Unit 8 Technology Plans

I found the Gerding and MacKellar reading “Applying for Technology Grants” to be an especially informative survey of technology resources. I had no idea for example that there were hundreds of community based technology centers funded by the US Dept of Education established to bridge the national digital divide. Also the Gerding and MacKellar article points out some of the best studies and reports on how technology and the internet has and will impact American life. These web sites are sources that I plan to access on a regular schedule going forward, in fact I have added each site to my Google RSS reader.

Another reading I found very helpful was the Dugan reading “Information Technology Plans.” Dugan reminds his readers of a theme that permeates all of the readings this week, that technology plans must advance and support the institution's mission and goals. This gets into the whole vision and strategic directions discussion with many questioning whether technology hasn't often been an end in itself rather than a tool in service to a larger end. Technology is so complex and multifacted that it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming enmeshed in the details of technology deployment while failing to evaluate how well the technology is furthering the larger cause of the organization. At a college this might be as simple as asking the question: “has the acquisition and application of technologies improved learning?”

Planning would seem to be at the core of ensuring that technology is not an end in itself but rather a means to an end. Hence the need for the technology plan. Like the larger strategic plan the technology plan involves lots of stakeholders and participants but one should be careful not to let the process drag on for so long that the plan becomes obsolete. After all a strategic plan and especially a technology plan is a document that charts a course of action over the next 12 to 36 months. It is not a long range plan which is really another type of management document. Aligning the planning process timeline with the fiscal budget cycle is a good pratical recommendation by Dugan.

One of the authors this week observed that libraries formerly constructed stacks designed to be serviceable for 50 years or more. Today technology cycles range from 18 to 36 months. There really is no precedent for this kind of environment. Our planning is often overwhelmed by the pace of change.

To meet this challenge , metrics should be constructed to measure progress and outcomes. Is the tech plan on time and within budget? How well does the plan advance the mission of the organization? The last measurement being subjective and difficult to quantify. The Balanced Scorecard metric is one structured approach to this sort of management problem that has proven helpful. This metic measures success from four perspectives including 1) user perspective, 2) internal processes (workflow efficiency), 3) the finance perspective, 4) how well does the technology plan as realized help us to met new challenges? It is also important to understand that the plan will need to be recalibrated and revised at annual intervals to keep the implementation of the technology plan on schedule, on course and aligned with the mission of the organization.

I have been involved in a host of technology initiatives over the course of my career. These include, in roughly chronological order, training personnel in the use of Lexis and Westlaw first generation hardware - dedicated terminals; writing annual tech budget requests; installing and utilizing PCs for legal research and library and office administrative tasks; designing and configuring a relational database system to monitor library expenditures, acquisitions, and equipment inventory control; managing the installation and implementation of the library's LAN; migrating the relational database system to a LAN configuration; introduction of web access to the court and public, serving on the hiring committee for the court's first dedicated LAN administrator; managing the installation, operation and maintenance of a WAN CD Tower; serving as a trainer on the first statewide judicial laptop distribution project, training personel in the efficient use of web based legal research resources; supervising the creation and maintenance of the law library's web site; hiring and supervising the library's pc analyst; implementing an internal virtual reference service to judges and court attorneys; participating as a node in a statewide 800 general information line; supervising the implementation of the library's first generation ILS; supervising the implementation of the library's second generation ILS; training library staff to operate both generations of the library's ILS.

Dedicated professional network technologists were not available in the courts until the mid 1990's and even today few if any are available to support library operations. So for the most part initiatives are still local or develop from a community of similarly situation law libraries in other counties.

All of the technology projects listed above involved extensive planning and documentation on my part. These included annual budget proposals sufficient to articulate the needs, constituencies, costs, outcomes and evaluation methodolgy for the technology requested. I would have benefited from having researched the literature of technology planning more systematically as I have done this week. Resources like TechSoup and WebJunction would have been a great help but weren't available back then. The literature I read this week had not yet been published when I began my involvement in technology planning, procurement and implemenation going back as far as the mid 1980's.

I will end this week's blog right now, not wanting to further exhaust the reader.