Alternatives to IT Policy Documentation
David R. Ross[1] , December 2004

[Click here for simple set of recommended operating principles]

Our colleges and universities have responded to the information technology revolution by devoting substantial resources to new staff, infrastructure, equipment and software.  We delight in the transformative opportunities IT offers the academy, but struggle to cope with its challenge to traditional ways of getting things done.  Virtually every IT task is collaborative:  facilitating the work and learning of some and dependent on the effort and expertise of others.   The central administrative challenge we place on our information technology-related departments is managing these collaborative relationships.  I’d like to convince you that the acceptable use and other policy documentation proliferating like weeds throughout the higher education landscape[2] unnecessarily distract us from meeting that challenge.

It is ironic (see Box 1) that most IT departments juxtapose mission statements celebrating partnership with the rest of the campus community with policies and procedures targeting the hackers, thieves, and other evildoers that one would think based on reading these documents must permeate higher education.  I prefer to believe that the proliferation of policy documentation reflects less a perception of information technology users as Hobbesian savages,[3] than uncritical adoption of corporate models for managing information technology.  Because these documents do nothing to promote institutional mission, it is past time to push back against the dominance of policy and shift our attention to managing IT-centered collaborations.

The Dominance of Policy
The appeal of policy documentation is understandable.  In public, university administrators will tell you that the information technology revolution has created a new dawn for higher education – new ways of seeing the world, rapid dissemination of scholarship, and opportunities to engage students more deeply in and across disciplines.  But, back on campus, they see IT as a major headache.  IT has carved a whole new category out of an already stretched academic budget.  Funds must be found for building and maintaining campus networks, cycling through new desktop computers every three to five years, and meeting the insatiable demand for staff -- from help-desk crisis counselors through “sys-admins” to instructional technologists.  Philosophical musings on IT and the academic mission are swamped by the need to cope with one disaster after another:  staff report that the brand new campus network can’t keep up with accelerating growth in traffic, a professor threatens to sue a dean for invasion of privacy for reviewing past email exchanges, the FBI is on line 1 because someone using a university IP address just hacked the Pentagon, and the RIAA[4] is on line 2 because a university computer is the number one source of Korn (or other popular music) downloads.  Legal advisors want disclaimers and prohibitions limiting the institution’s liability, auditors want enhanced security for on-line administrative data, and computing staff want rules rationing responses to the exploding demands for IT-related services.

            The result has been the proliferation of policies – acceptable use, copyright, email, dorm networking and the like – that read like the licensing agreements (SLA’s) that come with computer software and have about the same relevance:   Like SLA’s, no one reads policy documents other than the authors (usually a committee, with a committee’s gift for infelicitous prose) until caught in some quasi-legalistic dispute over their enforcement.   At best, they distract from the academic mission; at worst, they threaten the collaborative ties among faculty, students and staff that define higher education.  If someone tried to introduce such documentation in more traditional areas of the academy, they would be ridiculed or charged with threatening academic integrity (see Box 2).

How can departmental goals to “empower members of the Community” and “build relationships” and “help” and “support” result in policy documents designed to keep Hobbesian savages at bay?  Perhaps a clue comes from the Service Motto of Bucknell University’s Information Services and Resources department:  “Our customer's success is our success.”

Customer-seller, client-server vocabulary appears in much of the self-descriptive material for academic information technology departments.  Many IT staff (and managers) are recruited from corporate settings.  And it is easy for college presidents and other senior administrators to see IT departments (with networks and expensive hubs akin to electrical, plumbing and HVAC infrastructure) as similar to Buildings and Grounds, Payroll or other offices often seen as supporting rather participating in academic activities.  It has become natural to view managing these support functions as similar to running a business, with contracts (often explicit) establishing mutual obligations, service requirements and performance standards.

But, seeing IT departments in business or contractual terms is antithetical to the recognition that the information technology revolution has come to permeate the academy and is transforming what it means to teach and learn.  The client-server model is no more helpful for understanding the linkages between IT staff and the rest of the college community than it would be if applied to the relationship between student and teacher, researcher and librarian or co-authors of a scholarly paper, each of which is better understood as a collaboration between colleagues sharing a common mission.

Information Technology and Collaboration
Virtually every IT task is collaborative:  facilitating the work and learning of some and dependent on the effort and expertise of others.  The collaborative impulse, the recognition that colleagues are more effective at meeting shared individual goals when working cooperatively, goes a long way toward overcoming differences in temperament and approach.  Co-authored scholarship, ad hoc committees, study groups are ubiquitous features of higher education.  Staff, faculty and students apply this sort of collaboration to information technology when they evaluate or roll out new software, reconfigure computer laboratories, or brainstorm solutions to network outages, help desk calls or desktop support puzzles.

But, for most members of the academic community most of the time, information, software and computing equipment are tools that serve work and learning; people think of these tools in the same way that they do the telephone, telephone book and pen.  For them, the primary IT collaboration is based on obtaining or providing seamless access to these tools in the midst of teaching, learning and related administrative support activities.

The distinction is helpful in understanding some of the stresses that arise in our IT collaborations.   Jointly creating something strengthens collaborative ties.  When a reference librarian and faculty colleague are on the hunt for a source, they are partners.  The joy students, staff and faculty feel when they get a departmental Website to work as they’d hoped is intoxicating and leaves each participant with a sense of mutual respect and gratitude.  But, when a collaborative role is primarily supportive or limited in scope, the sense of common purpose must compete with hierarchical or customer-server imagery that, while antithetical to the academic mission, we nonetheless bring from other aspects of our lives.  Having a tool break in the midst of invigorating, demanding and time-sensitive work or learning is frustrating.  Few of us have the moral fiber fully to protect colleagues, particularly those we call for help, from the heat of our frustration.  Thus, collaboration by IT staff often requires the skills of the crisis counselor.[5] 

            A shared sense of mission is all it takes to manage most collaborations encountered in higher education.  But, because many IT-related collaborations involve one colleague supporting another or cross departmental and administrative lines, something more is needed.       

            Standardized procedures and rules are a natural response to the perception of being on the lower rungs of hierarchy and the desire to ration unpleasant or overwhelming demands.  Acceptable use policies, widely adopted within corporations, seemingly offer a quick fix to the administrative headaches and potential legal entanglements our campuses have encountered in implementing new information technologies.  The approach fails because the standardization, scale economies, and routinized procedures that drive IT departments in commercial settings are absent in higher education.  Academia celebrates, indeed requires, unique endeavors and the diversity and idiosyncrasies of students, teachers and scholars.  Hence, higher education requires information technology staff willing to be flexible, multidimensional, imaginative, diverse collaborators.  And, it needs administrators capable of coping with the stresses that inevitably arise. 

Managing the Information Technology Collaboration
The primary managerial challenge facing the chief information officer, director of computing or vice president for information technology is facilitating collaboration among diverse, opinionated, idiosyncratic information technologists, other support staff, faculty and students in a setting where institutional mission celebrates and requires that very diversity and individuality.  She or he must manage in an environment in which virtually all participants (even those linked by supervisory “reporting lines”) are self-directed and motivated, where the vestiges of hierarchy are more likely to poison relationships than channel meaningful managerial control.  A core element in the mission of all information technology-related departments is to organize documentation, structure help-desk or reference functions and nurture a mindset among all team members to link those seeking help with those colleagues best suited to partnering to achieve desired ends or providing needed answers.  Success depends on the evolution of a culture that accepts something like the following set of operating principles:

• Treat others as you want to be treated.
   
• Focus on implementing the institution’s and information technology department’s mission statements whenever doing so won’t impinge on others’ ability to serve those missions, compromise one’s sense of moral integrity or violate the law of the land.
   
• When pursuit of mission by some necessarily restrict the ability of others to do so, choose those actions that those affected agree yield the greatest benefit for the minimum cost.
   
• Shift discussion of differences about the efficacy of proposed actions to the forum most likely to resolve those differences.  Facilitating the resolution of differences in collaboration is the central senior managerial function.

The purpose, then, of information technology documentation is to implement these operating principles (see Box 3).   Few existing policy documents do so.  They are more concerned with apportioning blame and responsibility when something goes wrong than anticipating and resolving conflicts before they arise.  Our communities would be better served by dropping them or shifting their focus to facilitating the efforts of students, faculty and staff to  harness information technology for learning and scholarship (see Box 4).

Ideally, any member of the campus community will feel able to implement available strategies for resolving conflicts concerning the use of information technology resources.  For the foreseeable future, most of the attention the chief information officer, director of computing or vice president for information technology devotes to facilitating collaboration is likely to take the form of anticipating and resolving conflict, defusing or coping with tensions that emerge from conflict and developing these skills in the team or department managers that report to her.

Understanding the consequences of one’s actions, identifying alternative strategies, and resolving conflicting demands on information technology resources will enable members of the academic community to eliminate virtually all of the needs that have generated policy documentation in the past.  But, what of individuals who choose not to support the institutional mission or who are unable to respect and accommodate the needs of others?   Colleges and universities have always had to deal with these few individuals and have in place well established systems for coping with them.  The information technology revolution does not require developing a new or parallel judicial system.  Violations of privacy, intellectual dishonesty, misuse of campus facilities, harassment and mental or physical intimidation are inconsistent with institutional mission.  Such behavior has long violated student honor or judicial codes and faculty and staff contractual obligations.  All that is needed is the will among senior administrators and participation of knowledgeable community members to apply traditional standards and insights in novel contexts.

            We don’t need policy documents that itemize all the ways a few rogues and rascals could harm our academic communities.  At most, we need to clarify how to direct into existing systems for protecting academic standards truly anti-social behavior that might remain after all efforts at education and conflict resolution have been exhausted.   Our primary focus should be on affirming the role that new information technologies can play in facilitating our quests for learning, wisdom, and living together in community.