Distributed Thinking

WonkHE recently posted an interesting opinion piece with the title Academics and Administrators: No more ‘us and them’ . In that post, Paul Greatrix rebutted criticisms of professional services (administrative) staff in Universites from some academics. To illustrate his point, he quoted recent articles in which administrators were portrayed as a useless overhead on the key tasks at hand (teaching and research). This flows both ways, as Greatrix himself points out. As Enterprise Architect, I work with Professional Services colleagues and I have heard some of them express opinions that clearly fail to understand the nature of academic work. Academics cannot be treated as if they were factory workers, churning out lectures on a treadmill. I think these comments reveal a fundamental clash of ideas about how a University should work. Some people who come into management positions for other sectors tend to frame the University as a business, with students and research funders as customer...

My mother, who turned 95 years old this month, has never used a computer.  She doesn't even have a mobile phone, let alone a smartphone.  She has only the vaguest idea of what the internet is.  So when she asked me what I do at work, I had to simplify things a bit. I'd be interested to hear other suggestions for how to explain Enterprise Architecture to someone who doesn't know anything about computers.  Arguably, this is good practice, because in our role we have to convey complicated ideas to people who vary considerably in their knowledge of IT.  Some are IT specialists, while others are specialists in their own areas, and we need to explain our work in language that makes sense to them. I told Mum that my job is to make all the University computers work together. As an example, I explained that one computer stores information about which courses the students have chosen, and another one handles stores the marks the students score in their coursework and ...