Thriving in an Era of Rabid Collaboration

In the video on "Thriving in an Era of Rabid Collaboration," Brad Wheeler, spokesman from Indiana University, speaks of the challenges of collaborating.

He speaks of the advances in computer technology that have enabled students, administration, and other users in higher education to effectively teach or learn more efficiently.  Systems that allow these efficiencies in higher education are developed through collaboration amongst universities, they are expensive to develop and they are highly resource consuming, but the value as a result of implementation, allows universities to be competitive with other education providers.  The driver of this collaboration is the capability of fast digital networks.  The capability is present but the idea of collaboration is difficult amongst stakeholders.

He speaks about the words collaboration and cooperation.  Collaboration requires an alignment around a common goal and its' duration is only the length of time it takes to fulfill the purpose.  Cooperation means that people have to work together or "co-labor," or see the project through to its' very end.  One interesting point between challenge and value is how as the scale of the project gets larger, the slope of retreat for stakeholders becomes more steep.  An economic situation is referenced where teams are able to exploit the gap of retreat, minimizing the slope to allow collaborators to complete the task.

Collaborating brings forth leverage between money and value.  Each collaborator puts forth a fraction of capital and in return, more value is added, because each benefactor uses the system after it is rolled out.  A few examples of the systems discussed were; Kuali, which is a administrative system, handling financial systems of universities, Sakai, which is a learning system for the students and Hathi Trust, which is a library book database resource.  Many universities are now outsourcing systems to corporations, such as to Microsoft, who handles some universities email systems.  The benefit to these systems is that it aggregates resources and enables coordination between stakeholders to achieve goals.

The governance of these systems is viewed as a cycle in which empowerment is given to the users.  Decision rights are given to whomever has authority of the system, but the decisions are made because feedback is given from and accountability framework.  The input rights are set by the decisions, which enable and empower users.  The users can effect the decisions through the accountability framework.

The last of the challenges discussed were of the capacities of storage.  Newly added jobs with the purpose of innovating existing storage practices or developing better storage management are such creations that combat this problem, but another possibility is the use of cloud computing.  With cloud computing, contingency planning is highlighted.  If disaster occurs, a system can still run live through this service.  The challenge is creating an infrastructure, platform and the software as a service.