The Technological Horizon for Florida State College

Posted by Dr. Rob Rennie Tue, October 19, 2010 2:43 pm EDT

Today I am going to share a little bit about the big trends that are driving our technology planning here at the college but also happen to be creating major changes throughout our society that will affect how we live, learn, and conduct the business of our lives for a very long time.

As I stated in my opening blog for this site, I have been living and working in the center core of information technology for a very long time, over 33 years in fact. And in the course of this very long career there have been two giant leaps, historical shifts of epic proportion, affecting technology and ultimately, our everyday lives. The first of these was the development of the personal computer. It is hard to imagine our lives without these ubiquitous devices. Second was the Internet/web. This advancement provided the infrastructure and means by which all the world’s computers could communicate, including all of those personal computers. Together these two major technological shifts made the power of computing available to everyone and enabled access to a vast array of digital resources, the creation of computing communities-such as our social networks, and served a the stimuli for new business models. They changed the way we communicate, learn, shop, conduct and share research, how we entertain ourselves and even the ways in which we socialize and establish our personal networks and relationships. Few could argue the significance of these forces in the course of human history.

One of the most fascinating things about each of these giant leaps was that a very small number of people realized the significance of what was happening at the time. The realization of the importance of the personal computer and the web was a slowly evolving thing. The press coverage at the time was not in bold headlines but rather a somewhat dismissive “so-and-so” announced “new technology here” today. But this is common, huge trends are sometimes so big that they swallow us up before we realize it.

I was very fortunate during each of those major shifts to be engaged at the core of the developments. That involvement provided a perspective that made early adoption a very comfortable thing. During the early personal computing days we deployed the new technology in K-12 classrooms and developed systems to assist with assessment of academic achievement that was nearly impossible up to that point. We had large mainframe computers but they were too large and too expensive to divert from their essential business functions. It took very little time to confirm that we could improve student performance by knowing how their educational experience was going and by measuring the effectiveness of different approaches for different students, then optimizing their instructional programs.

When the web was in its nascent stages, I was CIO at a large college in California. We were an early adopter of the Internet, even with its very limited capabilities at the time, and were able to move quickly to web-enabled services when the first of the modern browsers became available.

Well, here we go again, but even bigger. I believe the most significant events in technology are currently underway, and again in a discrete one-by-one analysis they may seem like quiet little events, but in combination they represent what could be the most impactful changes since the personal computer and the web.

They are: business analytics/business intelligence, extreme mobile computing with fully ubiquitous networks, cloud computing, and the integration of social networks. Each of these major technology shifts interacts with the driving societal, business and technology trends that are taking place. We have identified the top ten trends as: experience as brand and system as experience; social computing, communities and collaboration; digital content ecosystems; service oriented systems (SOA); Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 to Web n.0 evolution; integration of consumer devices from the edge of networks; federated identity management and profile-based computing; hybridization of experiences; virtual reality & simulation; and the emergence of digital natives.

To identify and prepare the college for these extraordinary changes we have been heavily engaged in research and analysis as we begin development of our next strategic technology plan. It is this plan that will provide the framework for optimizing new technologies and trends, leveraging new technology-related behaviors and resources for student success, and ensuring maximum value creation from technology investments. For the past couple of years I have become a reluctant road warrior in pursuing the best technology ideas and strategies (sadly very little of the technology industry happenings are here at home-except one, the IT Leadership Academy we run at the college-which will be a blog topic all its own). In addition to extensive professional development and seemingly endless technology and business case presentations and discussions, my team and I have devoted most of our last years’ weekends and evenings to reading everything available on these subjects and debriefing each other. It is from these experiences that I assert the presence of this next mega technology shift.

I will be sharing details of this mega change and some of what we have learned including some of the amazing innovation going on in business, industry and education. We will also share some of the thinking that will serve as the foundation of the college’s technology environment over the next several years and a few of the very special projects that will provide exceptional support for student success.