Presented to EDUCA ONLINE, Berlin, December 1998

This paper summarises and reflects upon a series of models, concepts and ideas that the authors have found of use in appreciating the organisational (rather than technological) issues involved when deploying Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and ICT projects in a university business school. Experimenting, piloting and rolling out ICT based applications in the Open University Business School (OUBS), a very large scale high quality distance management education provider, have found to be much more about organisational transformation than about media choice. Plans and strategies for embedding ICT in the complex interactive teaching methodologies in OUBS are shared as a case study of the application of the change process models.

Burton Clark's recent study study reports on 5 universities that deliberately & collectively attempted, during 1980s and 90s (i.e. over a decade or more) to become more innovative, enterprising & entrepreneurial (in both process and outcome), with however strong academic values. Five elements were identified as:

• Greater managerial capacity, quicker, more flexible, more focussed on change, includes central managerial groups and academic faculties, reconciliation between new managerial values and traditional academic ones

• Need greater systematic capacity to steer

• Actively seeking resources and pathways, foci and niches

• Coherence built through entrepreneurial actions and presentation to outside world

1. Expanded Developmental Periphery

• Units that cross traditional boundaries

• Links up with outside groups and organisations

• Focus on industrial contact, knowledge transfer, intellectual property development

• Alumni affairs

• Interdisciplinary projects and research centres

• Organisational structures to support creativity

• Outreach units (often temporary/easily disbanded)

• "core university" into "distributed" university where knowledge is more applications generated and focussed

1. Diversified Funding Base

• Greater financial resources and especially discretionary funds

• Step up of raising money from research councils and similar

• Widening and deepening portfolio of 3^rd stream income wide variety of sources (but new limits need defining around an expanded base beyond which demands will not be met)

2. Stimulated Academic Heartland

• "heart" still found in academic departments, new and old

• Acceptance and involvement by these of organisational transformation

• Blend with new managerial approaches

• High level of acceptance of entrepreneurial change even where traditionally, e.g. in science, knowledge generation had dominated (educational as well as economic value needs seeking)

• Academic norm always close to the surface and articulated

• Academic excellence and the imaginative generation of revenue

1. Integrated Entrepreneurial Culture

• Work culture that embraces change and becomes elaborated into system of organisational beliefs and creates institutional identity

• Institutional ideas to be successful must spread among many participants and link up with other ideas, (maybe through pilots which become symbolic), become embedded in structures and processes, become part of organisational beliefs

Model 1: classic bureaucracy, blueprinted functional departments, run from the top, rules, regulations, job descriptions and controls. Works like a machine and efficiently- so long as no change! No mandate to solve or manage change. Problems work their up to CEO's desk. S/he gets overloaded and appoints top management team; they deal with problems leaving others to continue routine (Model 2).

Model 2: works OK for moderate amounts of change. But top team gets overloaded with many operational and strategic decisions and meetings.

Model 3: Interdepartmental or project teams are formed. Routine work conducted through hierarchies, problems and projects to teams for investigation and action. Teams often fail to take of because of bureaucratic structure. Many projects, many meetings, many "spinning wheels". Team members represent the functional departments i.e. "sit on" committees and teams etc. . They have dual loyalties. Real power, career progression with department heads. May be delay whilst consult and report back. If issues are controversial get pushed up the line again. More and more training for teams is not necessarily the answer. Therefore only relatively minor change issues are dealt with, and slowly.

I think many of us working in universities and trying to introduce new, sometimes radical ideas and processes recognise this model?

Model 4: the matrix organisation – but with equal weighting given in terms of power to functions and task/project teams. Project heads influence rewards and careers. Project teams become true driving forces behind innovation

Model 5: of highly innovative SMEs. People work on one or two projects that occupy most of their time and shift projects as they complete. Ideal for rapid change. Focus on teamwork, innovation. Functional departments are support to the teams. Controlled by management team at the centre through strategy and resources.

Model 6: Little physical entity or resources – subcontracting network with organisation at the centre. Typical of say, fashion industry- but perhaps like the International University in the US?)

• Study of 15 change agents in education including OU.

• Achieving change must be relevant to the context - generic models don't apply.
• Change is a process not an event
• Special complication in HE as a managerial context because objectives hard to define and measure, purposes conflict, students as "outputs" or clients?, learning process built on personal relationships

1. They first become aware of the environmental impetus impacting on the institution
2. They spend time on the "how and "why"
3. They reflect on their role, their position, their degree of influence
4. They search for personal meanings as guides for action and examine their values as starting points i.e. self actualising and personalising as part of their professional identities
5. They reflect on their own and others "mindset" – and either sought to embed them in the change or change their mindset
6. Only then do they consider internal organisational issues
7. They do this by considering how to achieve the innovation within existing organisational structures and ways of operating
8. From the meaning clarification, feelings of control arise, less challenge to the original impetus for change and greater concentration on achieving implementation. I.e. issues from "academic discussion of interesting "external" issues to those views as relevant

Some odd things about this:

1. issues of teaching and learning actually featured little- it was professional and personal identity that was important rather than professional actions
2. Human and financial resourcing featured very little – hence the panic when well into the implementation and it got too big to handle

Key ways of creating innovative change agents:

1. introduction of outsiders to question and challenge mindsets
2. take steps to disrupt conservative decision making structures
3. drive changes from action to policy
4. empower (rather than consult) individuals at lower levels in the hierarchy and outside traditional structures
5. activate powerful advocacy, engage in symbolic acts

In Universities to achieve innovative changes (rather than problem solving) we need to:

1. negotiate new meanings and shared constructs between those achieving change as precursor for change actions
2. change impetuses from institution's environment must be "translated" into meaningful HE context
3. effective implementation then becomes process of clarification rather than imposition

For the past two years, a specific and intentional change programme has been in place. The OU's well-rehearsed distance learning methods ensure systems and processes provide for a very high level of quality assurance throughout teaching and assessment. To maintain these whilst responding to the ICT imperatives and customers requirements has been the challenge. Policies, strategies and resources have been carefully put in place to ensure that experiments become pilots, that pilots are evaluated, that successful worthwhile pilots are rolled out to thousands, whilst original or enhanced quality and academic integrity is maintained.

OUBS's focus in 1999 is on:

1. Embedding ICTs in teaching and learning by scanning and experimenting, evaluating and developing processes and formats as well as rethinking delivery methodologies, often radically
2. Developing a number of projects which integrate broadcast tv, radio and the web for existing and potential students and lifelong learners. These projects to be fully evaluated for relevance and impact.
3. Exploring and developing effective Intranet and Internet applications for administration, presentation, communications and assessment online as well as teaching
4. Experimenting with integrated approaches using commercially produced software such as Lotus Learning Space and Microsoft technologies
5. Continuing to equip, train, and build capacity in all staff members
6. Equipping, training and developing the 650 part time management tutors in working and teaching online
7. Providing Just in Time and Point of Need induction and training materials online for students so that they are comfortable and competent with new technologies at the time their course begins
8. Extending evaluation and research across all possible technologies

1. PROJECT……………………………………………………………..PROCESS
2. ACTION…………………………………………………………… STRATEGY
3. INSIGHT…………………………………………………………… PRACTICE
4. INTERVENTION………………………………………………… STRUCTURE
5. DISRUPTION……………………………………………… CLARIFICATION
6. DIRECTIVE……………………………………………… COLLABARATIVE
7. MOBILISE OPPOSITION………………………… MOBILISE ACTIVATION
8. ALLIANCES………………………………………………… PARTNERSHIPS
9. WAYS OF ORGANISING…………………… CONTINUOUS ADAPTATION
10. LEARNING EXPERIENCE……………………………… CULTURAL NORM
11. TELLING……………SHOWING…………HELPING…………EMBEDDING

We believe that ICT developments in teaching, administration and research in University Business Schools can provide a stimulus to change and transformation on our institutions. We need to manage this process to enjoy and exploit the opportunities rather than become their victims. We need to educate ourselves and manage the education process much better. We also need to recognise and manage the weaker signals from our increasingly competitive environment. We need to find our individual niches and ways to collaborate effectively with each other whilst preserving these. This will not be for the fainthearted! In our view, the leading business schools of the next decade will not be those who keep up in the race to use the Web or CD-ROMs. The leaders will be those who can predict and action on the weakest signals, the up and-coming technologies from our global, networked environment and those who can to turn yet unimagined opportunities into integrated, viable, useful and relevant management education processes.

This will be achieved by focussing on the cognition and professionalism of all the staff members involved and by having a clear vision of achievable change processes. The core values and core purposes of teaching and research needs to be maintained throughout, while change is achieved in cultural and operating practice through very specific goals and strategies relating to viable choice of media and demonstration of the value of ICT through actions.