The National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education (NCAHE) recently called attention to its final report, Accountability for Better Results: A National Imperative for Higher Education, by proclaiming: "Improved accountability for better results is imperative, but how to improve accountability in higher education is not so obvious." Why did the NCAHE so carefully and persuasively argue the case for accountability as an imperative if it didn't intend to recommend and highlight proven strategies for improving accountability?
In any case, I disagree with the NCAHE that how to improve accountability in higher education is not so obvious! To improve accountability, higher education can use technology to redesign academic and administrative service processes for measurably improved effectiveness, flexibility, and efficiency. The common course redesign strategy and the flex program and service redesign strategy are described and their performance-improvement effectiveness documented in Improving Institutional Performance: The necessary role of IT-enabled innovation.
To put the issue in larger context, consider the role played by innovative, IT-enabled production and service process redesign in the recent and well documented increase in productivity in the national / global economy (Vikas Bajaj, Reprogrammed: Blazing gain in productivity means some jobs are no longer needed, Dallas Morning News, Oct. 10, 2004, 1D). The same strategy can be used in higher education to improve productivity -- another word for accountability and institutional performance.
About the same time that the NCAHE issued its report in March of 2005, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman published his latest book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). Friedman makes abundantly clear the role of technology in the innovative collaboration and sourcing models that are changing the responsibilities of governments, commercial and noncommercial organizations, and the individuals who lead and who work for these governments and organizations. Higher education needs to harness Friedman's "flattening" forces and the new "horizontal," collaborative value chains that are replacing traditional values chains -- none more traditional than the vertical value chain employed by higher education.
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