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32 E D U C A U S E Q U A R T E R LY^ •^ Number 2 2006
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o succeed professionally, a tech- nology manager in higher educa- tion must align institutional goals with the skill set of campus technologists and the resources available for informa- tion technology support. Getting a firm grasp on any of these parameters is not easy, however. Resources are often com- mitted to multiyear projects or hidden by opaque budget accounting practices. Skills are not easy to assess, particularly when they exceed the bare minimum required to set up and administer IT services. Yet understanding institutional goals often presents the most daunt- ing challenge, even for experienced IT managers. Almost all universities support ser- vice to their students; almost all recruit faculty committed to scholarship and teaching; and almost all boast facilities that support faculty research and schol- arship and provide secure, comfortable learning environments for students. But programs and initiatives welcome in some settings might be considered suspect in others. Strategies that garner strong faculty support in one institution can be considered frivolous or wasteful in another. And initiatives considered cutting-edge in one department might seem passé elsewhere.
In this article I suggest that the three value disciplines described by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema 1 provide a lens to analyze and align institutional goals in higher education with critical IT decisions. After describing the three value disciplines and how each could shape IT decisions, I suggest how a technology department might select a particular value discipline, then note the complications unique to this selec- tion in an academic environment. A demonstration follows on how a tech- nology department operating within a value discipline might apply the discipline to hiring a new staff mem- ber, implementing a Web front end for a student information system, and purchasing a learning management system.
Three Value Disciplines
In a seminal article later expanded to a book,^2 Treacy and Wiersema described three value disciplines: ■ Operational excellence ■ Customer intimacy ■ Product leadership They suggested that in a business context, firms must select and excel at one of these value disciplines as a core operating model, while remaining adept
Value
Disciplines:
A Lens for Successful Decision
Making in IT
Applying the
concept of value
disciplines on
campus helps align
IT efforts with
institutional goals
By Marc Eichen
Number 2 2006 • E D U C A U S E Q U A R T E R LY 33
at the other two. Regardless of a firm’s specific core competence^3 or the sector in which it operates—manufacturing, retail, service, or technology—the value discipline shapes the choices made by managers on a day-to-day basis. Employees trained within one value discipline will feel comfortable moving to firms that share this value discipline, even if they move from one sector of the economy to another. The ability of management to choose and excel at one value discipline and communicate this choice so that employees understand and carry it out effectively marks the
difference between success (that is, market leadership) and failure. Applying the same logic in higher education, IT departments must under- stand and align with the value disci- pline of their institutions. 4 Further, IT managers must translate this domi- nant value discipline into IT strategy and communicate it clearly to senior management so that they understand both the choices and the consequences. IT managers must also communicate these ideas to IT staff and the campus community to achieve clarity about IT values and services.
Operational Excellence Companies that pursue operational excellence provide consumers with products at the lowest total cost.^5 The product line is standardized and limited, with highly reliable products—opera- tional excellence demands zero defects. Procedures for manufacturing pursue the highest level of efficiency, often using IT as a way of tracking inventory and orders. Customer service pursues the highest level of convenience, with the goal of making every customer inter- action easy, pleasant, quick, and accu- rate. Employees in these firms exhibit a high level of teamwork. Wal-Mart, FedEx, MacDonalds, Dell, and South- west Airlines are examples of companies that pursue operational excellence. In the context of higher education, operational excellence would focus on providing educational course material with maximum convenience and the lowest possible cost. Public institu- tions—such as state universities with multiple campuses and large outreach organizations that can provide classes in nontraditional settings, including the workplace or malls—are examples of educational institutions that follow the value discipline of operational excel- lence. Such institutions typically do not attempt to tailor offerings to meet indi- vidual student needs. Instead, they offer standardized instruction that serves a large number of students. These institu- tions rely on back-end systems to work flawlessly, since a very large number of faculty and students use them at any given time. IT departments that pursue the dis- cipline of operational excellence focus on computing as a utility. They make a homogeneous set of computing services available to faculty and students at the least possible marginal cost. They seek to make lowest-common-denominator facilities available to the faculty con-
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believe will give them a strong competi- tive edge. Employees of these firms are expected to think creatively and work in highly flexible, often shifting organiza- tional structures. Rewards are based on an employee’s ability to innovate and to bring innovative concepts to market as products. Examples of firms that pur- sue the discipline of product leadership include Johnson and Johnson, Intel, and, historically, Bell Labs. Academic institutions that pursue the value discipline of product leader- ship seek to hire and retain faculty who are true innovators and leaders in their fields. They encourage these faculty to incorporate cutting-edge methodology and results within their teaching. They encourage cross-disciplinary work as well as work that can be spun off in commercial applications. IT departments that align with prod- uct leadership make the latest technol- ogies available to faculty. Since these technologies are often “bleeding edge,” IT departments should offer the “buyer beware” caveat to faculty and student users that these technologies might not work as initially described, might dif- fer significantly from release to release, or might not be supported or even available in the future.^12 Note that the rubric of product leadership does not commit an IT operation to a particular technology—just the opposite, in fact. A commitment to product leadership commits the IT department to offering an ever changing menu of cutting-edge technologies.
Selection and Alignment
with a Value Discipline
Treacy and Wiersema asserted that a firm must choose a single value disci- pline and excel at this discipline while remaining adept at the other two. They suggested that choosing a single strategy is key because it will shape every subse- quent operational decision. Following this logic, I would argue that IT departments within higher education likewise must choose a single value disci- pline while remaining adept at the other two. In a resource-scarce environment, this choice will determine the technol- ogy emphasized and its implementation.
The choice will shape the staff competen- cies rewarded and will provide a baseline for customer expectations. Successful IT departments will align the chosen value discipline with the needs of their con- stituency, whether a university, school, or department. University environments are not monolithic decision structures, how- ever, nor are they homogeneous in their IT requirements. And IT managers, while making this choice, must remain vigilant and respectful of local varia- tion. Where they serve multiple con- stituencies, IT departments may have to excel at different value disciplines for different customers. A business school, for instance, might want an IT depart- ment to offer operational excellence, following a public utility model for IT that stresses delivery of a homogeneous product at the lowest possible cost. Demand for this discipline rests on the belief that a homogeneous technology environment will best serve the needs of students and faculty in that school and that most users will be able to use the standardized technologies provided with little or no additional coaching or assistance. At the same institution, the science department might demand product leadership, with the faculty and admin- istration insisting on the most cutting-
edge hardware and software even if it entails instability and problems with long-range support. Faculty in the humanities, on the other hand, might require customer intimacy. In that case, the IT staff would have to under- stand faculty computer usage (which software and hardware they use) and their instructional goals and styles and choose among IT investments to meet their needs. Of course, it’s facile to suggest that science departments will always want product leadership and humanities departments will always demand cus- tomer intimacy. Often specific faculty and a unique collective history shape the value discipline a department or school requires. A department of reli- gion might, for instance, demand cut- ting-edge technology to store, describe, catalog, and present images of religious icons. A science department might demand operational excellence or cus- tomer intimacy if the faculty believe they have sufficient technical expertise to customize and deliver their own tech- nological solutions. Further complications and challenges arise when individual faculty are anoma- lous within their departments or schools in requiring particular value disciplines. A department that requires operational excellence but has one or two faculty who demand cutting-edge technology will strain the resources (and the patience) of a university technology staff (as well as their deans or department chairs). Still further friction and complica- tions arise when the technology staff at one hierarchical level must perform with one value discipline while other technology staff must perform with a different value discipline. For example, the university might “own” the com- puter network and provide operational excellence in terms of reliability and robustness on that network as well as facilitating ease of connection and security. At the same time, school- or department-based personnel might be required to develop or maintain a set of applications that meet the unique needs of that department, even if they strain the security restrictions of the university network.
Successful IT departments
will align the chosen value
discipline with the needs
of their constituency
36 E D U C A U S E Q U A R T E R LY^ •^ Number 2 2006
More generally, schools within the same university, often served by a sin- gle technology staff, diverge on their value discipline requirements, placing enormous demands on the IT staff. Staff who put a premium on their ability to deliver—and in some cases develop— cutting-edge technology will have little patience for staff who invest in develop- ing a relationship with individual fac- ulty to deliver the best overall solution. Staff who excel at rolling out and main- taining low-cost, highly available sys- tems will be suspicious of cutting-edge applications that service a small handful of users and have little likelihood of being replicated on a large scale. It is incumbent on the technology management team to understand the value discipline demanded by each academic unit as well as specific fac- ulty members. The technology man- agement team must also understand the anomalies, such as why a particular faculty member might require customer intimacy even though the department requires operational excellence.
Value Disciplines Shaping
Technology Decisions
To understand the potential impor- tance of value disciplines and how they might work in practice, consider three key decisions: hiring staff, implement- ing a Web-based front end for a legacy student information system, and choos- ing and implementing a learning man- agement system.
Hiring Staff Hiring staff represents a long-term commitment to the individual hired and signals the skills that managers want to strengthen within their depart- ments. Hiring interviews often focus on technological competence. Consider- able effort has gone into assessing tech- nical competence within an interview setting. The current fashion is to use some type of problem-solving or game framework. 13 This encourages a reason- able freshness in the interview process. Applicants can compete against each other in areas and skills that parallel those required in the prospective job. The method I suggest here comple-
ments this approach, 14 as it assumes technical competence and focuses on its application. Technology managers know that tech- nical competence is only the first filter applied to job candidates. If you need someone to run your Linux-based e-mail system, it is certainly important that they have experience in this area. But how do you distinguish among the final- ists, all of whom have the foundational technical skills? In my experience, you seek a candidate who is comfortable working in an organization that shares the value discipline of your technology department. With this in mind, you might give a candidate the following scenario to consider:
Your department is responsible for administering e-mail for more than 4, students and faculty. It is time to present new budget proposals. You must prioritize among a number of distinct projects: a. Purchase a new Linux e-mail server to add capacity. b. Purchase a second, redundant Linux e- mail server. c. Develop a new e-mail client, which promises to deliver added functionality that a small number of faculty have requested. d. Contract with a consultant to develop supplementary multimedia documentation that can be distributed to incoming students. e. Contract with a consultant who can better customize and integrate various e-mail clients such as legacy Netscape clients, Eudora, Outlook Express, Outlook, and OWA. Please outline how you would prioritize these choices and explain your rationale.
A one-to-one mapping does not exist between a value discipline and a technology choice. In this scenario, several choices map into a particular value discipline, and several might serve more than a single value discipline. The rationale behind the choice is key. For instance, the discipline of operational excellence would be served by (a) or (b), obviously, but (d) might also fit if the rationale was to provide standard docu- mentation to a large number of users. At
the same time, (d) might serve the value discipline of customer intimacy if the rationale was to respond to the special needs of a unique group of students (for example, providing documentation in a foreign language with appropriate cultural examples to assist new, non- English speaking students). Another strategy is to ask the follow- ing question:
Please describe what you consider the critical purchases in your current depart- ment during the past two years. How do these reflect the underlying priorities in the department? If you could make these deci- sions now, how would you change them, if at all?
With this free-format question, you can probe for divergence between the values in the applicant’s current depart- ment and his or her individual value discipline. Such divergence in values can signal why an applicant might want to make a lateral move from one orga- nization to another.^15 A final question might be:
A faculty member in the art department would like the IT staff to develop a Web browser that more faithfully renders sculp- ture. This would include three-dimensional rendering of sculptural pieces as well as more accurate rendering of color, includ- ing very high color bit density. How would you evaluate the proposal? What would be the important considerations in deciding whether your department should undertake such a project? If you were asked to direct such a project, how would you evaluate it in terms of your own career goals and achievements?
Here again, it is key to probe how the applicant views this type of project, whether cutting-edge or meeting the needs of a small segment of faculty. Given how the applicant views the project, would he or she be comfortable under- taking this project for the department or in a managerial capacity? An individual who would relish this challenge would probably fit well into a department that follows the discipline of product leader- ship or customer intimacy.
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pline rubric could be applied, assume you have just been hired as a senior IT manager in a mid-size public university. The provost has received complaints from faculty, staff, and students regard- ing the e-mail system and suggested, in a most collegial manner, that one of your first tasks is to “fix the darn thing.” How might the value discipline rubric help you? Your first task, of course, is to under- stand the real problem. If the institu- tion has a functioning trouble-ticket system, you would review the e-mail- related tickets and contact the users who registered complaints within the past month. When talking with these student, faculty, and staff customers,
listen carefully to the issues raised. First you want to hear them describe the problem in their own words, prob- ing to see which value discipline might best meet their needs. Next you want to provide paired alternatives that outline how the IT department might approach the problem. Each pair would essentially ask whether, given their complaints, the IT operation should focus on operational excellence or customer intimacy, operational excel- lence or product leadership, customer intimacy or product leadership. For example, the e-mail system was not working for a senior faculty member in the sciences, and she called the provost’s office to complain. After
reviewing her trouble ticket and hear- ing her describe her complaint in her own words, a summary of your ques- tions might be,
Professor Sampson, from what you’ve described and what I’ve read in our help- desk logs, we didn’t respond to your issue until late the next business day. Am I under- standing this correctly? And you believe this problem is symptomatic of our general unresponsiveness? Suppose we had a choice of devoting additional staff to the help desk or adding a systems administrator for the e-mail system specifically. Which would best meet your needs? Suppose we had a choice of changing our e-mail system so it provided integrated instant messaging or adding staff to the help desk. Which would best meet your needs?
Although each question targets this professor’s specific issue with the e-mail system, you are focusing on a choice between the value disciplines in a way that will help guide a strategy for solving the problem. For this particular professor, the paired questions reveal that customer intimacy is the most important value discipline. She may, in fact, tolerate some level of inefficiency if her questions are answered and her problems dealt with in a personal and timely fashion. If this pattern is consistent among faculty, you would want to suggest additional help- desk support to the provost rather than an overhaul of the e-mail system. The value discipline rubric provides a lens for senior technology managers in higher education to analyze and under- stand their institutions. This lens also provides a way of shaping basic, key decisions that every technology man- ager must face, such as hiring staff and purchasing and implementing institu- tion-wide systems. It demonstrates that within a specific educational context, innovation is provided not only by what technologies are chosen but also by how those technologies are imple- mented. e
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my staff at MassBay Community College, Suffolk University Law School, Long Island University, and the City University of
Key References As higher education managers move through their careers, they are asked to focus less on the nuts and bolts of technology and more on the business of higher education and how IT fits into the educational vision for their campuses. Along with this article, the following references may encourage IT managers to reflect on these issues.
M. Treacy and F. Wiersema, “Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines,” Harvard Business Review , January/February 1993, pp. 84–93; expanded in M. Treacy and F. Wiersema, The Discipline of Market Leaders (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1995). This Harvard Business Review article by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, which they later expanded into a book, makes the case for focusing on one of the three value disciplines. The authors based their argument on in-depth interviews with corporate decision makers. The book has more extensive case studies of firms in each of the three value disciplines. D. Leonard, Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innova- tion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 1995). Dorothy Leonard made a strong case for the argument that a firm’s competi- tive advantage lies in the ability to learn and innovate and turn this innovation into continuing ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. Her book touches on the ways in which corporate culture shapes managerial and physical systems. P. G. W. Keen, “Information Systems and Organizational Change,” Communica- tions of the ACM , Vol. 24, No. 1, 1981, pp. 24–33. In this article, Peter Keen discussed the difficulties of using information systems to encourage organizational change and the likelihood of organizational resis- tance during times of rapid innovation.
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New York for their cooperation and input. Particular thanks go to Denise Ondishko for suggesting this line of inquiry many years ago.
Endnotes
- M. Treacy and F. Wiersema, “Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines,” Harvard Business Review , January/Febru- ary 1993, pp. 84–93; expanded in M. Treacy and F. Wiersema, The Discipline of Market Leaders (Cambridge, Mass.: Per- seus Books, 1995). Wiersema followed up on this work in two directions, first by focusing on customer intimacy in Cus- tomer Intimacy (New York: Knowledge Exchange, 1996) and second by focus- ing on gaining market share by getting and holding customers in The New Mar- ket Leaders (New York: Simon and Schus- ter, 2001).
- Ibid. (1995), Chapter 4, “The Discipline of Operational Excellence,” pp. 47–63; Chapter 6, “The Discipline of Product Leaders,” pp. 85–100; and Chapter 8, “The Discipline of Customer Intimacy,” pp. 123–142.
- See D. Leonard, Wellsprings of Knowl- edge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard Business School Press, 1995), for a thorough discussion of core compe- tence within the firm. While Treacy and Wiersema contrasted the core compe- tence model with their own value dis- cipline model, I prefer to think that core competence as described by Leon- ard and others is the distilled and accumulated expertise applied by a firm within a chosen value discipline, such as product leadership. The Gart- ner Group research reports have also touched on the relationship between value discipline and core competence: <http://www.gartner.com/5_about/ press_releases/2002_08/pr20020805a .jsp> (accessed December 13, 2005).
- Of course, the underlying question, “How does a university, college, or other academic institution choose a partic- ular value discipline?” remains unan- swered in this article. This is worthy of serious consideration by senior educa- tional decision makers, particularly as the market for education becomes both more global and more regionally com- petitive.
- Treacy and Wiersema, 1995, op. cit., pp. 49–63.
- For a description of the processes and systems Indiana University imple- mented within what I would call the operational excellence rubric, see the following ECAR research bulle- tins (available by subscription): G. C.
Elmore, J. R. Holloway, and S. B. Work- man, “Customer-Centered IT Support: Foundations, Principles, and Systems” (Boulder, Colo.: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Research Bul- letin, Issue 23, 2004), <http://www .educause.edu/Librar yDetailPage/ 666?ID=ERB0423>; and G. C. Elmore, J. R. Holloway, and S. B. Workman,
- “An Architecture for Evolv- ing IT Customer Service” (Boulder, Colo.: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, Research Bulletin, Issue 14, 2005), <http://www.educause.edu/ LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ERB0514>.
- Treacy and Wiersema, 1993, op. cit., p.
- Treacy and Wiersema, 1995, op. cit., pp. 121–142.
- See, for instance, A. Agee, A. Genovese, and K. H. Gillette, “Culture Change: What IT Takes to Create a Quality Customer Service Environment,” a presentation at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, 2004, <http://www.educause.edu/ LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=EDU0462>; M. Cain, “The Freedom of ‘Yes’—A Per- sonal View of Service,” EDUCAUSE Review , November 2002, pp. 7–10, <http://www .educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0230. pdf>; and R. Grant, “Improving Service Quality with Benchmarks,” EDUCAUSE Review , November/December 2001, pp. 12–13, <http://www.educause.edu/ir/ library/pdf/ERM0168.pdf>.
- P. A. McClure, J. W. Smith, and T. D. Sitko, “The Crisis in Information Tech- nology Support: Has Our Current Model Reached Its Limit?” EDUCAUSE/CAUSE Professional Paper No. 16, 1997, <http:// www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/ 666?ID=PUB3016>.
- Treacy and Wiersema, 1995, op. cit., pp. 87–100.
- At this writing, grid computing and the middleware technologies to support grid computing serve as a good example of product leadership within higher educa- tion IT. For a description of these tech- nologies, see P. Plaszczak and R. Well- ner, Jr., Grid Computing (Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, 2006). Also see M. P. Cummings and J. C. Huskamp, “Grid Computing,” EDUCAUSE Review , November/December 2005, pp. 116–117, <http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/ pdf/ERM05612.pdf>, for a description of the caveats and pitfalls involved in implementing technology associ- ated with product leadership. Another example of product leadership, which is perhaps less cutting edge at this point, would be utility or commodity comput- ing, in which off-the-shelf systems are combined in high-performance clusters. See, for instance, T. L. Sterling et al., How
to Build a Beowulf (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
- For a description of the Microsoft method for posing complex puzzles and prob- lems as the basis of job interviews, see W. Poundstone, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle—How the World’s Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers (New York: Time Warner/Little Brown, 2003).
- I think these sorts of games and stan- dardized puzzles are better than hav- ing applicants talk about their skills as long as managers understand that the usual caveats about standardized testing apply to these settings as well. For exam- ple, these tests tend to measure a lim- ited number of intelligence-related skills; they come with heavy cultural baggage, as does test-taking generally; and they have difficulty in measuring creative or unusual solutions.
- It is common to hear that a particular individual “just didn’t work out” in a specific organizational setting. Manag- ers and those responsible for personnel decisions organization-wide are often at a loss to understand and respond appro- priately. It is interesting to speculate, for example, the extent to which individ- uals might be trained within one value discipline and forced to work within a different value discipline. I believe orga- nizations that require the discipline of customer intimacy are uniquely chal- lenging for personnel in IT depart- ments, since both the technology and the reward structure for these manag- ers generally emphasizes the alternative value disciplines of operational excel- lence and product leadership.
- For instance, see J. P. Frazee, “The SDSU Rubric for Rating Commercial Portal Vendors,” March 2001, <http://www .bris.ac.uk/ISC/portal/sdsu-portal-rubric .pdf> (accessed December 13, 2005), for a thorough review of these technical specifications.
- There are a number of learning style tax- onomies. The following site includes a useful annotated bibliography in this area, as well as references to its applica- tion in graduate education and the inte- gration of learning style theories into broader personality metrics: <http:// www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Learning_ Styles.html> (accessed December 13, 2005).
Marc Eichen (meichen@massbay.edu) is Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at MassBay Com- munity College in Wellesley, Framingham, and Ashland, Massachusetts.
