This is the beginning of a small series of blog posts that explores the case study of the US Space Shuttle program and draws lessons for enterprise software projects.

Part 1:  Background on the Space Shuttle program

By looking at some of NASA’s manned space flight history, we can see two of the easiest mistakes that managers make when self-preservation of a favorite project becomes their modus operandi.  These mistakes are becoming blind to reality and forgetting how to listen to those closest to the action.  These two mistakes can kill any mission-critical system implementation.  

Last year I watched Apollo 13 with one of my daughters.  Apollo 13 is the movie based on Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon, which tells the true story of the Apollo mission just 8 months after the first landing on the moon.  This is a dramatic story where everything that could go wrong in the mission does go wrong.  After liftoff, when the mission is halfway to the moon, the astronauts heard a violent explosion that no one could explain.  Suddenly the ground crew and the astronauts are faced with a situation that they have never faced before - no one knows what exploded or what subsystems have been damaged on the spacecraft.  All they know is that the oxygen tanks and battery levels are falling.

The movie then shows the ground crew and the astronauts making a series of improvised solutions to various problems that arise, all while the astronauts know they have a slim chance to return alive.  While watching this movie, both of my daughters said that they would be scared to be astronauts.  Later, after the astronauts safely land and the movie finishes, my youngest daughter Olivia seemed to be thinking.  Eventually she said to me, “But Dad, it must be much safer now that we have all this experience, and we must know better how to do this.  Don't we?”

It turns out there was no good way to answer Olivia.  Do we really know better how to “do this”, if by “doing this” we mean safely sending astronauts into space and returning them while completing the mission?  The evidence is not at all clear.

IT Governance is growing in importance for higher education, and is consistently listed as one of the Educause Top Ten Issues. Certainly governance is crucial for higher education organizations to be effective, however, I worry that too often we think of governance from a top-down perspective, often basing the case for governance on such abstract concepts as alignment. Rather than thinking of IT governance as something we need to do, I think we should focus on the challenges our organizations face and then determine how governance could help solve these problems.

In this note, I'd like to focus on getting real buy-in for IT initiatives - buy-in that results in decisions and follow-through on those decisions. How can governance help you gain support and engagement from the whole organization?

I don't know about you, but seldom have I heard people discussing a project say "Boy, we'd be a lot more successful if IT initiatives were in alignment with overall institutional strategy." If you do hear that statement, I'm willing to bet that you're sitting in a committee meeting thinking about a new game of buzzword bingo.

While we need alignment, these abstract discussions miss an opportunity for governance to be relevant to major IT initiatives. What I do hear from people discussing a project is something closer to "Those guys in the College of Engineering seem to fight us every step of the way. Why do they always feel they need to use their own system rather than work with us in central IT?" Or, how about the lament that "We do have a steering committee for our system-wide LMS initiative. We just can't get half the campus to actually use the new system."

Phil Hill participated in the webinar: "Keeping Pace with Online Learning". It was presented on Thursday, January 28, at 1 PM Eastern Time.

Presented by: John Watson, Evergreen Education Group, Consultant and Lead author of "Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning",
with Higher Education Perspectives shared by: Phil Hill, Delta Initiative, Consultant

TO SEE WEBINAR ARCHIVE simply click on the following link - or copy and paste it into your browser:  Monterey Institute Jan 2010 Webinar.

You can also download the presentation here>>

Recently I participated in two webinars on the topic of the future of online programs (SIIA membership required, and Monterey Institute, Elluminate archive). I co-presented with John Watson of the Evergreen Education Group, with John covering K-12 online and with me covering higher education online perspectives.  During the webinars there seemed to be some real interest in the paradoxical nature of the higher ed online world - despite tremendous growth of online courses and programs, online organizations are often in a large state of flux and turmoil. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . 

You can get a good look at this situation by viewing two recent studies. The new 2009 Sloan Consortium report just came out last week, and it documents the continued, and potentially accelerating growth of online courses and programs. For the first time, the report includes enrollment numbers affected by the recession that started in 2008, giving us a perspective on its potential affects.  The highlights are that for fall 2008, 1 in 4 higher ed students takes at least one online course, with 4.6 million students in this category, and enrollment growth rates of ~17% per year. Compare this to overall enrollment growth rates of 1 - 2%, and you get the distinct picture of online's growth - it's here as a major option, regardless of any skepticism.

At the same time, a WCET and Campus Computing Project survey was released in October 2009, and it documents the turmoil of our online organizations and academic technology infrastructure. The highlights are that 45% of online units have re-organized in the past 2 years, 52% of online units plan to re-organize in the next 2 years, and 29% of online units have reorganized in the past 2 years and still plan to do so again in the next 2 years.  Talk about instability. Furthermore, while 88% of online units use the same LMS as the main campus, 47% plan to re-evaluate their strategy, and 24% plan to change LMS in the next 2 years.