CNI Report - Future Perfect Copyright 1996 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ magazine, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1996, p. 3. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information technology in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu FUTURE PERFECT by Richard P. West We've all talked about it for some time, "it" being the future we imagine that will allow us to have widespread access to digitized information. Even more exciting is the ability to fetch the information from afar via electronic networks while we reside at home or wherever our office is that day. CNI was created to explore the possibilities of storing and communicating information across electronic networks--"To Advance Scholarship and Intellectual Productivity"--as CNI's letterhead succinctly states. Throughout CNI's Task Force meetings and projects the possibility of using networked information has been enthusiastically encouraged, examined, and envisioned. In CNI forums, the nature of the changes required to implement the future world of networked information has never been restricted to the technical aspects of networked information. To be sure, the navigation and interoperability issues, which are primarily technical, constituted one of the five original CNI project themes identified at the first few organizational meetings of the CNI Task Force. However, institutional and user readiness, public policy, and the changing economics of networked information have also always been part of CNI's thematic tracks. As I complete this article, Congress has passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As originators and now veteran users of the Internet, the higher education community has a lot riding on how the policy decisions made by the Congress are implemented. The actions of Congress have focused the leadership of our professional higher education associations--and, indeed, the leadership of our institutions--on the opportunities, costs, and benefits of information technology, particularly network-related technology. A common theme among today's higher education technology and information managers is how to communicate, advise, and inform our higher education leadership about the potential of technology for the mission of our institutions. Most presidents and provosts, I think, are persuaded that networked technology is beginning to have a positive force on higher education's activities. Some recognize that the impact on our services of teaching, research, and learning can be significant and even revolutionary. However, when the professional managers begin talking about the technology, presidents and provosts often become impatient and confused, don't grasp the points of our presentations, and miss the wisdom of our recommendations. It is our responsibility as information resources managers (I include both librarians and information technologists here) to frame our ideas, discussions, and implementation of technology with as much consideration to the business of managing technology as to the technology itself. Although I enjoy the word games and intellectual challenges of, for instance, determining the real meaning of client/server technology and cleverly implemented Z39.50-based services, my president should be spared these nuances. Our challenge is to persuade our presidents that our institutions' funds that acquire information technology and support technology-based information resources and services are being deployed to incorporate change, both technically and organizationally, as it continuously happens. We should not be selling grand slams, moon shots, miraculous revolutions, or, perhaps the worst sin of all, all the great things technology will do for us tomorrow. Rather, we should be selling networked information as a powerful force now operating on each and every one of our campuses to lower the barriers of time and place to access facts, records, ideas, information, and people. We need to design processes appropriate to each of our campuses to implement the many changes that will be enabled by the new marketplace dynamics unleashed by the new Telecommunications Act. The simple selling of technology may be over, but the ongoing incorporation of its benefits into our organizational daily lives has just begun. Today's management of technology and the change created by it is as much about economics, marketplaces, and regulation as it is about hardware and software. We need to work with our presidents and other executives not on the next exciting piece of "future perfect" technology, but rather on how to manage a wonderfully rich and vibrant--and, yes, constantly evolving--campus information infrastructure that advances scholarship and intellectual productivity. We need to demonstrate to our presidents that we know how to consolidate our economic gains and change the ways of doing business to benefit from the constantly improving technology available to us. The lesson to learn is that while technological change is constant, our implementation of technology is discrete, although ongoing. We must not let the constancy of technological change blind our ability to consolidate our productivity gains by modifying our personal and institutional behavior. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received was to understand that "life is what is happening while you're busy making other plans." We have incorporated much of our networked information technology into our daily lives already. There are presentations that I prepare in hours and days with information that would have taken weeks to obtain without today's networked information--and the information is more current and up to date. Electronic journals abound. And the Web gives me more digitized graphics and photos than I thought, as recently as two years ago, would be commonly available by now. However, we still have scholarly journals increasing in price in some science and medical fields at 15-18 percent per year at a time of 2-3 percent inflation. The price of scholarly information in general has increased more than inflation. The technology is exciting and being incorporated into our daily activities, but our organizational and economic policy issues persist. To help our executive leadership we need to be vigilant and aggressive in identifying the barriers to changing our personal and institutional behavior to "advance productivity." If we do that successfully, the investment and support we are seeking for our future perfect world of networked information will come quite automatically. ============================================================= CNI Report is a regular _CAUSE/EFFECT_ department that provides reports about the activities of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), formed by the Association of Research Libraries, CAUSE, and Educom in 1990 to promote the creation of and access to information resources in networked environments. ************************************************************* Richard P. West (richard_west@qmbridge. calstate.edu) is Vice Chancellor for Business and Finance for The California State University System. He has chaired the steering committee of the Coalition for Networked Information since its establishment in 1990.