| | OCTOBER 20188CIOReviewI've noticed IT people don't particularly like high-level, fluffy discussions. They'd rather hear specific use cases. So I'm going to do both in this article, start with the use cases and then work up to a broad view of collaboration for the good of higher education. Collaboration. It's one of those words that if you ask ten people what it means, you get eleven different definitions. I'm going to define a few simple use cases to illustrate what I mean by collaboration and how the University of California has thought about it. I contend all three are reasonable arguments for why collaboration makes sense.· Use case 1: You and I work together to come up with a solution. By leveraging each others' strengths, the solution is better than each one of us could have come up with individually· Use case 2: You and I work together to come up with a solution that gets finished and is in place for users faster because we've shared the burden of time and resources· Use case 3: You have a great solution and I don't. I work with you to adapt your solution to my environment, which is a much easier and cheaper path than if I tried to do it on my ownTo be sure, I haven't spent my whole career in higher education ­ just four years ­ and many still consider me a newbie. But that gives me a somewhat neutral perspective. And one of my observations is I hear people say they're so busy they don't have time to do anything beyond their regular job. But they certainly have time to reinvent the wheel. They have time to solve a problem that has been solved many times over, and in many places. I find this not only ironic but also, dare I say, moronic? How, in such a financially constrained industry can we justify such a wasteful mindset? Are we really so unique that my problem for classroom assignments is different from yours, or your need for a grant database is different from mine? This is not a uniqueness issue. This is a mindset issue.Collaboration would be much more effective for us in higher ed if we challenged the fundamental paradigm about needing to be unique. At the University of California, we are a living experiment in collaboration ­ a university system made up of ten campuses and six health systems, each with its own CIO and IT functions. At each of our campuses, IT functions exist not only in a central IT unit but also across the campus in the academic and other departments.This broadly defined IT community counts 7500 people. That's right ­ 7500 people who come to the university every day to make a difference for our students, faculty, staff, and each other. I see that as 7500 opportunities, and when I joined UC, I asked a somewhat novel but simple question: What if these 7500 people had the ability to leverage the collective knowledge and experience of our community, and so could deliver increased value to the mission at unparalleled speeds? That has become our grand experiment ­ find ways to answer questions more quickly, find for our problems the solutions that already exist.By Tom Andriola, CIO, University of California SystemWHY COLLABORATION MATTERS IN HIGHER EDUCATIONTom Andriola
< Page 7 | Page 9 >