Crowdsourcing our way to a campus IT plan

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Proposed chapter from Curtis A. Carver:

When I became CIO at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2015, I confronted the same mandate every new IT leader faces when assuming the role: outlining, developing, and executing a strategic plan. The pressure to do this swiftly and immediately can be immense—and I think many CIOs feel compelled to articulate and hand down fully formed plans on Day 1. After all, that's typically the quickest way to assert your position and vision as a leader. But I like to take a different approach. I don't dictate my team's initial goals. I open them up. Working this way felt especially important in my new role at UAB, which I knew was going to be the last gig of my career. I wanted to make the largest contribution I could—not only to the university, but also to higher education in general. What better way to do this than to let them openly contribute to the goals my team would be tackling during my tenure? So I let the entire university community help me determine and prioritize our most pressing IT problems.

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Review and discussion questions

• Curtis explains how he mobilized his entire campus to help him address the challenge of establishing IT priorities. If you could engage your entire educational organization, what problem would you like to see it solve collectively?
• Could you "open up" critical decision making processes in your educational organization? What would you do? How would you start?
• Curtis notes that "collaborative approaches like ours require more work than solitary, draconian ones." What kinds of additional work did his open approach necessitate? Do you think this more complicated approach justified the results he and his team achieved? How might you and your teams begin addressing the work involved with taking an open approach to setting goals?