Strategy, Quality and Information Architecture in Higher Education
The once unblemished reputation of higher education is at stake almost everywhere. In the sixties, higher education was cherished as a miracle thrust for the economy and as a solid promise of social well-being. Thirty years later, it has become a major cause of dissatisfaction. The explosion in the number of students, the dramatic changes in lifestyles and in the nature of work, and the habits of faculty accommodated to an almost exclusive concentration on their research, have led higher education to the state of disfavour we currently witness.
Students complain of overcrowded classrooms, impersonal relationships with faculty, mass produced education, excessive theory vs too little practice, discretionary student evaluation, lack of coherence in the curricula, coarse mismatchings between what is taught in the classroom and what is needed in the world of work. Employers complain about the lack of practical skills of the graduates, and their poor behaviour and absence of values for the exercise of the profession, and criticise the lack of interest of universities in genuinely giving a say to the employers in the definition of the curricula. The government, and the tax payers, that sustain the bill, want to know where the money goes, and complain about academic organizational practices that insist in running along obsolete pathways.
This is an almost universal problem. A few years ago, John White, a Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation, compared university education with a typical industry, and asked "how long would a firm be in business if it rejected parts, materials, and subassemblies at an overall rate of 35% and rejected a critical component at a rate of 65%", "how long would a firm be in business if it consistently failed to meet its advertised delivery dates by 25%", and "how long would a firm be in business if its products failed to satisfy over half of its customers" (White, 1990).
The legend of Phoenix
Some people say that universities, like most businesses, are badly needing to be reinvented. Others, flagging an alternative buzzword, say that universities need to be reengineered. Personally, I prefer to recall the legend of Phoenix, the mythological bird that burns itself to ashes every few hundred years and is them reborn from its own ashes, combining the energy and creativity of youth with the maturity and wisdom of its own past.
My claim is that the universities of the present day should be preparing their own rebirth. Otherwise, now under the pressures of global competition, in a learning society surrendered to multimedia and extended into cyberspace, they will be condemned to extinction.
Some years ago none of these constraints existed. A university could quietly ignore all competition and routinely deliver its own brew of mass produced education. Exactly as it happened with most of the firms of the time, a university could afford to offer with arrogant displeasure the customary service, with uneven and often debatable quality, sure that its customers, for lack of alternative, would not complain or try to get satisfaction elsewhere. All this has changed dramatically in our times! It is not possible, anymore, for a university to chisel the model of its offer of education ignoring the trends of supply and demand: supply and demand of higher education, but also supply and demand of professionals in a world where the nature of work and the organization of production have radically changed.
Focusing on the customer
Assuming the university needs, indeed, to be reborn, who will then be the key agents of this rebirth? The answer is so simple that it may sound disconcerting: the professors and the students! I am sure that I will be shocking some of my colleagues by pointing out the students as indispensable partners in this process. Yet, the concept is as old as the concept of university itself. It were exactly the same agents that gave birth to the earliest universities a thousand years ago: Bologna, recognized as the first of all universities, was born as an association of students, and Paris, which is believed to be almost as old, resulted from an association between professors and students (Rüegg, 1996).
You should not infer from the above words that I am trying to suggest that the rebirth of the universities should be exactly like their birth. Not at all! What I believe is that, since the laws of the market are ruling our times, the universities should distinctively nurture the relationship with their customers. And as we know today, the companies that create for themselves a future of success are those that create a better future for their own customers, and, if possible, with them (Hamel, 1994).
A business model of strategy and quality for higher education
The centrality I attach to the customer makes clear that, in my mind, a university must be run as a business. Not as any business, though! The business model I favor stresses a permanent strategic intent and a supreme preoccupation with quality.
When I refer to strategic intent, I understand it as the above ability to create a better future for the customers, and, if possible, with them. Of course, the strategic intent assumes that all the other components of a strategic approach _ vision, mission, values, aims, critical success factors, SWOT analysis _ are carefully taken into account. But it requires much more! It requires a systematic ability to imagine a future made possible by technological progress, by the change in life and workstyles, by the globalisation of the economy and by the explosion of physical and virtual mobilities. It requires emancipation from stagnant visions about the essence of higher education and about the kinds of services that should be offered. It requires a radical reconception of many of those services, in search of entirely new cost/performance balances. It requires a permanent exercise of creativity, a constant opening to new paradigms, and an enduring empathy to human needs (Hamel, 1994).
It is in this sense that one must challenge many assumptions of higher education that have remained unquestioned for ages and now emphatically claim new perspectives. Peter Denning (Denning, 1996) offers us the example of four assumptions that lie behind the historical concept of a university: 1) the university defined as a closed community of scholars drawing on each other’s knowledge in different disciplines, 2) the university of teachers working with small groups of students, 3) the university of the departmental libraries, and 4) the university as a place where adolescents attempt to obtain the competencies and credentials to get a job.
In practise, the local community of specialized knowledges that made up a university has suddenly opened up to the world, and has become part of an open community of specialists linked by the Internet, phone, fax, and meetings and conferences of all kinds. Small undergraduate classes have become economically infeasible: a growing number of commercial firms are now offering qualified education at much lower costs. The departmental libraries are becoming bare complements of universal digital libraries. Finally, with professional competencies becoming obsolete at an increasingly higher rate, the universities should be extending their educational offer to cover, not just the four or five years immediately preceding professional life, but, in fact, the whole 45 years of professional life (Denning, 1996).
On the other hand, when I refer to the quality of education and other services offered by universities, I am not referring to some unclear concept of quality, measured by obscure or subjective criteria. I am referring to total quality management, (TQM) a management concept that focuses the collective efforts of all human resources in satisfying customers expectations by continually improving operations, management processes, and products and services (Berry, 1991). TQM combines the optimization of costs, the improvement of the organization and its functions, from conception to delivery, the optimization of the production function, and the warranty of the final product/service.
I am also referring to a quality constantly subjected to scrutiny, responsive to self-assessment, capable of guaranteeing the excellency of the processes, supported by a culture of permanent improvement, and, I insist, based on the engagement of all the partners. I am referring, in particular, to a concept of quality that lets us know clearly the degree of accomplishment in satisfying the needs and expectations of customers and partners, in improving the key processes, and in identifying the extent to which leaders are capable of personifying and communicating vision, mission, values and aims.
All this can be satisfactorily measured, today _ as is already being done in some pioneering institutions _ by adapting to higher education the principles of the main quality award systems used in business: the ISO 9000 registration procedures, in Europe; the methods of the Malcom Baldrige Award, in the United States; and the procedures of the Deming Prize, in Japan. In fact, the complementary focus of the three approaches let them be combined to cover different perspectives: accreditation and evaluation (i.e., curriculum analysis, program requirements, facilities analysis) using ISO 9000 registration procedures; customer satisfaction and retention (i.e., students, employers, parents, alumni, taxpayers) with the methods of the Malcom Baldrige Award; and institutional research and assessment (i.e., enrolment patterns, student progress, drop-out rates, recruitment activities) following the principles of the Deming prize (Izadi, 1996).
Information architecture
A university founded on the business paradigm, willing to build its success upon strategy and quality, necessarily needs to put a strategic information system at the service of its business model. This used to be an almost impossible task some years ago, as no ways existed to express a business model as an abstraction capable of leading to the architecture of an information system. At present, with consistent conceptual frameworks for the description of strategic information systems (Jelassi, 1994) and considerable knowledge of methods for converting business models into information architectures (Edwards, 1995), no insurmountable technical difficulties exist. As in many other endeavours of management and strategy, the main problem is now essentially of human nature. It requires, above all, in our case, the development of a culture of collective engagement and continuous improvement.
On the other hand, as universities extend into cyberspace, the campus itself gains a virtual dimension that must be taken into account when defining an information architecture. Apart from the formal approach that takes us from business model to strategic information system, we must now find ways of building into the information architecture the variety and liveliness of the emerging community habits. As the architects of the buildings and campuses of decades ago put all their mights in creating productive, stimulating, and, above all, humanized environments, the information architects of the present day must be able to confront, in the fascinating world of virtual communication, a much identical challenge.
Back to the legend of Phoenix
To sum up, I would like to stress my belief that strategy, quality and information architecture are the three key pillars of higher education in the advent of the twenty first century. None of them, however, is of any use without the other two. No strategy can lead anywhere without major concerns about total quality and supporting information architecture. No total quality can be achieved, in higher education, without a sound strategy and matching information architecture. Finally, no information architecture is of any use if it is not the result of a sound strategy and of a total concern for quality.
I might stop here, now! However, I think something should be added before we are fully done with the legend of Phoenix. If Phoenix is to be reborn, flames must be lit! The flames, according to the ancient myth, emerged from sunlight. The sunlight of our endeavour, I believe, is constructive dissatisfaction against the established paradigms! As Gary Hamel put it (Hamel, 1996), never has the world been more hospitable to revolutionaries and more hostile to incumbents. There is no point in "trying harder" within the old paradigms of higher education when the rules of the business are being rewritten! If higher education is to flourish again, it must be reborn. And, as when it was first born, a thousand years ago, the key partners must closely collaborate in the adventure. The difference is that the energy and creativity of youth can now be carefully combined with the maturity and wisdom of a long and glorious past.
References
(Berry, 1991) Berry, T.H. Managing the Total Quality Transformation, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991.
(Denning, 1996) Denning, Peter ‘Criticism of undergrad curricula justified’, Computer Research News Online, January 1996. (http://www.cra.org/CRN/html/9601/education/pjd.6_1_t.shtml)
(Edwards, 1995) Edwards, Chris, Ward, John, and Bytheway, Andy, The Essence of Information Systems (2nd edition), Prentice-Hall, 1995.
(Hamel, 1994) Hamel,Gary and Prahalad, C.K. Competing for the Future, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 1994.
(Hamel, 1996) Hamel,Gary ‘Strategy as Revolution’, Harvard Business Review, 74(4), July/August, 1996.
(Izadi, 1996) Izadi, M., Kashef, A.E., and Stadt, R.W. ‘Quality in higher education: lessons learned from the Baldrige award, Deming prize, and ISO 9000 registration’, Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, 33(2), 1996.
(Jelassi, 1994) Jelassi, T., ‘Strategic Information Systems: a Review of Some Conceptual Frameworks’, in Jelassi, T., European Casebook on Competing through Information Technology: Strategy and Implementation, Prentice Hall, Hemel Hempstead, 1994.
(Rüegg, 1996) Rüegg, Walter, Uma História da Universidade na Europa, Conselho de Reitores das Universidades Portuguesas e Fundaçăo Eng. António de Almeida, Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, Lisboa, 1996 (Original title: A History of the University in Europe, CRE, European Rectors Conference).
(White, 1990) White, John A. ‘TQM: It’s time, academia!’, EducatioNews, IEEE, 3(2), November 1990.