Name: Don M. WeeInstitution: Loyola University Chicago
E-mail Address: dwee@luc.edu
Format: Paper presentation
Suggested Audience: Supervisors and managers involved in organizational change; central staff acting as liaisons with departmental technologists
Presentation Outcome:
1. Relate industry trends to pressures influencing changes in their own organization
2. Present the need for/value of cross-departmental teams regardless of new structure
3. Compare notes on how other schools are addressing similar organizational issues
Presentation Content:
The 80's brought minis, PCs, and LANs, and with them decentralization of support, as departments and "superusers" struck out on their own. Now the pendulum is swinging back to centralization, with claims that "the network is the computer" growing truer and "corporate restructuring" reaching into academia to make deapartment heads focus increasingly on bottom lines and core competencies. But the new central function is not the glass house of yesterday. In the center, we have network plumbers, data managers, superserver administrators, and webmistresses imposing order over chaotic content, but still have partners in the departments who are the experts in the field-specific needs, lines of business, and vertical-market applications of their departments. Our org charts must place technologists in both the center and the periphery, but we also need cross-departmental teams to augment line management to benefit from economies of scale yet flexibly respond to extraordinary opportunities.