Rebirth, or Something Like It
May 19th, 2007 by Grokker
I abandoned this blog a year ago because blogging on my profession was difficult without my “no-boundaries-shooting-my-mouth-off” style of writing. But, being here at Faculty Academy 2007, I am compelled to start fresh.
We were just treated to a talk by Karen Stephenson on networking in corporate culture. She made clear so many dynamics that I experienced in the corporate world, and even more powerfully in the organizational world of higher education from the administrative perspective. Silos, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and networking.
Most talk around here since the new president came (an unceremoniously went) has been about breaking down silos. Technology itself, and the portal project we just finished, has this almost utopian mission to help do just that: democratize access to and control of information, thereby facilitating the breaking down of silos.
Still, even with brand new online tools, as in the analog world of paper, phone and fax, I’ve seen those who want the responsibility of managing and manipulating information, and those for whom it’s a burden. So the ideal of silo-busting seems difficult when people are still people, and hierarchies, are so invested in continuing to be who they are. Darn those people!
Back before I telecommuted, I would eat every day in the faculty staff dining room. I’d sit with all different people from day to day: administrative staff, plumbers from the physical plant, an occasional dean, and art professors. I just liked to know people since it made the job interesting. But, I was strangely alone in this habit. Most of the tables I joined were entrenched in terms of a rather consistent day-to-day population — even a consistent choice of table position in the room. So the experience was one of being some sort of human “free-radical” going in and messing with the DNA of otherwise stable cells.
All this is not to say “boy am I awesomely social, or what!” but rather can we expect the technology alone to change the way people work, to make them feel empowered to change tables, if we don’t also address the underlying culture that keeps them at the same tables, even in the same jobs, year after year.
The wisdom of Dr. Stephenson’s talk (insofar as I am even feebly equipped to understand it) seems to be that the underlying hierarchy does not need to change, or be transformed, by some cool technology. But, the technology’s place may be to capitalize on the networks that already exist, and strengthen them rather than just concentrating on breaking the silos, which are here to stay.
Tagging seems to do this, and Alan Levine’s talk about odd groups, and little apps that do little things, seems to speak to this. We join ideas through a network, and find like minds, but the technology becomes more and more transparent — as transparent as getting in your car and getting on the highway, neither of which existed 150 years ago. To phrase it better, the notion of the “killer app” as the embodiment of the ultimate technological solution for what ails us seems to be fading away in favor of a single person simply choosing the little apps (silos) that they want to utilize and tag (network OR hierarchy, or both, depending on what’s consuming them).
Our administrative systems, closed and “killer appy” in their scale and complexity, hold lots and lots of information about the person within the hierarchy of the institution. It seems that tagging, with the nodes being people, their departments/disciplines, and their little apps, would account for the networking component that can become the backbone of the notion of heterarchy.
Which gets to the Ronco, and it’s unique relationship between one’s current relationship to the institution, and then beyond graduation (or separation) when that relationship is no longer relevant, but the content produced during the active years remains a part of the body of work that defines the life and fleshes out that relationship as historical fact.
Viewed within this looser framework, technology could indeed be a key component in building heterarchy within the walls of the university. The rubber will meet the proverbial road in terms of the privacy of personal information and the notion of intellectual capital as currently defined. But, it seems that if technology is not going to transform everything, it sure is a necessary component to making that tranformation possible.
