Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Brian McDonald, Founder of MOR Associates. Brian may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
Beyond Efficiency: IT Integration’s Enduring Value
Throughout this series on integrating administrative units in higher education, we have explored the practical dimensions of these complex transformation initiatives. The articles have examined:
Collectively, these articles have focused on a fundamental question:
How can leaders increase the likelihood that an integration will be successful?
Yet stepping back from these experiences suggests an even more important question:
Why integrate in the first place?
The most common answers – many of which surfaced in the University of Nebraska example – are familiar and entirely valid. Integration can reduce duplication, improve efficiency, strengthen cybersecurity, standardize enterprise services, optimize institutional spending, and enhance service delivery. These outcomes provide a necessary rationale for undertaking the work.
But they are best understood as first-order outcomes: the immediate and visible benefits that result from bringing people, services, and technologies together.
When leaders get up on the balcony, second-order outcomes begin to come into view. As people learn to work across organizational boundaries, make enterprise decisions, share expertise, and adapt collectively to changing circumstances, they develop something far more valuable than a new organizational structure. They build greater institutional capability.
Integration builds capability because it gives people repeated experience working across boundaries. It considers the needs of the enterprise, sharing expertise, and responding collectively to new challenges. Over time, these experiences increase the institution’s capacity to deliver greater value and respond more effectively to needs that cannot yet be anticipated.
The Distinction Between Capability and Capacity
- Capability is what an organization has learned to do: leverage talent, collaborate across boundaries, make enterprise decisions, innovate, adapt, and continuously improve.
- Capacity is what that capability enables the organization to accomplish: deliver greater value, execute more effectively, increase resilience, steward resources more wisely, and provide stronger support for its mission.
Viewed through this lens, the larger purpose of integration is not simply to create a more efficient organization. It is to help the institution become more capable and, as a result, expand its capacity to fulfill its mission.
A Broader Field for Talent
When people working in smaller local units become part of a university-wide organization, their perspective can begin to change. They gain greater exposure to institutional priorities and develop a broader understanding of what is in the best interest of the university as a whole.
These staff may also gain access to opportunities that were not available in their previous settings. They can join cross-institutional task forces, explore different roles, learn new technologies, and become part of a larger professional community. People whose specialized talents had previously been isolated within distributed units can apply their expertise more broadly and contribute at an institutional scale.
The university becomes a larger playing field for people who want to stretch, contribute, and step into new opportunities.
What becomes possible when expertise previously confined to one school, department, or administrative unit becomes available to the entire institution? What might people contribute if they could see and pursue opportunities beyond their immediate organizational boundaries?
Steve Fleagle, who recently retired as the University of Iowa’s CIO shared, “We had many people who contributed at an institutional level. Some never knew they wanted to do something like that until the opportunity was presented to them. We also had many people change roles – there were career paths available to them that they hadn’t seen before. Another area we observed was the learning and growth of people who had been siloed- and this went both ways. They could see how colleagues were tackling similar problems and learn from them and they also had clever solutions that could be shared with others. Sometimes they didn’t even know how clever their solutions were, but they appreciated the recognition from their peers.”
By intentionally creating these opportunities, leaders can enlarge the institution’s talent pool while also increasing its overall capability. Integration becomes not only an organizational initiative but also a strategy for developing, connecting, and retaining talent.
Greater Understanding Across Boundaries
The learning moves in both directions.
People joining the larger organization develop a broader enterprise perspective. At the same time, those working in central units gain a deeper understanding of the distinctive needs of schools, departments, researchers, faculty, and students.
Those providing enterprise services have an opportunity to get closer to the core missions of teaching, learning, and research. They can see more clearly how common platforms and stronger security practices must sometimes be adapted to support specialized work – particularly in areas such as cutting-edge research.
The result is not simply better coordination. It is better judgment. People make better decisions because they can see more of the institution and understand perspectives beyond their own organizational setting.
Redirecting Resources Toward Emerging Priorities
As one CIO at a Big Ten university observed:
“Our university has enough funding for IT. We just don’t have it deployed in a way that optimizes the entire spend.”
This statement identifies one of the central opportunities created by integration. The issue is not always whether the university has sufficient resources. It may be whether those resources are organized and deployed in ways that generate the greatest institutional value.
When a central organization expands by bringing together several hundred people, leaders gain a clearer view of the institution’s collective expertise, duplicated work, service gaps, and emerging needs. That visibility can make it possible to redirect resources toward higher-priority work.
At one institution, integration enabled the creation of a data analytics unit that produced dashboards stakeholders had identified as critical to their work. At another, bringing together multiple units providing web services reduced fragmentation. Web services became more consistent and better aligned with the university’s brand, while some employees were able to move into higher-value roles.
Similar opportunities are emerging in research computing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data governance, and other areas of increasing institutional importance. Integration can enable universities to address these priorities by reconsidering how existing talent is deployed.
What new needs could an institution address if duplicated work were consolidated? What might become possible if talented people were freed to contribute to emerging priorities? How could those opportunities enhance both institutional performance and individual careers?
These are second-order outcomes because they extend beyond the savings or efficiencies initially used to justify the integration. They represent the institution’s increased ability to redirect its resources as priorities change.
How Organizations Learn
Leadership is learned through application, not simply through the transfer of knowledge. Concepts and frameworks may provide guidance, but the capability to lead develops through experience – by confronting meaningful challenges, trying new approaches, reflecting on the results, and gradually building new habits.
This principle has long shaped MOR’s approach to leadership development. It also applies to organizations.
Institutions do not become integrated simply because leaders announce a new organizational design or redraw reporting relationships. They become integrated as people learn, through experience, how to work together differently.
People develop shared approaches to solving problems, making decisions, stewarding resources, and advancing the institution’s mission. They discover how to work through competing interests, reconcile enterprise priorities with local needs, and draw on expertise from across the university.
As these new behaviors are practiced and reinforced, they become the organization’s new normal. What begins as a series of individual experiences and collaborative practices can eventually become part of the institution’s culture – a culture in which people more readily work across boundaries and apply their collective expertise in service of the university.
This is how integration creates capability. The organization learns by doing.
Preparing the Institution for What Comes Next
Leaders are responsible not only for addressing today’s challenges but also for positioning their organizations to remain successful in an ever-changing world.
The context for higher education will continue to be shaped by forces that cannot be fully predicted. Institutions that know how to collaborate across organizational boundaries, redirect their resources, learn from experience, and continuously improve will be better prepared for whatever comes next. They will possess not only the resources required to respond, but also the relationships, habits, and collective confidence needed to act.
Integration is not the destination. It is the means by which institutions expand their capacity to deliver on their missions and strengthen their ability to keep learning and evolving.
The true legacy of successful IT integration outcomes in higher education is not simply that the organization is structured differently. It is that the institution is fundamentally better equipped to create value, respond to change, and meet the challenges of the future.
In which capability do you see the most opportunity for your organization?
Last week, we asked which you would most like us to explore more in a future Tuesday Reading.
- 78% said Connecting With the Community
- 11% said From Consensus to Decision-Making
- 7% said Finding Your North Star
- 4% said Culture as Catalyst
Well, there is a clear front-runner topic! Look for more on that in the months ahead. And, if you feel you have especially relevant experience you could offer this community on one of these topics, please reply to this reading and it would be great to explore that with you.