#1 Explain how the graduate program – with specific reference to its policy emphasis and your chosen area of study (labor, social policy) – will help you achieve your purposes for pursuing a master’s degree. Please include any other information about your needs and goals that might give us insight as to why our program will serve you well.
As a Chief Information Officer within a public institution of higher education, I am continually challenged with identifying new projects and initiatives that can enhance the mission of the institution and provide for our community, while aligning with current operations, the technical environment and even campus culture. Needs analysis, development, implementation and administration requires the understanding of not only key educational and business objectives for the campus’ administration, faculty and students, but external drivers that may influence current practices and future demands. I believe success, in such complexity, is most likely achieved when multiple stakeholders are able to understand the current issues and contribute to their solution. Specific practices based on openness, transparency and collaboration are therefore vital to incorporate into the organization’s culture. Unfortunately these practices are antithetical to traditional approaches in policy-making found within both the public and private sector .
Traditionally decision-making (i.e. needs identification, analysis and resourcing) within, not only public institutions such as higher education but the commercial sector as well, have followed a top-down approach where cabinet level executives defined a strategic direction and put forth objectives or goals as directives based on personal experience, expertise and/or the recommendations of select committees. Twenty-five years ago, Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky in The Experts Speak may have lampooned the value of “experts” in identifying trends, assessing markets and defining policy, but now others have come forth to offer a more formal approach to the traditional model.
Anthony Williams and Don Tapscott authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything argue better problem-solving and policy-making can be made through non-traditional approaches. “While hierarchies are not vanishing, profound changes in the nature of technology, demographics, and the global economy are giving rise to powerful new models of production based on community, collaboration, and self-organization rather than on hierarchy and control.” Through the use of new technologies such as wiki’s, the authors claim, internal and external stakeholders can engage directly in–and influence–government and businesses to not only define direction but “improve policy outcomes, reduce costs, and increase public value.”
The value of openness and collaboration in decision-making is shared by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations. “Strategy,” Surowiecki says, “is all about collecting information from many different sources, evaluating the probabilities of potential outcomes and making decisions in the face of an uncertain future. These are tasks for which decision markets are tailor made. Yet companies [and the public sector, I wonder] have remained, for the most part, indifferent to this source.”
Throughout my career, as a programmer analyst who has embraced the open and collaborative development model known as Agile Methods where continuous feedback allowed for emergent design to direct development, and now as a CIO where I have implemented various technologies and techniques to tap the resources and vision of the campus community and peers throughout both education and technology in order to better define IT governance and project management, I have sought better explanations for, and validation of, mass-collaboration as a method to yield better decision-making, problem-solving and thus policy-making.
My goal within an academic program would be to explore the issues around policy-making, test the ideas and theories presented by advocates of distributed processes and, if proved of value, learn specific methods that would introduce these practices into an organization.
Opening My Masters 