One of my co-workers and I recently returned home from the National Association for Student Professional Administrators #NASPA18 in Philadelpha, PA. This was the first national NASPA that I’ve attended, even though I’ve been a student affairs professional for more than 23 years. As a technologist and technical manager, NASPA was an interesting experience for me. Here are some thoughts on #NASPA18.

NASPA is Political

From the opening session, NASPA presents a strongly political agenda to its membership. This is defined as “public policy” in the NASPA strategic plan. My home “tribe” of EDUCAUSE generally tries to avoid politics and focus on technology, management, and leadership. While I might agree or disagree with points of the agenda, I’ve always been taught that as higher education administrators, we should stay neutral in our political views when dealing with students in order to train them how to think and form their own opinions rather than co-opt others.

NASPA is Super-Multicultural

As a straight white male, I was definitely in the minority at this conference. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the politics of multiculturalism run strong in the threads of the conference and organization. I personally believe that the essence of being truly multi-cultural is to not focus on our attributes but on our character. In my experience, when one does this, cultural differences tend to disappear.  NASPA tends to push multi-cultural differences to the forefront, almost to the point of absurdity. For example, during one of the plenary sessions, half an hour was devoted to asking the indigenous people of the region for permission to hold the conference on their land. Apparently, this is a tradition at NASPA. I wonder if any of the landowners have ever said “no?”

NASPA Values Technology

The conference had a technology track, but what NASPA considers technology is a little different than what IT professionals may think. Most members equate technology with social media, and while this is an aspect of what student affairs professionals do, it’s certainly not the totality nor even representative of what IT does. This attitude in practice is a little surprising considering the fourth strategic goal of NASPA is technology:

Goal 4: Provide leadership for student affairs in integrating existing and emerging technologies.

Objectives:
4.1 Develop knowledge of technologies that enhance the student experience, increase quality, and create administrative efficiencies in student affairs.
4.2 Increase capacity and develop programs to create meaningful engagement and learning about emerging and existing technologies in student affairs.
4.3 Cultivate strategic alliances to advance technological solutions and enhancements that support excellence in practice.
4.4 Implement technologies to increase member engagement, learning, and association effectiveness.

It is because of this fourth goal that I think there is fertile ground for IT to make in-roads at NASPA. Some areas for presentation proposals next year are “Learn to Speak Geek: A Common Vocabulary to Use with IT”, “Project Management for Student Affairs Professionals”, “Co-Opting IT to Help You with Student Assessment”, and “Communicating Business Value: Finding New Technologies to Support Your Work.”

I think NASPA needs what we have, and if we create strategic partnerships with them, we can increase our influence and reputations. If we are able to get over our discomfort at the characteristics of the organization, we may have something to teach them.

A colleague of mine, who is another division-level IT manager, and I are teaching a course in the fall. The course is a senior level elective that focuses on special topics in technology management. Cool – right up our alley. We were given freedom to pick the topic, and of course we chose DevOps. You may have heard of it. It has become trendy is recent years, but I think it will prove to be more than a passing fad. You see, DevOps tries to solve problems, not primarily with technology, but rather with organizational functioning and communication.

The traditional definition of DevOps describes the intersection of communication and automation between IT development, operations and quality assurance. While these three areas are classically highlighted as the main areas of focus, in truth, DevOps is a set of principles for all of the IT disciplines. Recent sources have described DevOps as a philosophy for approaching IT work based upon four pillars; collaboration, affinity, tools, and scaling (cf. Davis & Daniels, 2016. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale). More accurately, I think of DevOps as an organizational culture. Sure, part of DevOps is tools that enhance automation, communication, and collaboration. In fact, most people mistakenly talk about how to “do DevOps” and usually focus on tools. But what I find extremely useful is the push to break down organizational silos and embrace shared responsibility and authority across the organization.

Here’s the interesting part. As we have been trying to introduce DevOps into the work that we do here at the big school, we are finding that the organizational structure of a large Tier 1 University (or most any other higher education institution for that matter) is the antithesis of a DevOps culture. Higher education embraces vertical structures of organization and authority, delineated responsibility, demarcated services, territorial imbroglios, and  finger-pointing when things go south. In IT, we see this among our IT organizations, between us and our customers, and even between organizations with a common purpose like academic colleges.

That is why I think DevOps is so important for Higher Ed IT. It gives us a framework to finally address some of the serious shortcomings of our environments in a way that will prove our worth to the academy. If we can only get over our historical cultures and shift our thinking, I think we can take Higher Ed IT to the next level using principles of DevOps.