NLII 2000

I’ll provide some background, illustrate the issues, offer some explanation of what we are attempting to do in Indiana, and then close by coming full circle to the strategies required for success.

Background

Tim Berners-Lee had the idea, while sitting in his physics lab in Switzerland, that computers should be able to store random associations between disparate things, just like the brain can. Many people point to that instance as the genesis of the Internet and ultimately the World Wide Web.

In reality, the ripples from that thought take us much further than our current use and misuse of the Internet.

If you dissemble Berners-Lee’s thought to its more basic parts, you continue to have an interesting set of pointers on a roadmap to success.

Success of Berners-Lee’s concept was predicated on effective interaction between the technology and appropriate content.  Surely there were people before him who knew for a fact that computers could connect random bits of information.  It wasn’t until there was a readily apparently and driving need for content that the concept became a reality and the revolution began.

Not just what could happen, but why something should happen.

Hold that thought for a second and let’s fast forward a bit.

Harvard School of Business

April 7, 1997, the Harvard Business School publishes a paper projecting the winners and losers in the inevitable digital convergence of voice, video and data. The paper is an outcome of a November 1995 Colloquium on Multimedia and the Boundaryless World. 

Authors Bane, Bradley and Collis predict the winners will be those who provide the highest quality content at a reasonable price. 

Winning will not be based in anyway on current distribution strength. 

In essence, current technology prowess and ownership is not enough.  It is more than ownership of the technology; you must  “own” the customer also. 

Customer “ownership” requires a history of quality customer service leading to customer satisfaction.  Customer contact remains critical.  Allowing someone else to deliver your content will cause longer-term problems.

However, they suggested that Content Packagers would appear in positions of strength.  Successful packagers will link quality content with customers through almost invisible distribution systems.  People won’t care whole lot about the technology, as long as they have access to it, can use it effectively, and it provides them access to the content they want, need, or for some reason must have.

Ultimately, customers will link with whoever has the most versatile combination of quality content and user-friendly technology.

Fast forward again. 

The Connected Society

In the opening months of 1999, Ernst and Young, the international consulting company talked with 100 information technology CEOs around the world about the future of their areas of interest.  The outcome was a report entitled The Connected Society.

Initial findings:  Content Packagers are emerging as key gatekeepers between technology and the consumer. 

These content packagers sort through massive amounts of available content and information and bring the customers just what they need, when they need it, and how they want it.  Those who are successful make the users’ experience simpler, more tailored and more efficient. 

And they’ll get in early. Both the Harvard School of Business and Ernst and Young emphasize the importance of getting in and established early.  One CEO put it this way:

“Players who win the content battle early will dominate by winning brand loyalty in the rapidly growing new market.”

Good examples of this include: MTV, the first to define the new niche.  And Amazon.com, still not making a profit but dominating the market niche.  Some economists suggest that the first to define the market niche will seldom drop below 50 % market share.  Late arriving competitors will fight over the remaining half.   

So, what is required to be successful as a content packager? Again, according to one of the CEOs interviewed by Ernst and Young:

-     Heavy investment in brand identity.

-         Constant improvement of the user access and interface

-         Development of new products and services tailored specifically to the user needs

Converging on the Customer

In the past month, Ernst and Young has released another paper entitled Converging on the Customer.  The opening line says it all: 

“Real convergence has always been there, all along.  All the different communication technologies have always converged – on the customer!”

The paper identifies two important truths:

-         Convergence must be around the customer, not the technology

-         Customer choice is shaping the communications industry

Education Today

So what does all this tell us in education?

Managing the second wave of convergence will be critical to our success.  And doing things differently will be required for those of us in information access and education if we are to be competitive in the Knowledge Marketplace of the Year 2000.

The first thing we need to recognize is that competition is real.  Occasionally you hear arguments from within higher education that the competition is not “real.”

They say, “Look at the actual student numbers of Western Governors University.”

Or  “ If you pay close attention to what Phoenix or Jones International are saying, they are not our competitors.”

According to the Digest of Education Statistics $250 billion was spent on higher education in 1996.  Admittedly much of that was spent on campus.  But that also means these figures probably don’t take into account the potential growth market of life long learning.  If the market segment has that kind of action now, you know there are commercial entities monitoring our activity very closely.  They are just waiting for the best time to jump.

And as I said before, Harvard Business School notes in their prognosis of “Winners and Losers” that there is significant advantage to be the first to develop a creative approach to a new market segment.  Out potential competitors certainly won’t wait long to jump in.  Certainly not long enough for current education providers to naturally evolve to Knowledge Marketplace concepts. 

The Challenge

So how do we address the challenge? 

Initially we’ll need to recognize what we do, and don’t already know. 

One of the most difficult conversions during the Second Wave Convergence will be away from the “expert syndrome” in which our faculty feel they know their audience well enough to be competitive.  The problem arises from years of being the “expert in front of the class” in which the students come to us in a seemingly unending flow. 

We haven’t developed the motivation or even the processes to effectively “own” a customer in the fashion the Harvard School of Business or Ernst and Young indicated will be required for success.  We may own the customers who walk through the gates of our institutions, but we don’t know nearly enough about what will, without question, be an exploding customer base demanding life long learning outside the ivy covered walls of our campuses.

Needs Assessment

What do these new learners want?  Why do they want it?  When do they need it?  How are they willing to access it? 

The needs assessment process is much more complicated than it has been in the past.  It’s more than needs. It’s a complex matrix of needs, wants and motivations.

If I think I know what you need, do I also know what you want?  If I don’t know what you want, you won’t pay any attention to me. 

And beyond that, if I don’t know what will actually push you to overcome the inertia of status quo, what will motivate you enough to actually come to me and access the information or educational programming I have available, nothing will happen.

Two Major Segments

To complicate things more, there are, at a minimum, two major audience segments emerging that we must pay attention to.  Soon there will be many, many more.  The two major segments we must attend to today are dramatically different.

One is built from the traditional on-campus students we’re churning out semester by semester each year.  Graduates with newly minted diplomas used to pour into the work force with only a minimal look back. 

Now, however, as they walk out the door they know the technology they use to ply their expertise will change dramatically in a very short period of time, and the knowledge base they built their on-campus expertise from will possibly double in their first year out. 

They are beginning to leave our campuses telling us we must maintain connections with them; we must provide them on-going access to life long learning opportunities; we must maintain diverse access points with increasingly robust information sources for them to return to in some virtual fashion.

The second audience segment of critical importance to those of us in education and information access is one that includes the people who are being characterized these days as being on the down side of the Digital Divide.  These are the people who don’t have access. And the more we feed the upside of the Divide, the farther the downside spilt gets. 

Typically these are people with lower incomes and less technology access. 

Nationally, for people who make less than $10,000 a year only 16 % use the Internet for any purpose, at any location.  At the other end of that spectrum 58 % of the people with household incomes of $75,000 or more have and use Internet access according to the U.S. Dept. of Commerce.

If the predications are right about the nature of the Connected Society, this digital divide will grow larger as more of our everyday lives intertwine with Internet access.

As life long learners become more and more competitive for jobs and advancement, it will be those who have little or no access that could gain the greatest advantage from the kinds of educational and informational access we must focus on to be competitive. 

It’s an interesting and in some ways ironic circle. As we compete with commercial and virtual educational organizations for the most affluent and available customers, the kinds of access we must create to compete with them might actually provide greater benefit to those who the commercial competitors will find less enticing.  This is all the more reason for public education to be competitive in the Knowledge Marketplace. 

In Indiana

In Indiana we don’t lack for opportunity and need.  The Indiana Career and Post Secondary Advancement Center (ICPAC) indicates there are 850,000 people who don’t have a high school diploma.  And 1.28 million have a high school diploma but no college experience.  These two segments make up 60% of the Indiana population.

These are people who could benefit from additional training and education, but are the least likely to even consider a traditional higher education experience.  Yet at the same time, they will be the people who will come the farthest when and if they gain access simply because they are slipping behind so rapidly now. 

Bridging the Divide

The Benton Foundation offers insight about what is required to bridge this Digital Divide:

- Access points

- User Support

- Content designed to effectively help the target audience

A Pattern Forms

Do you start to see a pattern forming?  Access, Content and Training that directly satisfy customer needs start emerging as the foundation of second wave of convergence. From Harvard School of Business, to Ernst and Young, and the Benton Foundation, consensus is building about what it will take to be competitive.

Peter Drucker predicts dramatic change in education.  The most dramatic since the invention of the text book more than 300 years ago. 

The drivers of this change will be:

-         Technology access

-         Increased demands for content from the knowledge based society, as organized learning becomes a life long process for knowledge workers.

-         New theories about how humans learn.

Drucker is one more contributor to the consensus. 

With the consensus growing, again the question arises: What should we do about? 

IHETS as a Player

In Indiana we’re attempting to look at each factor in the equation, each part of the process, and each player’s contribution.  Can we reconfigure and take advantage of the opportunity to manage the second wave of convergence?  Let’s take a look.

First, who are we?

The Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System is a consortium of higher education institutions in Indiana focused on effective use of technology in teaching and learning. 

We began in 1967 as microwave-based ITFS system to provide one-way video and two-way audio to learning sites around the state.  Over time we’ve grown to include a voice system connecting all campuses with long distance service, and statewide data network to provide internet access to the seven major public institutions and more than 30 smaller and private colleges around the state. 

In the early 90s we began developing a statewide partnership to promote content development and professional development for teaching faculty.  The Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education continues to develop as the complementary partner to our on-going technology development. 

As a consortium, our driving force is the ability to do more together than each member can do separately.    

In the mid 1990s, the Governor’s office and others began developing a program called Access Indiana. There are several Access Indiana initiatives, but the most germane to the issue at hand is the development of the Access Indiana State Network.  It is a partnership including higher education, K-12 schools, libraries, public broadcasting, and state government.  The Intelenet Commission, a government agency charged with aggregating bandwidth needs for tax supported entities and negotiating favorable contracts with telecom providers, coordinates it. 

The structure of the partnership with other access and education providers in the state looks something like this:

Access Indiana State Network

The outcome of this partnership is an ATM-based voice, video, and data network that provides T1 ATM connections at the same price anywhere in the state.  

Because IHETS had already deployed a statewide data network, the partners approached the consortium to build the new Access Indiana State Network on the foundation of our data network.  Initially the network ran parallel to the IHETS data network by placing redundant switches at each of our campus based network nodes. 

Now we are expanding and have contracted with AT&T to carry the bulk of the network traffic.  We are in the process even as I speak today of migrating our ATM switches from the campus nodes to AT&T facilities across the state, cutting our T1 costs by about half. 

All the original IHETS campus based circuits were the first network connections.  Now we’re adding schools, libraries, county offices of the Purdue Extension Service, some county government offices, some public broadcasting stations, and most agencies of state government to the network.  I expect we’ll have 600 network connections by year’s end and as many as 1000 in 18 months. 

Faculty/Learner Benefits

But if we go back to the drivers we discussed earlier, Technology, Content, and Training, what does all this network development really mean for our faculty and learners around the state?

Primarily it means much greater access—two way interactive video access--through a variety of learning center-type faculties. This is in addition to the 300plus satellite receive sties in learning centers, extension offices, schools and libraries around the state. 

Fall semester 2000, we will have more than 70 degree and certificate programs available. Including 85 classes available via two-way interactive video. There will be 90 available via satellite. And courses available on the Internet double each year (644 in 1999-00).  In some cases we have students taking five different classes from five different instructions and yet are resident students on none. 

But we are not alone in that process; there are any number of educational programs and institutions offering classes in a similar fashion.

In many cases, though, network development and content development are following parallel but separate paths.  There is inherent power behind the technology roll out. Legislators, other elected officials, and decision makers across the country are scrambling to build some kind of network-like connections. From Virginia, to Ohio, to the West Coast, debates are raging -- many times among people who have just recently learned the meaning of many of the words they’re using -- about H.323 IP Video vs. H.320 ATM video, about Cisco vs. Nortel vs., Lucent switches, and any number of other network based decisions that simply must be made.

And simultaneously in buildings across campuses, or across states others are plotting strategies to take advantage of Learning Anytime Any Place grant funds, or any number of other grant opportunities designed to help foster the development of content for audiences from preschool to K-12 to higher education to workforce development to life long learning.  

Second Wave Convergence

This parallel development could look something like this:

In fact, our assessment is that content development lags somewhere behind the technology rollout. The argument among decision makers, when it comes to funding technology, is typically focused on how can we afford not do this, even if I can’t exactly tell you why we should.  Funding for content is a little tougher “sell.”  After all it’s already there, all you need to do is adapt it to the technology, right?  Well, maybe.

With both the Partnership for Statewide Education and the Access Indiana State Network in our overall organization, we’re attempting to move these arrows of development more like this. 

Ultimately we expect to be front row for the Second Wave Convergence -- the convergence of Content, Technology Access, and Training.  This is the convergence Ernst and Young has identified at the consumer level.  This is the convergence that brings about ultimate user satisfaction.  And it will not happen on parallel tracks.  Without this Second Wave Convergence, frustration will set in and we’ll lose the opportunity to establish our niche in the Knowledge Marketplace.

Frustrations Abound

Frustration can set us back with our customers, with our faculty, and with our funders. 

The frustration equation is simply stated: If you have technology access but no content, you have no reason to use the technology and you feel you’ve wasted the resources required to gain access.  If there is well-identified content, but you can’t don’t have access to the technology required, you are on the outside looking in.  And if you have both the technology access and the appropriate content but have not been trained to effectively use the technology, your still lost and angry.

Timing is everything.  That’s why managing the Second Wave Convergence is so critical. 

IHETS Initiatives

We have begun several initiatives at IHETS designed to help our members gain value from actively managing the Second Wave Convergence.

We are:

-         Expanding the mission and vision of the consortium to address audience needs outside the traditional on-campus higher education student, including the full spectrum of life long learning students. The expanded mission is designed to foster greater collaboration with and among other education providers statewide including K-12, formal and informal certificate and competency-based training, Indiana Public Broadcasting, and others.

-         Shifting staff perceptions of success from customer service to customer satisfaction.  Providing effective customer service may have gotten us close to the customer in the past, but taking the responsibility for full customer satisfaction requires greater involvement in helping users and learners have a positive educational experience using technology.

-         Developing new methods to efficiently and effectively identify customer needs. We’re developing new tools, which will be shared among the consortium members to conduct consistent audience analysis.  These unified tools will allow for aggregation of data about audience needs among all members.

-         Beginning an initiative to increase grant programs designed to fund content development in Indiana.

-         Looking aggressively for natural opportunities to tie content development to technology development.

-         Refocusing staff recognition of the importance of training and reinforcing the idea that sharing information about how to do something is as critical as being able to do something for someone. 

Blurring

At the foundation of our efforts are the goals of being effective and competitive.  To reach these goals, we must take on the role of the content packager described by Harvard School of Business and Ernst and Young. We must blur the lines around what have previously been distinct functions.

The Connected Society report says content packagers typify this “blur.”  They merge content, information services, and communications services, but in fact are not content developers, nor are they wholly telecommunications providers.

Full Circle

So, we’ve come full circle. 

Remember what is required to be successful as a content packager? Again, according to one of the CEOs interviewed:

-     Heavy investment in brand identity.

-         Constant improvement of the user access and interface

-         Development of new products and services tailored specifically to the user needs

Consortia Model

Consortia like IHETS and on a national level, ADEC, the American Distance Education Consortium, are positioned well to help our member institutions remain competitive.  In fact, given the nature of the Knowledge Marketplace, I think the consortium model provides the perfect competitor for virtual universities. 

-         We have brand identity being aggressively protected on each of our member campuses.  (When was the last time you turned on the television to watch Western Governors University play Indiana in the Final Four?) 

-         We have ownership of the customer through our members in most cases because of that brand identity (if we can only figure out how to take advantage of that.)

-         In Indiana, we’re leading the most massive statewide technology roll out our state has seen in decades, perhaps ever. 

-         And in higher education we’re the keepers and creators of the knowledge base, which supports all educational programming being developed for the full spectrum of life long learners. 

Conclusion

To get there we must aggressively mange the Second Wave Convergence of Technology, Content, and Training.

- We must know our audience and “own” our customers.  We can’t afford to develop programming that is not perfectly tailored for a well-identified target audience.  And we can’t afford to lose direct contact with our learners.

The idea of “owning” our customers is the most foreign to our educational culture. Let me offer one of the company strategies profiled in the Connected Society.  It has five basic parts, which we could be well positioned to adopt:

-                     Guess what the customers wants and needs

-                     Listen to the customer, be proactive

-                     Connect the customer, better, faster, cheaper

-                     Eliminate customer techno fears

-     Hold on to the customers

- We must package content.  We need to identify learner needs and then provide them with the highest quality, most technically accessible package of information.

- We must compete. If our competitors gain a foothold in areas normally considered our competitive advantage, some of our learner/customers in the greatest need—those on the downside of the Digital Divide--will fall even farther behind as our resources to serve them are siphoned off through competition with commercial providers.

- And ultimately, we must recognize, as Drucker says, that education is headed for some dramatic change. 

We can’t shy away from the change we must embrace it and, in fact, promote it.

One of the CEOs interviewed put it this way:

“Legacy players who feel challenged and scared may be the ultimate winners.  Those who don’t yet feel challenged and scared don’t have a chance.”

How about you?  Are you scared, yet?

References:

Bradley, S.P., Bane, P.W., and Collis, D.J. "Winners and Losers--Industry Structure in the Converging World of Telecommunications, Computing, and Entertainment." In Competing in the Age of Digital Convergence, edited by D. Yoffie. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996.   http://www.hbs.edu/mis/multimedia/link/p_winners_losers.html