Paige, and I think one that demonstrates why events like the data jam are so important for trying things out first with made-up data and before real resources are committed.

In the real world, I don’t think anyone should be able to find out so much about a stranger just like that, and then contact them. You’d have to build in controls to let users limit who sees what, and under what conditions, at a minimum. But a mechanism that suggests other users to ‘follow’ or ‘friend’ has been implemented by social networks like LinkedIn with some success, and a match based on learning achievements and goals seems an approach that might be worth exploring further- given the right safeguards.

Universities – especially large research ones – are indeed a special case. They seem more like loose conglomerates that sort of share a brand and maybe a couple of services, than a single organisation with a clear governance structure.

As you say, many groups within those universities have considerable clout, and a bunch of IT guys pretending to be business people, coming in to rationalise organisational structures in the name of efficiency seems a somewhat Quixotic undertaking. They can do it within their own domain, but the trouble with IT is that it is infrastructure that reaches all parts of the organisation…

The Mintzberg taxonomy article looks interesting- very much in line with the cybernetics that colleagues at CETIS are working with!

Thanks!

Wilbert

Great experiment, thanks for sharing.

Sheila

Interesting post. Your observation that:

“Enterprise architects are not hired to decide what the organisation’s
goals are, what its structure should be or how it should change.
Management does that.”

is certainly true of many organizations, but it may not apply to universities as a whole.

In my experience, managers of support service units within the university do have a lot to say about the structure of their units, the role definitions (job descriptions) of staff who work for them, the mission of their units within the organization, and so forth.

But university administrators do not have much say about the role of faculty. Although I’m going outside my direct experience here, I would say that this is also true of many professional organizations (law firms, hospitals) where the professional employees have learned to play their role through many years of schooling prior to entering the workforce.

It would make sense, therefore, if technocrats in some industries are given free reign to define and automate the roles of some employees. An example of this might be the Automatic Teller Machine in the banking industry.

On the other hand, I shutter to think what the response of research faculty would be if would be technocrats at the university tried to introduce the idea of the Automatic Professor Machine!

And, in most research universities the faculty have the political clout to protect their interests since they outrank IT technocrats in the university’s pecking order.

Unfortunately, the professoriate may be able to resist even good ideas for change because they feel their interests are threatened by technocrats with expertise in areas relevant to the objective of improving instruction and/or reducing its cost, areas such as IT, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and so forth.

Of course, entrepreneurial educational startup firms may be in a position to challenge and disrupt the incumbent institutions with innovative new technologies, new business models, and new job roles. We may be seeing this today with the rise of MOOCs.

In any event, if you’re interested in more on how different organizational forms respond to innovation, check out my blog post on:

Mintzberg’s Taxonomy of Organizational Forms
http://innovationmemes.blogspot.com/2012/11/mintzbergs-taxonomy-of-organizational_24.html

Cheers,
Fred

Cheers, Adam

The interesting aspect of commodification, I think, is that it makes a technology predictable and thereby ripe for building new innovations on. With the new BB deal, the chance of functional differentiation of VLEs for differentiation’s sake has gone from moderate to slim, and that should mean that it will become a lot easier to build innovative tools and content that can be used in all of them. It may also mean that a core, internal innovation in one VLE will spread more quickly to the others.

You’re quite right that the measure of the deal is on its effect on innovation…