Over on Liberty Road, Kevin has asked for some input while he prepares for the upcoming ITS All-staff meeting. He is looking for feedback on his four themes.
I’d like to ask that you tell me what you have done personally, seen personally; done in your group, unit, or organization or seen in your group, unit, or organization; that has been in support of one of the themes, some of the themes or all of the themes. How have you changed your approach to what you do in light of a theme or themes? How has your group changed its approach?
I gave one example from my experience in the comments. I had more to say, but wanted to give others an opportunity to talk. Instead, I thought I would continue the conversation here.
My comment was on the theme, “IT at Penn State is larger than ITS,” but I had another recent breakthrough on some of the other themes.
The other day, Phil Coolick and I were discussing a potential new service. We are in Telecommunications and Networking Services so naturally, it involved telecommunications and networks. This particular idea is very exciting, but also very complicated, and involves many components that are neither telecommunications nor networks.
I think we do telecommunications and networks well. Other areas, like middleware, content management, and so on… not so much. However, we felt we needed to deliver a fully formed service and this service involved those areas.
Traditionally we lived in a stovepipe, to use the local vernacular. In business, they call this vertical integration. Here is a snippet from what Wikipedia has to say about vertical integration:
In microeconomics and strategic management, the term vertical integration describes a style of ownership and control.
That is what it comes down to: ownership and control. Under the old guard, that was the motto. Now, however, Kevin asks us to “Put the core business of Penn State in the center of service design and delivery.” If we do that, we see that we are not individual corporations trying to create service monopolies selling to customers. We are part of a support group within an organization whose mission is teaching, research, and service. In that light the measure of our success is not, “How big is our kingdom?” but rather, “How well do we support the mission of the University?”
As we were going through the discussion of this potential new service, Phil was adamant that we not take on the responsibility for parts that were outside our area of expertise. (I’ll have to admit that I had simply assumed we would be doing them.) In that context, it was instantly clear that if we limited our fully formed service to be the telecommunications and networking aspect — the data link through application layers of the TCP/IP stack — that we could assure that we could do it well.
However, that would leave us with only part of a useable service. What to do? What to do? Wait a moment… What if we leverage the strength of being ITS? Perhaps, rather than inventing another wheel, we might find some group within ITS that already has wheels. We thought about the people we knew, made a few phone calls, and lo-and-behold, there were a variety of places that might provide the middleware part of our solution. In fact, with the answers to a few more questions, it was fairly simple to make sure that the right person was involved with the discussion.
That left us with the content management portion of the service. It did not seem to us that there was anyone within ITS that would be appropriate for this role. Wait again… What other tools have we been given? What if we remember that IT at Penn State is larger than ITS? Of course, if it had been a snake it would have bit us. Who better to manage the content then the IT folks in the customer’s shop? After all, they were the ones that instigated this in the first place.
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We had our complete service
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We were doing what we were good at and letting others do what they were good at
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We put the core business of Penn State in the center of service design and delivery
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We leveraged the strength of being ITS
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We remembered that IT at Penn State is larger than ITS
While it is too early to tell whether this nascent service will succeed — we are still in the talking phase, after all — I do recognize that the themes have already had a profound effect on the way we think and act. Thank you for that.
Labels: leadership
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