Databus Issue: 2003 3 07/15/2003
Meeting Expectations
Mike Caskey President“A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.” -- Mark Twain
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Occasionally, I peruse some of the information technology industry magazines, which helps me to stay abreast of ideas and trends in the field. One of the most prominent themes of late is to insist on full user community participation in IT projects, which in turn helps gain “buy in” and support from those users for IT. One COMPUTERWORLD issue had an article suggesting that IT has work to do on its image. That same issue also had a couple of articles that stressed the pervasiveness of IT in today’s world and the impact that has on the perception of IT in the workplace. I believe these three themes or ideas are worth a little closer look.
It may be stating the obvious to say that IT is pervasive. It’s everywhere. PCs are on desks, chips are imbedded in equipment, toasters, and leisure equipment, and your automobile has more MIPS than ENIAC had. In fact, you might even say that it is commonplace. It’s so commonplace that information technology is even in great evidence in the K-12 environment from administrative systems to e-mail, the Internet, labs and classrooms. And this is probably not lost on your superintendent.
All right, so the superintendent is aware if IT. Is the superintendent also aware of any IT project delays or cost overruns? How visible is the IT budget? Since IT is everywhere, it is hard to conceive of a project that doesn’t have some IT component. It’s also likely that any project difficulties will come back to haunt IT, deserved or not. The pervasiveness brings high visibility, making IT an easy target. Plus, as IT has been deployed, proponents have extolled the virtues of technology citing an increasing value for a decreasing cost. Unfortunately, the performance does not always meet the expectation, so we may have a little image polishing to do.
But we do have, at least potentially, a valuable resource to help counteract some of the negative aspects of IT deployment -- our partners, the users. Why is technology everywhere? Because it can be -- and is -- used to help improve the performance of our duties. If we really partner with our customers and users to provide these efficiencies and added capabilities, while keeping them involved in the development and on-going maintenance and operation of the IT infrastructure, we will develop proponents instead of opponents.
Since IT has its “fingers in most of the pies” and is no longer a fad, now is the time to start managing the expectations for IT. If you examine project management methodologies, you will find the usual “devices” for keeping the project on track, but you will also find a communications component that aims at making sure that any and all participants, active or passive, will be notified of project progress, including changes which impact the final outcome. This is an example of managing not only a project, but more importantly, of managing expectations. If you keep your customers immersed (yes, I said immersed, not just involved) in the technology projects, reasonable expectations should be the result, and the meeting of those reasonable expectations should be the outcome.
The theme of this issue is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and I’m sure you will gain a great deal of insight into developing and using TCO metrics from this issue of the CETPA Databus. The information provided by TCO can be a valuable tool in assisting you to avoid unreasonable expectations. As Yogi Berra said, “You got to be careful if you don\'t know where you\'re going, because you might not get there”. (I just can’t resist a good Yogi quote.) We want everyone to know where we are going and what it will take to get there so that results meet expectations.
