In the early stages of the Government Digital Service, loads of the stickers had the maxim of “trust, users, delivery” emblazoned around the outside. It’s a great opening gambit, as it is basically the opposite of the “fuck you, this’ll do, you have to use it” model. It pairs with the discussions of the ethical need for well designed government services because users almost never have a choice as to which government to use, so absent a competition imperative, we have to phrase our duties to users in ethical language.
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/08/a-problem-shared-is-money-saved/
I went to the pub last week for a friend’s post-viva drinks and got chatting with an assistant professor about work, me trying to get services out, her as an academic trying to get shit done.
It was a really illuminating conversation that left me thinking about a few parts of my job. So, that plus a load of other chats from the last three months or so, led to this.
Often, we’re in a fruitless them and us opposition, where professional services are caricatured as well paid layabouts (we’re under the public sector average for our job roles) dedicated to frustrating academic freedom (despite UCU being the recognised union for those same professional services staff). Things aren’t rosy for relations between academic and professional staff. They should be better, and in my context, some of the things that academic staff see as being driven decisions made by the administration are really things that were never decided, or decisions taken in isolation without research or a full understanding of implications.
We have hundreds of forms that ask for the same information, because we don’t see things as joined up and because we rarely run through the administrative journey in the same way that our users are. We also don’t have remit to change those hundreds of forms because most are invisible to us as word docs or fall outside of the specific departmental processes that we’re working on.
Compliance could be, if not fun, then certainly low-friction.
We’re making life harder for academics. One of the key things they’re asking for in the industrial dispute is a maximum 35 hour week and “adoption of the Health and Safety Executive's Stress Management Standards, or equivalent”. How much of that could we make a dent in by making the administrative burden of the university even half as shit?
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. We use software that is reasonably standard for performing work in the 2020s. Outlook, google docs, teams, Oracle, Zoom. All of these things are normal for an organisation with more than 30,000 members. There’s some shadow IT and odds and ends, but it’s all normal enterprise stuff. But, it relies on a modality of Business in the 2020s. Is academia that different? Maybe? I don’t personally think so, and I think a lot of the drivers for formalisation through software and the collapsing of complexity into particular journeys are often driven by legislation and policy rather than a wish by university administration to make things worse at work, but we have to understand that some of the mistrust is about bringing in companies that stand for versions of work and the world that we don’t stand for.
At the AI and Society Forum a few weeks ago, there was a great talk about the uses of AI and surveillance in schools and educational settings that emphasised the slow, thoughtless drift into using overreaching technologies for “compliance” reasons. It sometimes ignores that there are few options that don’t involve the big companies. We switched some of our ID landscape from a roll-your-own thing we’ve been using and growing since the 90s to Microsoft. We can’t make our own MFA app that can deal with state-level advanced persistent threats. But it’s hard to talk about that, especially when you’re concerned about making clear what your targets are and what their weaknesses might be. We’ve got what we’ve got. We’re past the point of building our own OSs, drivers, mail servers and login security. So: what is the university we should build with the tools available to us and, crucially, how do we phrase that in how we choose, buy and configure what we have.
We’re not going to magically deliver better things until we start trying to deliver better things. No piece of boring software is in and of itself transformative. That only comes by having uncomfortable and potentially confronting discussions about the state of things as they stand, and also where you want to be. GDS often talks about the need for everyone involved in transformation work to watch 2 hours of user research every 6 weeks (not reports or presentations, the raw usability testing).
I think in universities we can do better. Our users are, often, in our buildings. Our users are on our Teams instances. Our users are our bosses (sort of). Without open conversation and engaging in good faith with critics and detractors, all the talk of transformation is never going to get to the point of a university that serves the needs of the academics and students. We have to come out of the bunker. Our users have no incentive to start trusting us, we have to go out there and prove what we can do by understanding their problems and delivering against them. All the rest is just background chatter in the pub.