Greg Jackson (Educause)
Collaboration – we don’t do it very well across our organization.
– We sign NDAs for No Benefit
– We let vendors pick us off
– We keep our cake (we hold on to resources we really should be sharing)
Battles – we fight those we can’t win. Prevalence will sometimes win out over quality.
– Google is going to win
– The CFO is going to win
– Verizon/AT&T/Sprint are going to win
– Oracle is going to win – not everything, but everything it cares about
We don’t engage very well if we characterize them as evil
Optimization
– Being different from peers isn’t the same as being ahead of peers. No competitive advantage to how we use IT at our institutions.
– Being ahead of peers isn’t the same as winning.
– Distinctiveness yields value, but it also consumes it
– It doesn’t matter what computer you use, because standardization has largely been achieved
– When standardization fails, idiosyncrasy accelerates
Tracy notes that we’re different because our environments demand us to be.
Greg – we don’t want to aspire to mediocrity. We shouldn’t innovate in different directions just for the sake of different directions.
Management
– We reject cost accounting
– We prefer tactics to strategies
– We send good money after bad
– We prefer right to timely
– We eat (or alienate) our seed corn
– We mistake users for customers
Association
– We squabble (especially in public)
– We waste too much time on governance
– We spread ourselves too thinly
– We obsess
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