Early Consulting Concepts – The 4 Questions

As news of the Loomis technology progress spread, more and more schools in New England started contacting me to “consult”. By 1993, I was soon advising emerging tech committees at Noble and Greenough, Concord Academy, Deerfield Academy, Tabor Academy, The Winsor School, Miss Porter’s School, Hamden Hall, Milton Academy, Ethel Walker and several others.

Given that we were basically making it up as we went along, I did not feel like an “expert”, merely someone a few miles further down the road. Nonetheless, I soon developed a framework that allowed schools to ask the questions that helped them make progress. Thirty years later these still seem like the questions every school needs to grapple with. The answers surely have migrated over time, but the questions remain relevant.

1. Where does IT fit?
2. How do you future proof?
3. What is appropriate staffing?
4. What is the right leadership style?

As schools went from zero users to most faculty and staff using computers, growing almost crippling tech expenses, needing to make strategic choices, building facilities that needed staff, etc the first question was— who is in charge?

1. There was and is no easy answer. The needs and effects broke across all traditional boundaries —between maintenance teams and faculty, into classrooms and requirements. So should the leader be an educational leader or an IT technology person, or under the CFO since that was the controlling place for all the expenses? Who should decide what the various administrative offices should use and should they be asked or forced to use the same system?

2. Schools were now being asked to built computer labs, wire buildings, create web sites, install databases in the administration offices and integrate the teach about technology as well as the teaching with technology into the curriculum. These were new expenses and often challenged budgets. How do you know you are not just throwing good money after bad? There were very bitter platform wars occurring and standardizing one way or the other might be a disaster. Some schools did huge capital campaigns to buy dozens of machines only to find them hopelessly obsolete in 2-3 years. 

3. Students and teachers and staff needed training, Computers and networks and servers and printers needed setup and maintenance. The website needed constant attention. The administrative offices needed training and help managing their databases. Someone needed to provide knowledgeable leadership around this change. Depending on the size of the school, is this 1 person, 5 people, or 20? Can the administrative offices and academic departments just take care of themselves? Should a technology person be part of the school’s strategic leadership?

4. Is the role of the technology leader to encourage use and provide as much access as possible as fast as possible? Or is their role to protect the data and the computers of the school and only allow monitored use by approved, qualified, certified users who can justify their request for access?

These served as starting points for some very important conversations. Depending on where schools were in terms of leadership and finances the results varied.

In some cases, for instance, in some of the more affluent schools, the faculty were very powerful and the administration was very wary to dictate any change. For this reason in some of those schools that had 100 million dollar endowments and all the money in the world to finance technology, those schools were 4-5 years behind more adventurous and open spirited tiny schools who were willing to experiment. They were late to get labs, computerize comments, get a website or install administrative databases.

With Loomis Chaffee, I was very fortunate to serve under a very progressive Headmaster and an administrative team willing to try new things. After a couple of years the Dean of Faculty mandated that all the faculty would use a computer to write their teacher comments. The school was one of the first boarding schools to financed the wiring of the dormitories. The school allowed me to travel around the country on a sabbatical year to learn what other schools were doing.

Leading schools through those questions remains a relevant task even today.