Last Day at City: 13 Great Years!

This is my last day at City University London. I've decided to take a career break and travel the world.

Almost two years ago my mother died and I promised her that I’d not work so hard (being an academic, especially at Head of Department level is an all-consuming activity). A year on and I realised that I wasn’t making good on that promise and decided on reflection that I should spend some time on me while I am young enough to enjoy it.

I’ve had a great 13 years at City, and working with David Chan to establish the Centre for Information Leadership has been wonderful. I’d like to thank you all for your kind support of the Centre and ask you to continue to support David who will be leading it to bigger and better things.

The Master of Information Leadership (MIL) will I am sure flourish, and I must say it was one of best things I did at City and I hope it plays its part in securing the future of the IT profession. I'll still be one of its main supporters.

I am not sure what I'll be doing once I am back from my travels. This will be something I will leave until my return (but from October 2012 I'll be open to offers...:-)

I have been made an honorary visiting fellow at City and I will be continuing to blog on matters relevant to information leaders (and on the previous MIL weekends I have been involved in). Of course, I am no longer an employee of City University London so the disclaimer I have about speaking in a personal capacity now doubly applies.

So watch this space!

Cake or Death: Or why the LSE doesn't understand economics!

I sometimes do understand why those outside academia seem to think we make bizzare decisions. After some recent pints with a colleague I was reminder of the very funny 'cake or death' sequence by Eddie Izzard - shown below.

As it says, the right choice between cake or death should be obvious. So who would choose death? It would appear that academia can sometimes choose death on principle.

Over that last few months universities have been announcing their fees under the new regime in 2012. The Daily Mash (warning: is a bit sweary) appears have some rather biting insights. It's actually not as a simple as that: high fees are a marker of quality, and finance is to maintain high levels of quality research-led teaching. To do the best for their students, it's a commonly held view that universities wish to do both.

The recent announcement of the London School of Economics's council and academic board to charge less than 9K is rather bizarre. They claim it is to send "a clear message that LSE welcomes students from all backgrounds". But I find it hard to see how it's in the interests of students to do this for the following reasons.

1. They could use the maximum fee give bigger bursaries to the poor students, so they can focus on their studies without worrying about paying their bills.
2. ...or god forbid, spend the money on better facilities, more quality contact time for students.
3. It's a slap to the face for the international students (LSE is heavily internationalised) who already pay an awful lot  - this decision can't but remove the last lingering doubts many of them have that they may be there as cash cows.
4. A high price point usually is a signal of quality. I hope for the LSE's sake that its reputation is able to stand a price point lower than the vast majority of the Russell and 1994 group.

It is therefore rather depressing that given the number of economists in the LSE, they still wanted to make what is in my opinion nothing more than a party political point at the expense of their students (now that the baby boomers are too old to occupy and set up a red base in the bursar's office, futile gestures are all that's left I suppose....:-). I assume it takes a certain level of rarefied intellect to not to make the obviously correct decision.

Anyway, I can't see how the LSE can from this decision get to the highest standards of academic excellence, unless they wish to not support poor students as best they can, strip-mine their international students (not sustainable, or even ethical IMHO) or seek donations of dubious providence (that will diminish further their reputation).

Cake or death anyone? Mine's a Death by Chocolate...:-)

In the Press: Reflections on the NESTA Games Report

A catch up on my press writings. I occasionally write for ComputerWorld UK and I recently wrote on the NESTA report on skills in the games industry. Both the report and my article are worth a read IMHO.

As you can tell, I thought the report was a curate's egg. I found the idea that a sensible league table could be constructed particularly hilarious. I'd say the the largest barrier to the top 5-10% of C++ coding talent from universities going into games is them 'selling out' and taking the better pay and conditions in London's financial services industry. I know of one other leading London CS department that runs an annual games event to persuade their graduates not just to go to banks and consultancies.

Apart from acknowledging the ability of special interest groups to lobby government instead of addressing the problem from their own resources, it to me highlights the futility of trying to manage skills at all in central government as it appears to attract attempts to capture the agenda away from those who really matter - the students!

I suppose the games industry at least didn't ask for tax credits (again!). I find it hard to believe that you can ask for subsidy and say you are a vibrant industry contributing to growth at the same time. If they can't entice the top C++ coding talent to move from productive jobs in financial services without a subsidy, then that talent is better for society working for banks to build the economy. Markets work nicely that way - pay and conditions follow productivity.

The quote below from Frederic Bastiat in his essay 'Government' perhaps says all that needs to be said.

"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

As I said in the article, attracting and developing talent is a problem that the games industry has to solve itself.

'Metrics Puppies' or why Deming should be read by HE managers...

I've been reflecting on an interesting talk I attended at the IoE two months ago by Professor Rob Cuthbert called "Failing the Challenge of Institutional Evaluation: how and why managerialism flourishes". The talk and the discussion did miss an important point, alas...

An interesting anecdote was shared of a university with overall NSS scores not statistically significantly different from the norm. So instead of targeting the headline figure directly and cascading it aggressively down to the front line, they looked at the detailed responses and reviewed their practices in a considered way. Over the next few years the scores went up. But a few years later response was changed and ran using the management by objectives playbook - scores then back went down to where they were...

But this not just an HE issue - it illustrates the point that MBO can be dangerous.

Of course academics who can't teach shouldn't expect to be paid, but the vast majority want to do a good job. Interestingly there was the usual hand-wringing about managerialism in the discussion, but no concrete discussion of what an alternative would look like (apart from allowing academics to do as they please - quelle surprise?).

One name that was not mentioned was Deming - I guess engineering management isn't really in line with the overabundance of postmodernist or Marxist analyses of university management in the literature. To illustrate, the above situation could easily be retold in terms of his Red Bead Experiment. His proposal in essence is that the system of work determines most of the performance, so measurement is best used to understand how the system can be improved rather than aimed at exhorting the workforce to work harder/smarter/faster.

This applies to all sectors and arguably it is IMHO equally important in services as it is in manufacturing. For those interested in the debate between MBO and the more humanistic engineering management approach, Art Kleiner's 'Measures that Matter' article is an excellent introduction (albeit from an accounting viewpoint).

I close with by coining a new phrase: a 'metrics puppy' to describe the unthinking advocates of MBO. Those from the UK may have visions of the puppy that advertised toilet paper by chasing rolls of it with great energy. The blind chasing of measurements by making their transmission the object of management without understanding the work system is really no different - just not as cute.

PS. Posted using BlogPress from my iPad - so apologies if things go awry while I get used to it.

A Tale of Two CIOs (Saturday 2nd October 2010)

One aim of the Information Leader in Organisations module is to understand the differences and similarities in information leader roles in different organisations.

First, Chris Puttick, CIO of Oxford Archaeology presented on 'More with Less'. The charity sector is a great place to look for innovate solutions to provide great IT to a demanding (and often non-mainstream) user base with very little money. His talk invited the MIL students to think about what was impossible and lead to a very interesting discussion of the trade-off between cost-cutting and risk.

The contrast with the last speaker of the day couldn't be more start. Leon Schumacher, Group CIO of Novartis. He presented work he was a part of with the CIO Executive Council, a global CIO network. Their Future State CIO model is a principled analysis of CIO role and competencies. It examines the transitions required between functional IT roles and the transformation/strategic roles that information leaders seek. We are quite grateful that the CIO Executive Council allowed us use of this model as a basis for analysing a number of issues that arise during this module.

Though the companies and budgets they are worlds apart (in terms of budget, Leon's phone budget is probably larger than Chris' whole IT budget), what unites them is a passion and commitment to using information to make their organisations more effective and a broad skill-set that allows them to achieve this. The two speakers embodied that message splendidly.

MIL: These are who I get to enjoy teaching...

Computer Weekly have profiled the first group of Master of Information Leadership students in support of our scholarship competition - the article is here.

I have to say its been a joy to teach them. The teaching approach is really paying off and David and I are seeing the improvement in their academic work and their professional practice.

I'm looking forward to the April intake joining us!

Brief: Have I coined a phrase.....?

The concept of cultural maturity has come up in a number of modules on the Master of Information Leadership. There appears to be a plethora of maturity models ever since Crosby (1979), and most aren't that different). So I'd like to say we should recognise this orgy of identikit model construction with a new IT acronym (my proposal seems to have caught on with the MIL students, anyway)...

YAMM = Yet Another Maturity Model

Looked on Google, and it drew a blank so I'm claiming it. Feel free to use it  - but say it was me....:-)

Fame at last? Time will tell...

References

Crosby, Philip (1979). Quality is Free. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-014512-1.