DIT Bits

I keep a 4×8 sheet of whiteboard on my office wall. Always have. Sometimes I use it as a low-tech auxiliary memory sometimes when things hit a level of complexity that throws my brain into gridlock. Other times I diagram projects, fill it with post it notes so I can see how things fit together (or don’t), or draw pictures so I’m sure I understand what someone is telling me (or vice versa).

Over the years, though, I have used it primarily as a central repository of things people say, noteworthy quotes made memorable by keen insight, egregious absurdity, or just plain funny stuff. An old favorite came from a former Director: “The meeting is relatively mandatory.” Another from a principal, asked what school policy was when kids were chronically late because of disorganized  parents: “We don’t think it’s a good idea.” From NAIS Pat Bassett: “The single greatest impediment to change in independent schools is our cultural attachment to consensus.”Most of the quotes came from real people I know, and there was a certain quality of board-worthiness associated with whatever went up there.

Lately, I haven’t put many quotes up and the board is strangely empty. As a typical human, of course, my first impulse is to blame other people for saying fewer interesting things. Lord knows that seems to be true of pretty much any of the talking heads we experience in the mass media.

On the other hand, you have to be listening for the serendipitous moments when the best quotes are uttered. I think I figured out that during this year, the busiest and most pressure-packed in many years, I have likely spent too much time in my office and not enough out and about in the community, engaging in the informal conversations that are fertile ground for board-worthy comments.  I never thought of my board as a barometer of my visibility within the Schools, but now that I have, it should be a good reminder to show my face more often.

Posted on May 11th, 2012 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Two weeks ago, Jack, the best account exec I’ve encountered in 14 years as an IT Director, told me he was leaving his company, bad news indeed. He came to see my team and me last week and took us out for one last business lunch like many we’ve enjoyed over the years.

He was quick to say that he’d called us first with the news of his decision because we were his favorite customers–not his biggest customers by any means, just the ones he felt closest to and fondest of. That meant a lot to me. I’ve worked hard to manage all my school’s technology vendor relationships going back to my earliest days in this position.

Jack’s departure prompted me to think about what made him such a good account exec.  What makes a strong vendor/client relationship? What do both parties need to bring to the table to make the relationship work?

In short, it’s all about mutual trust and the steps you both take to earn it.

From the customer side of things, vendors earn my trust when they:

>>>  take the time to learn about my school, my IT team, and how the team’s goals fit into the school’s big picture

>>>  make certain we are both clear on what we expect from each other

>>>  deliver at least what is promised (and often more) on time and on budget

>>>  take responsibility for delays, missteps, or problems with products or services they sell, and act quickly and effectively to put them right

>>>  advocate for our needs with their higher-ups when necessary

>>>  bring us creative, worthwhile options we hadn’t thought of to achieve our goals

>>>  are well-organized and efficient in following up on action steps  — getting the little things right

>>>  get back to me in a reasonable amount of time when I contact them

>>>  are able to hear and give constructive feedback on the working relationship we have

>>>  deliver a quality product or service at a fair price (which may or may not be different from the lowest price–in general, I think you get what you pay for)

>>>  are respectful of my time

These are the qualities that made Jack such a valued partner in our work here at my school. We will miss him and wish him all the best in his next endeavor, whatever it turns out to be.

To make vendor relationships work from our end, we need to:

>>>  be clear about specs/features and our goals/expectations when acquiring any given product or service

>>>  review contracts and service agreements carefully and resolving any matters of concern before signing them

>>>  pay them on time for services rendered

>>>  provide them with any important contextual information they may need to fully meet our needs

>>>  provide constructive feedback as needed, and promptly share concerns or kudos

>>>   be appropriately patient when things don’t go as planned, and be direct, assertive, and professional if and when appropriate patience becomes exhausted

>>>  respond in a timely way when they contact us

The best relationships between customers and vendors are always about something more than just buying and selling equipment or services. The “value add” (a popular term I don’t much care for) starts rising when the trusting relationship you’ve set out to build makes both parties better at what they do.

Posted on February 5th, 2012 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Managing IT | No Comments »

I’m always wary of people in schools who are fond of insisting. I’m not one of them. If you insist all the time, people get tone-deaf to it.  Tech leaders have to be especially careful about what they insist on, since managing a variety of fairly serious risks is part of the territory. That can lead to an awful lot of insisting if we’re not judicious about it (this is starting to sound like the first in a brief series of Things I Insist On–we’ll see if that pans out).

I do insist that all tech purchases and proposed donations be cleared through my office.

There are at least four good reasons to do this :

1) To protect school stakeholders and the school’s interests in legal matters, including all the stuff nobody but me and the CFO ever reads: vendor contracts, Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, data security practices for offsite vendors, licensing agreements, and so on.

2)  To determine support implications for my team, which there nearly always are. It’s also helpful to store copies of license codes, vendor contact info, renewal dates, licensing agreements, and other such data in a central repository for those times when it gets away from the departments and offices who buy it.

3)  To have a reasonable shot at having the data needed to work on Total Cost of Ownership and Value On Investment calculations.

4) To maintain overall coherence with the school’s technology  direction.

This last piece is probably most important. As people tire of hearing me say, IT leaders are often one of only three or four people in any school who work with absolutely everyone. Departments and offices are not in a good position to know what all the others are doing or grasp interdependencies among school subgroups. We are. We need to use our unique position to ensure that people acting with an appropriate degree of autonomy don’t tie anyone else’s shoelaces together.

The Business Office here has become very cooperative in alerting me to tech purchases coming through its paper trail. The Computer Science Department also communicates well about purchases they need to make and broader purchases they are prepared to support with their software budget. And I still reserve the right to refuse support services for items acquired outside the prescribed process. I can’t say I’ve ever done that, but I have come close.

I’m always amazed when I encounter schools with leaky procurement practices who then expect IT staff to support anything and everything that comes in.  Ultimately, students pay the price for the chaos this creates — which sounds like a natural segue into the next installment in this series.

Are there things as an IT leader that you insist on? I’d be curious to hear some.

Posted on December 2nd, 2011 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

In an earlier post, I wondered if IT leaders might be a self-selected group of “change addicts,” professionally restless, attitudinally positioned to engage with change, naturally curious, and at ease with being in a constant state of transition in daily work.

After much thought, I’ve concluded there is some substance to the claim. I’ve met lots of school IT leaders while presenting at and attending conferences and regional meetings, teaming with them on consulting engagements, and participating in online communities. As we get better acquainted, my personal and professional histories seem freakishly congruent with theirs in many ways. It’s a small sample size, but it’s come up too often to ignore.

My family moved often as I grew up. Until college, I never attended any school for more than two consecutive years. After grad school, I taught Kindergarten for two years in a public school and was laid off. At Lab, I started as a third grade teacher for a few years, and then requested a move back to Kindergarten. Four years later, I left Lab to pursue other options in psychology, social work, student teaching supervision, and textbook writing. I returned to Lab three years after that to teach fourth grade, and four years later, moved into the position I currently have.

I’ve stayed in this job for thirteen years now, the longest I have ever held the same position. Though the title hasn’t changed, the job most certainly has; as the school’s needs have evolved, what the school needs me to be and do gets reinvented regularly. I can identify at least four distinct evolutions during this span that could easily be viewed as entirely new jobs, but without a title change.

Many of my IT leader peers report similar career paths to and within their current positions. Watching them move in and out of different phases of their careers can be wonderfully entertaining (and sometimes instructive), whether reinventing themselves where they are or moving on to other ventures.

For the sake of argument, let’s say this admitted generalization holds water. So what?

For one thing, keeping this notion in mind adds potentially helpful perspective to conversations about change management in schools. It may be that this self-selected group is so inured to change that they assume others share their appetite for it. No doubt, this assumption will apply to some stakeholders, but likely not for many. The resulting clash of perspectives, if we are not aware of it, can create friction between IT leaders and some stakeholders that diverts attention from a proper focus on what students need to how comfortable adults are, or are not, with change. That’s not usually a good thing, at least not for students.

It may also help those responsible for hiring and supervising IT leaders. Candidates for IT leadership positions who have not demonstrated a healthy appetite for change may not fare as well in IT leadership as those who have. Please note that I said “healthy” appetite for change; a change glutton is probably not want you want, either, since change for the sake of change is as perilous to good schooling as no change at all. Supervisors may indeed have to help build consensus around what healthy change looks like in their school.

What is your experience? Do you find that IT leaders are naturally attracted to change, or does their work simply require them to accommodate it? How does your school respond to change generally, and particularly with respect to technology?

Posted on September 19th, 2011 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Let’s finish up the New Normal series today. This series revisits my portion of a panel presentation at the NAIS conference this year.

Feel free to revisit Parts 1 and 2 archived on this blog to bring you back up to speed.

Today, I’ll focus on school leaders and their role in the new normal of educational technology.  Defining “leader” in broad terms is good practice here, since in most schools, leaders pop up in all kinds of places. My operational definition of a school leader is anyone who has the qualities and skills it takes to rally others around an idea and impel constructive action that ultimately benefits students.  You don’t need an office or a title to be a leader, but you have to be a leader to bring about change. Whomever your leaders are, and wherever you find them, here is the first of two key things they must do differently in the new normal:

Savvy leaders at all levels in the new normal must view and manage institutional attention as an even more precious resource than time. To accomplish school technology goals, or even put a school in position to create technology goals, there must be appropriate attention given to it.

Lack of time is often cited as an obstacle to progress in realizing the potential of technology for learning. I agree that this can often be the case, but more often the real problem is that schools do not manage institutional attention as well as they could.  You can recover time by managing attention more carefully. When institutional attention is scattered, time becomes more of a  problem than it would otherwise be.

Most schools I know try to wrestle far too many initiatives to the ground at the same time to do a capable job of managing all of them, despite the talent and sincerity they bring to each task.  Accreditation reviews, diversity initiatives, scheduling committees, “green” efforts, capital campaigns,  dealing with learning differences….so many of these kinds of large scale projects are running concurrently, it is no wonder technology is so often an afterthought.

Dealing with the new normal in ed tech will require a level of discipline and focus to meet the challenges ahead with purpose and intention. Schools that continue to crowbar, duct tape, and hot glue technology on to a lumbering caravan of competing efforts will find themselves outsmarted and outperformed in surprising ways by competitors who choose depth over breadth when making decisions about strategic initiatives. These school leaders are prepared to take some flak about what they are not doing so they can excel at what they are, and are not shy about saying that some initiatives are more important than others. They also do their homework about what their school’s particular strengths are and design their strategic plans to achieve goals unique to them, because they know it is the best way to stand out in an increasingly competitive independent school market.

Finally, schools who come out ahead in the new normal are those who lean into the discomfort that change brings with it. IT leaders are used to change, or had better be if they expect to keep their jobs (in fact, I believe we are a self-selected group of change addicts, but that is another post). We live in that twilight zone between that which rarely changes (human nature, institutions, school curricula) and that which changes daily (technology). It’s OK with us that what we knew yesterday may or may not help us today.  CIO magazine put it best in 2005: “IT leaders are change agents; transition is our stable state.”

But not everyone in schools has made peace with such rapid change. The leaders’ job is to win enough trust from people to get them into that twilight zone with us  long enough for them to see what’s in there. Once people do that,  and they learn to tolerate, and then embrace,  the discomfort they feel, they begin to see opportunities where others see only problems. They start to develop the kind of resilience it takes to thrive in such a dynamic space, a space very much like that in which our students will grow up and make a life.

What we absolutely cannot do is be complacent. I often hear people in independent schools say, “Our enrollment remains strong, our students get into the best colleges….what’s broken that needs to be fixed? Why change?” This is no doubt a familiar refrain to many of you.

Most of our schools have achieved the success they have because at some point in their evolution, they took a bold step others would not or could not. As we look at the global redefinition of learning in the digital age, and the seismic cultural shifts we see in the way students access information,  there are profound opportunities for our schools to step forward once again to do something only they can do.  The new normal rewards  judicious risk and punishes complacency. There is no better time to lean into our discomfort and see what we can learn about ourselves and our students as we do.

Posted on April 26th, 2011 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »