Ref: 042501
Environmental screening is essential to strategic planning. It is incumbent upon information resource professionals, particularly those in management and leadership positions, to scan their environment regularly. Part of the CAUSE mission--and the deliberations of the Board of Directors--is to aid that process.
It is instructive to look at the environmental factors identified by the Board
last year and set out in the November 1996 CAUSE Strategic Plan, and compare
them to the factors that were discussed by the Board in March. Less than a
year ago there were six:
* information technology organizations in a state of siege;
* pressures to reflect an increasingly diverse society;
* survival through institutional cooperation;
* extra-institutional pressures for accountability and for access to
affordable, quality education;
* burgeoning ethical and legal issues raised by networked information
publication and use, as well as the behavior of network users;
* and the effects on and influences on scholarly communication using
electronic media.
Another essential ingredient of strategic planning is awareness and acknowledgment of the emotional climate in which we do our scanning. When we looked a year ago, we were overwhelmed by what we saw and what we were experiencing. I am especially struck by the use of words such as "survival" and "siege." It tells us that a year ago, and perhaps for longer, many of us felt besieged: threatened, defensive, possibly even frozen in place, only just coping, not very hopeful, out of control. As a result, our view was profession centric.
Newly Identified Environmental Factors
This year, in March, the CAUSE Board looked again and this time identified four
factors:
(1) It is higher education that is under pressure for accountability,
affordability, access, diversity, productivity, service (especially to K-12
educational reform), and seeking shared solutions. These are not the sole
province of information resources management. We have allies, both within our
institutions and among them, who are also searching for partners with whom to
share the load and the solutions.
(2) We recognize that our traditional technology support infrastructure is no
longer adequate nor scaleable to meet expectations for change. Scalability
requires partnering, inclusiveness, malleability of boundaries.
(3) The barriers to making full use of information resources have shifted.
Technology is no longer the limiting factor. Now, more often than not,
institutional culture and practice are the inhibitors or catalysts for
change.
(4) The last factor is the cycle of infusion and diffusion of information
resources that, at the national level, has led associations whose focus has
been on discrete constituencies to discover their common agendas and seek
greater coherence. On our campuses, various constituencies are discovering
issues related to information, with varying levels of understanding of their
complexity and common elements.
Clearly our outlook has changed. A year ago we saw ourselves potentially at the mercy of our environment. Now we know that not only can we be actors upon it, but we are an integral part of the whole from which strength and progress can emerge.
There is no one path forward. Institutions will find or adopt those ways that use their strengths and valued attributes. Collaboration will provide for those needs that only scale can achieve.
We are on the threshold of unprecedented diversity in institutions and educational models for which information technologies are a diverse and strategic resource.
Copyright EUNIS 1997 Y.E.