Revolutionizing the Student Experience with Service Management

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EasyVista recently asked me to write about the evolution of service management in higher education. 

This is the second of four blogs on the topic of Transforming the University with IT Service Management. 

One of the keys to transforming the university is the move from multiple silos delivering services to finding ways to pull together single service areas. One of the most obvious of these is the call center. There is no reason for a student to have to call several different offices to solve an issue if the service management system is able to empower agents to handle any customer need.

The Modern, Tech Adept Student

Students have become more mobile and are completely comfortable with self-service tools. Users today have radically different needs from university IT than in the past and technology is partly to blame. They have grown up in a connected world with ubiquitous use of mobile phones and access to Wi-Fi. They are surprised, and even annoyed, when “technology” doesn’t work properly, or more correctly, or when what they need right now is not available at that moment (regardless of what device they are using). Being tech savvy consumers doesn’t mean those same students know what they “need” once they step foot onto the Campus. The challenge for IT is that unlike a traditional consumer, a student may not be fully aware of their needs or how to navigate the higher education experience. For example, a recent student survey at a large university indicated the number one concern students have is being able to access uninterrupted Wi-Fi from the parking lot to the classroom. From the university (and IT) perspective, uninterrupted Wi-Fi represents a very expensive proposition and is a much lower priority or concern.

Completely comfortable with mobile applications and technology, students are perfectly happy to use self-service tools like those provided by EasyVista. In fact, many prefer to use technology to mediate or replace human contact, making mobile apps ideal. Although students run the gamut from novice to bleeding edge, they all come with “consumerized” expectations. Students have an expectation of “here and now” based upon their experiences in their daily life. When they order something online, they want immediate delivery options whether picking it up in the store or receiving a delivery by the next day; they want to play a new game, it’s downloaded immediately; they want access to a new service, they can immediately signup and start using that service. On the other hand, if they need to get something done in their life “as a student” using the University system and it takes days for paperwork (physical or virtual) to flow through the system – it creates a disconnect between real life and student life. IT is closing the experience gap based upon the need for instantaneous access to the services students need at any time.

Grading Colleges on Success

University leadership is heavily focused on accountability for the success of the student both during their time in school and in their careers. This means that transforming the student experience—particularly those aspects that affect recruiting, retention and success—have very high priority. Delivering integrated, mobile-enabled, service management tools both improves the student experience and provides useful data for IT to ensure accountability (i.e. progress towards goals) is being well measured. With the federal government planning to rate colleges, and with legislators and parents worrying about cost, the pressure is on to create and provide metrics demonstrating “why Suzy just graduated with a mortgage-sized student loan and how that translates into the dollars she will need to pay back.” A final reason is more selfish. Universities coined the phrase “cradle to endowment” for a reason; It is important to cultivate both the donor and the life-long learner mentality. Once graduated, these same students become “prospects” for advanced degrees and season tickets.

Transforming Service Delivery in the University

So now the big question: How do we improve service management for students?

1. Mobile apps are a requirement for integrated IT services. IT departments need help deploying mobile apps and making information and data mobile aware. With resources in short supply, they are turning to service providers to help develop, manage and deploy these mobile applications, leveraging their economies of scale and commonalities in mobile app development.

2. Most service activities in higher education must be managed in common ways. This provides simplicity to the customer and reduces complexity for the service provider.

3. Apps must be intuitive and meet expectations on the first try. Student bodies are more diverse, more international, and more complex than ever before and being able to keep it simple while presenting the same service for different languages, cultures, and abilities is vital for success.

4. Universities cannot afford to have specialized help desks as they streamline and try to be more efficient. The same human or digital agent that solves the printer problem could be able to ensure a student’s parking issue is addressed, help them reserve a washing machine in the student laundry, or alert them to a financial aid issue. This requires not just great apps and strong CRM tools, but also great training and certification systems, while leveraging new social and crowdsourcing trends.

The Evolution from Higher Ed CIO to Chief Services Provider

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EasyVista recently asked me to write about the evolution of service management in higher education. The article below was originally published on their web site and on my LinkedIn page.

This is the first of four blogs on the topic of Transforming the University with IT Service Management.

Higher Education’s IT departments are facing a shifting paradigm driven by changes in their customer base and in the capabilities of the market. Students, faculty, and staff have not been just users of IT services for some time—they are service consumers who obtain services themselves and are savvy enough to pull in outside providers if their internal IT organization can’t keep up with their requirements. Likewise, these service providers are capable of rapid deployments without extensive ramp up times and large scale capital investments.

CIOs: Evolution or Extinction

These two outside forces, service consumers and service providers, are combining to dramatically increase pressure on CIOs whose organizations are often stuck in outdated business practices. CIOs must be experts in the delivery of those legacy infrastructures and other services they have not (or cannot yet) move to commodity providers. They also need to be skillful at sourcing—negotiating, contracting, executing and managing service delivery—because their users don’t care where the service comes from, they just need everything to work. Furthermore, the need for new and better technology solutions, particularly those that improve customer service and success, is dramatically increasing demand on CIOs—creating virtually unlimited project portfolios.

To compound this issue, the pace of change has accelerated through BYOD, BYOA, mobility and consumerization. These trends have dramatically changed the model for delivering technology services from a centralized IT organization pushing technology decisions out, to working with users to define those same services. IT is racing just to keep up with savvy business units (and consumers), many that are now making their own technology decisions, using budgets once controlled exclusively by the CIO and IT.

We’ve all seen the changes in the CIO role coming for some time. CIOs have to become adept at strategizing what should be insourced and what should be outsourced. More importantly, they must become extraordinarily good at building, managing, and sustaining relationships with customers, vendors and their own teams. The IT engine they build now has no room for delays and failures as universities and colleges are completely dependent on technology. The thing that once made CIOs special—a unique understanding of technology—gives way to a shared understanding and reliance with sophisticated consumers. The ability to “control” technology and provide value by being the technical custodian of institutional computing resources and data is quickly diminishing.

All Hail the Chief Services Provider

All this points to a change in the core business of the CIO. No longer concerned solely with IT operations and technology management, the modern CIO is shifting focus to sourcing—balancing internally and externally sourced technology. This integrated services focus is less about managing the underlying technology infrastructure and more about matching technology services to service consumers. This role might also no longer be limited to just technology services. For example, why should the institution run multiple service desks if one group can do all of them really well? The more focused IT becomes on service integration, management and delivery, the greater the value it offers over its traditional services, which have largely become commodity services.

This new role of Chief Services Provider will retain many of the core CIO skills because many of the services needed will remain firmly rooted in technology and require an enterprise strategic view that transcends individual business units. Key integration points in providing services, and hence key efficiencies, can best be created by someone who can pull the threads together strategically and ensure each new integrated service is designed, developed, deployed and managed, faster and at lower overall cost to the institution using the right vendor or internal service unit. Skills such as relationship management are now paramount to the success of the CIO, along with a deeper understanding of both sides of the IT value chain—service providers and service consumers. The future of the CIO and the IT organization is to be the bridge between service providers and service consumers, aligning institutional goals, demands on speed of access, and service provider technology. CIOs now need to be able to take a dynamic set of resources from the marketplace (or internally), integrate them, and provide services on demand—within days in some cases. And provide those services within an easy to use, self-service style application, available to everyone, regardless of the device being used.

Thoughts on the iPad Pro

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Some changes in how you work make the iPad Pro a great choice

I was very happy to receive an iPad Pro for Christmas from Mrs. Claus.  

I will skip a discussion of the iPad Pro’s limitations and comparisons to the Surface Pro – those have been generally well done all over the place and I concur with the analysis that the Surface Pro is a laptop trying to be a tablet and the iPad Pro is a tablet trying to be a laptop. Likewise, I think the content consumption abilities of the iPad are terrific. The key is whether it can be a producer of content beyond the occasional email.

I really do think the iPad Pro can replace (for the most part) a laptop – this does not mean it will be a laptop but rather that you can accomplish everything you typically need to do when using a laptop. I spent about a week using it as my primary device and I was pretty happy with it. But the key to making it useful as a content creation device is total reliance on the cloud to replace your hard drive which means a change in how you work on all devices.

Keyboard

I did not try the Apple Smart Keyboard ($169) because it looked sort of flimsy and similar to the Surface Pro keyboard which I have found to be awkward to use.  (sidebar – for Windows tablets, I much prefer the Dell Latitude 13 7350 which comes with a real keyboard when you want to use it in laptop mode).  Instead I bought the standard Apple Smart Cover ($59) which holds the device up at a comfortable angle and I used my trusty old Apple wireless keyboard with the iPad Pro.  

I found using a real keyboard to be very comfortable and I liked being able to put the iPad Pro a little further away and keep the keyboard nearer (or wherever I wanted it since it was wireless).  While this has been possible on the iPad Air (and earlier), the size of the Pro’s screen made a huge difference in usability for me.  With this setup, it feels indistinguishable from a laptop except for having to use the touchscreen instead of a mouse. Of course, you can’t really use it in your lap.

More than a Satellite

Because I work in technology, I have used almost every model of iPad over the years.  I’ve always liked the device but at its best, I’ve found it to be a satellite of my MacOS devices.  I love iOS on my iPhone, but I feel like my iPad’s should just be able to do more things.  

Two of those “more” things are multitasking and having an accessible file system.  

While multitasking(ish) functions have been available for a while on the iPad, it wasn’t until the iPad Pro’s screen real estate that you are actually able to use two apps side by side.  Being able to easily switch between open Apps has been available and useful for a while but the side by side (or swipe out) functionality was too small on the iPad Air. It feels a little like the when Apple debuted Multifinder in the late 1980s.  I do think there is something productivity-enhancing about not having a lot of windows open across several monitors though.

The accessible file system is a bit of an issue for my workflow.  I’m used to managing my files directly.  While there are cloud file systems such as Box or Microsoft’s OneDrive, they are cumbersome sometimes on iOS.  Microsoft frequently throws permission issues and both options require that whatever I was doing on my other computer have properly sync’d to the cloud.

Solution

The solution that worked the best for me was transitioning to Evernote.  This means a change in both workflow on my MacOS computers and in how I store files. To really take advantage of the iPad Pro as a content creation device, I need access to my data and that means that when I use any computing device, I have to use software that makes that content available everywhere.  As noted above, there are multiple ways of doing this but trying to graft an directory-based file system onto iOS is always going to feel Frankenstein-like.

Once I started opening Evernote as my first choice word processor instead of Apple’s Pages or Microsoft Word, things started to work very smoothly on the Pro. Evernote’s sync works better than what I found in the other tools and I can just copy files to Evernote if they are more complex than text.

The limitation, of course, is that Evernote does not do spreadsheets.  If I need a spreadsheet, I am back to cloud file systems like Box or Google’s gDocs. I have Excel and Numbers on my iPad – and iCloud has been serviceable for Apple software – but I’m not a heavy spreadsheet user.  Your mileage may vary.

Next steps

I have an Apple Pencil on order and I can’t wait to try that. In meetings, I find typing distracting and I don’t like the sense of being more focused on my screen than on my colleagues.  I am looking forward to how that works and of course, with Penultimate, I should be able to maintain my use of Evernote.

I will likely buy the Apple Smart Keyboard at some point for ease of use when traveling.

I intend to look into MacJournal for blogging on the iPad Pro since it has an iOS counterpart that appears to sync with the MacOS version.

Conclusion

I find the iPad Pro to be a very useful device and I can do almost everything I need to do on it — I have actually traveled without my laptop a few times and find that very liberating.  Changing my workflow is still a bit of a challenge but for the person whose primary activity is textual, I think using a cloud-based program such as Evernote is a helpful step.

As is often the case, the technology is the easy part.  It’s the human stuff that makes or breaks things.

World War Three

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So, fully meaning to be alarmist, the one thing that has been truest for me in IT this year is that the third world war is already being fought on the Internet. The bad guys are multiplying, becoming more professional and more sophisticated and more dangerous every day. Some are state-sponsored. Some are terrorists or NGO-sponsored. And some are just plain criminals. But they are out there. They are working 24×7. And they are attacking us millions of times a day.

You have already been hacked, p0wned and exfiltrated. You may not have discovered it but it has already happened to most sites. If you’re lucky, you’ve just been embarrassed. The bad guys are using social engineering, known vulnerabilities and our own inability to keep up with the volume of attacks to get us.

In my own planning for this, I’m looking at three primary strategies:

1) Create alliances. Our vendor partners see what is going on across a wider field of battle. They see when an attack hits fifty sites in the US. We see when it hits us or a friend. We need to take advantage of every shred of capability that exists out there.

2) Lower the threat profile. Ten years ago, we just put everything out on the Internet by default. Twenty years ago we were just ending the era of the walled garden (AOL, CompuServe) where everything you needed came from one provider inside their own network. A hybrid strategy is now required where only after careful risk assessment do we put things on the open Internet. The vast majority of our technology does not need to be exposed to the Internet at all.

3) Centralize. We’ve been steadily getting rid of departmental Web servers and email servers for years. We need to limit that not just to the servers but also to the services that have access to the Internet. Part of the issue is that relatively under-resourced IT departments are being overwhelmed. Continuing to allow redundant services and servers saps resources and creates additional attack vectors.

The Internet is a fantastic thing. But it’s become a very dangerous place and while I still enjoy it tremendously, we have to start being much more careful with our use of it.

I think it’s often poor writing to use highly dramatic military analogies. But this is a contest where the bad guys are winning, where we are constantly under attack and battling. I don’t think other analogies are quite as apt.

No one (well almost no one) takes security lightly anymore. But the game has changed and become far more intense with far bigger stakes. So, I’m using WW3 as the analogy until I find a better one.

Choosing kindness

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One of my leadership maxims is “we’re dealing with human beings.” I repeat it regularly to my leadership team because I want us to think in terms of the people we work with and not just in terms of goals and strategies and what must be done today. It is important for all of us to stop and remember that the people we are counting on need to be able to count on us and that real leadership is kind and humane. It is too often true that we must make hard choices and that we must deliver difficult news or honestly coach someone about their performance. But it never needs to be delivered unkindly. We have all been on the other end of fierce comments, bad news and harsh remarks. We didn’t like it when we were the target and we must be certain that we choose to be better than that.

How we respond to things, how we treat people, all of our offhand remarks communicate something about us as leaders and about our values. It is very easy to fall into making snarky remarks or criticizing things that happened in the past. Cynicism comes all too easily to our minds. However, you can never tell whose feelings you might step on. It is very easy to criticize the bearer of bad news or the person who is having a hard time getting things done. And those are often opportunity moments where you can help someone up or tear someone down.

I see real kindness in my collegial relationships, both within my employer and with my colleagues around the country. But all too often I see people give into cynicism about people above them in the org chart, or about processes and motives of others. It is so easy to make the quick joke at someone’s expense or to not respond when someone expresses negative opinions about people, organizations and opportunities.

A long time ago I read The Power of Positive Thinking. I highly recommend it and still draw on it as I try to lead with good cheer and optimism. I believe optimism is a choice. I likewise believe kindness is a choice and one that we as leaders must choose. We must overcome the temptation to criticize unkindly and focus on how we want to be treated and the kind of culture we want to create in our organizations.

We succeed or fail based on how our teams perform. We spend more time with our colleagues than anyone but our families. And we can build great human relationships or we can just get some things done and go home. At the core of this is kindness. If we choose kindness everyday, we not only build strong relationships and loyalty to each other, we may just get a reward ourselves in being part of a really special team.

It’s your choice.

Connecting to the campus

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One of the really wonderful privileges I have in my current role is that I get to participate in many of the ceremonial duties of campus leadership. This includes things like graduations, and today’s event, convocation. It is kind of fun to put on regalia from time to time and it is particularly good to get to be a part of the academic life of our campus.

I think for CIO’s, it is easy to disconnect and make every day about whether the systems are running and the help desk is answering calls and all the enormous details of our daily work lives. Sometimes we cannot afford not to be that focused – our ministerial duties necessarily trump the ceremonial ones at times.

But I also think it is important to connect to what is happening on campus. To see and talk to our students and to let them see that we care about what they are doing. It’s a privilege to sit on the stage at graduation. It’s a lot of fun to see the jazz ensemble and the marching band and the steppers joyfully kick off the semester.

More importantly, it is a good thing to remind ourselves of why we are here. It is easy to think of everyone as “users” and “customers” but it is much better to see how awesome our students are and to recommit ourselves to their educations being successful, not just ensuring we are doing a great job as plumbers and strategists.

BYON

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(Originally posted June 24, 2012 on my defunct Tulane blog “Texan at Tulane”)

So I have been talking with colleagues about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) – the buzzword trend of customers who have their own mobile device or such coming to campus.  Some of them want to control the customer through policy or dictate.  It is sort of in our DNA as IT folks that we want to build systems that can do things automatically and we certainly can’t update a DAT file without controlling the network, what devices are allowed on it and what permissions and security the customer must give over to us before they can be on our networks.

This is remnant thinking from times bygone.

Our industry changes in weeks and months now.  We’re in (pick your alternate bad analogy) an era where the tectonic plates are shifting so fast that we can’t really wrap our brain around the new technology before the next technology comes up.  Recently I read an article that argued that the era of strategic planning was over because there isn’t time.

I say this as someone who remembers green bar paper and the state of our industry 30 years ago when I started in IT.  And I know there are a lot of people with better and older technology stories than mine still out there.

Today I was debating something about cell phones with one of colleagues.  He was clinging to the notion that his cell phone number was somehow more private, more personal, more HIS, than his home number.  He has no problem providing his home number to his employer but he is adamant that he does not have to give me his cell number.  And I responded that, in 1992, when I was paying 34 cents a minute, I felt strongly that I got to decide who had the number.  But today, it’s silliness.  Everyone has a cell phone.  The paradigm has shifted (and probably a decade ago).  Landline phones are phasing out, you may pay less for the cell phone and many people just have a cell phone.  It isn’t the same anymore. I did concede that isn’t about the device – it is about access.  I need to know I can reach him when I need to.  I could care less which phone it is.

The network is the foundational element to our IT worlds.  It is also the source of most of our need to control our customers.  But the time is rapidly coming where Bring Your Own Network (BYON) will be the rule, not the exception.  Our customers won’t just bring their own device – they will bring their own network and not care about ours.  Some already do with 3G and 4G wireless devices.  Cellular vendors, at least in urban areas, will be able to overlay our campuses without needing our permission (although we can reach friendly agreements to make sure enough antennas exist to ensure service in difficult or high demand locations).

I rarely bother to connect my iPhone to the WiFi network unless I need something only accessible via the WiFi network (such as larger downloads). Gartner predicts wireless networking will be fast enough and ubiquitous enough in a few years that no one will even think in terms of landlines or network speeds.  So the customer won’t care about our network. The control point for security purposes will be the server edge, not the network edge.

Another thing that goes away is our sense of our right to access someone’s device. We expect to be able to run clients that tell us about their computers. We expect to be able to require access that allows us to push updates onto their computers.  We expect to get their consent to agree to our policies before they are allowed on our networks.

The key though, is that the idea of control is already gone as it applies to our customers.  We may cling to the illusion that we can control them.  We may think there is a reason we need to.  But that horse is out the barn door.  We just haven’t checked the barn lately.  This means we’re going to need to make value propositions and ask people for permission, not demand consent.

We need to recognize the cloud, the BYO device, the BYO network are here now.  We have to find value we can provide in this environment or it will go from a transformative wave to a destructive wave.  We have to understand that the customer is at the center of the equation, not the user on the perimeter of the technical world we run.  We serve them and we have to find ways to empower them, to allow them to access our services when they provide value, not look for ways to ensure our needs – encryption, management, control, load balancing, whatever – are achieved through outmoded control models.

Loving and Hating the Cloud

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(originally published on my defunct Tulane blog, Texan at Tulane on January 01, 2012)

So I have a love/hate relationship with the cloud.

I love the potential. I hate the poor implementations. And when I say “poor” that means “doesn’t work the way I think it should work.” I am, as an N of 1, the expert in all things I would like.

So this morning I was trying to get a new playlist on my iPhone so I could listen to some encouraging music while I got my lazy self out to walk. And when I added a song to the playlist that was “ineligible” for iTunes Match, I got a dialog box that said the playlist could not be stored in the cloud.

“No problem” I thought. “I’ll just keep it on the phone with the other songs I sync directly.”

And then, in the dim recesses of my brain, I realized that probably meant something more significant than I realized at first glance and when I started poking around, I discovered that I could not choose what to sync any more because all the music on my iPhone was coming from iCloud. In fact, there was no music actually on the phone anymore. (or so it appears at this moment…I actually gave up and went for my walk).

So I’m currently really disenamoured of iTunes Match because I want to have the music I choose to keep _on_ the iPhone actually on the phone and not streamed AND have access to the REST of my music library via stream. If I have to choose between local or streamed access on a mobile device, I’ll pick local.

(sidebar: Of course, my friend Hunter argues with me constantly about my befuddled refusal to adopt gestures on my Mac but that’s another nattering.)

And therein lies why I hate the cloud. I want things when I want them. I’m fine with using Box for archives (and, in truth, I like being able to archive offline) but I prefer Dropbox’s implementation where the files are actually ON the computer and sync’d between the six or seven or eight computers I might be using as well as the 3 iOS devices I use. Likewise, when it works I LOVE Microsoft’s Mesh (although it hasn’t worked for me since Lion came out) and Evernote also gets this paradigm of now and cloud.

I loved the idea of iCloud producing an always sync’d word processing document without saving. (I haven’t updated yet because I like several features of MobileMe that are dying and don’t want to upgrade 3 laptops that can’t go to Lion yet). I use Gmail, Google Docs and Live@Edu and love the functionality but I want to be able to designate which things maintain local copies (without giving up the cloud functionality) and which don’t…not have the service decide for me.

Microsoft gets this. Google sort of does. Apple does not – yet. And I know I’m probably the only one who cares about it. I hate to critique Apple because for the most part, I think they’re awesome. But I really was annoyed that I spent my morning walk composing this in my head instead of listening to some fun music.