Strategy and Strategic it Planning

Strategy and Strategic it Planning

How ANU's and UCB's strategic it plans stack up against the Baldrige criteria for assessing strategic planning

In comparing the strategic it plans of the Australian National University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, similarities and differences become quickly evident. When the Criteria for Performance Excellence (2007) are taken into account in conjunction with comparing each strategic plan, the variation in depth of commitment to customers (end users of the systems) needs both today and into the future, and the role of Web Services and XML to streamline availability of data to the many applications that students rely on was much more evident on the University of Colorado at Boulder plan. Further, the assumptions of how educational technology, web-based student services, the role of the middleware layer in ensuring enterprise application integration (EAI) between systems, and the role of systems and it governance were also more prevalent in the University of Colorado at Boulder plan. The Australian plan however did focus on how to streamline help desk and support processes to better serve users who were in need of assistance.

Baldbridge Criteria for Performance Excellence

In 2007 the Baldrige National Quality Program specifically calls out organizational performance areas including product and service outcomes, customer0-focused outcomes, financial and market outcomes, workforce-focused outcomes, process effectiveness outcomes and leadership outcomes. These criteria clearly require a high degree of analytics and a level of process and system integration that makes it possible to track these key indicators to begin with. In the context of reporting systems that could potential track these performance areas and therefore begin to plan a quality improvement strategy to win a Baldrige Award, both universities do mention analytics, yet University of Colorado at Boulder again has more of an advantage in that it defines a series of four Central Services that include an it Four-Tier Support Model which includes analytics and the use of metrics of performance to measure overall effectiveness in terms of serving users. The Australian National University also has a support model, and there are specific measures of performance present, yet the University of Colorado at Boulder plan definitely has a more integrative aspect to the systems and reporting necessary to attain Baldrige level quality.

The Essence of any Strategic Plan: Goal Alignment and Agility

As the Baldrige Award requirements also state, for any organization to attain the level of performance on goal alignment of it strategies and resources to the broader, more strategic objectives of delivering exceptionally high levels of it service while at the same time looking specifically at the massive amounts of change it is bringing into each of these educational institutions. On this specific attribute, both plans are deficient in that they fail to clearly show a connection between broader strategic objectives for service and the metrics of performance that will be used for attaining them.

On the issue of being non-prescriptive and adaptable from an organizational perspective, in short, on how agile these organizations are, which is another key requirement from the Baldrige requirements section of the document cited earlier in this paper, both universities fall short. While each have escalation models for managing complaints, and each have a series of processes for managing services requests, neither of these organizations have structures in place organizationally to allow for an adaptable services unit to quickly be formed and then be disbanded. This attribute of a service-oriented organizational structure is a key requirement of Baldrige because it ensures responsiveness to the users served, and on this point there would need to be business process management and business process reengineering completed in both universities if this requirement is going to be fulfilled.

Goal-based diagnosis

In addition to the need to have organizational structures that are agile enough to quickly form interrelationships to solve emerging customer problems there is a corresponding need to also have a goal-based diagnosis methodology in place. According to the Criteria for Performance Excellence (2007) there are seven categories that form the basis for 18 criteria items, distributed throughout the areas of Leadership, Strategic Planning, Customer and Market Focus, Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management, Workforce Focus, Process Management, and Results. While the point has been made earlier that an entirely new approach to managing the tracking of these variables requires high degrees of process and system integration, there is also the need to completely modify how the universities operate in response to the demands placed on their it departments. It is not simply a strategy of selecting these 18 specific criteria and working to create high scores on each. Rather it is the fundamental re-shaping of the it cultures at these specific universities to make the alignment of results consistent with the variables and their measurements. Only then can either university hope to consistently deliver the level of service, have the transparency of processes, and create the level of agility necessary to win a Baldrige Award. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of all for either university as there is no "one and done" approach to making this happen; it has to be a gradual and steady change if it is going to last and deliver a level of consistent performance that will be reflected in the metrics used to track progress.

Making Change Last

Underscoring the fact that on many of the current Baldrige criteria both universities are deficient, there is the added challenge of changing how part-time, full-time and student temporary assistants manage the change process itself. In studying the effects of it system changes on the performance of departments