Harmonizing IT and education

The digitalization of the education and training ecosystem implies, firstly and foremost a renewed “cultural” approach to the horizon of opportunities made available by the exploitation of IT means for education and training.

Setting up an investment portfolio

The embracement of this new culture does not come for free…managers are called to face the challenge of scalability of IT investments for education and training:

• Scale economies
• Experience economies

Why even bothering with digitalization?

Leaner, clearer and quicker demand matching. Down to its core essentials, digitalization is about being more strategic and efficient in providing services and establishing a direct connection with the cohort of reference addressed by the organisation – and its most relevant STKHs and groups of interest.

An organisation and learner-oriented IT portfolio

This helps organisation in being much more practical in understanding what they actually might need to transit into new IT-paradigms of education and training and that are coherent to organizations’ potentials and the audience potentially addressed by their offer.

A poor, superficial planning is destined to lead to fail

Most organizations that are embarking this new pathway to digitalization fail to realize how “bumpy” the roadmap will be. Availability of capitals and economic resources is just the beginning: concrete changes happens when managers know how to deploy the aforementioned

Concrete benefits will emerge and consolidate in the long-run

There is no point in strategizing the organization's commitment to new IT-based models of doing things if first people are not willing to accept the fact that positive outcomes will be experienced starting from when:

• IT is finally integrated at structural level
• Professionals and teachers are equipped to valorize IT solutions accordingly

1. A make-it-rain approach
   Money is invested on too many things at the same time, with the fallacy expectations that good things will happen regardless – being the money seen as the goal, and not the resource…
2. Prioritizing investment where is not really needed
   It is most likely that a big chunk of the resources made available will be allocated to physical and software infrastructure, ignoring and/or underestimating the efforts that need to be deployed to train human capital
3. Lack of a comprehensive view
   The competitive landscape of digitalization comes in-handy when the underlying strategy prioritize the areas where it is most needed – not just the loudest people…

Picking up the red flags

Experience has shown that there are some clear indicators that should immediately perceived as distress message. Once these start manifesting, it is important that managers step-in, gather information of what is going on and react accordingly.

The more they are ignored, the more organizations drift apart from the initial plan.

Typical scenario are:

• Entropy across the chain of command
• Over-complexity of relatively easy and streamlined processes
• Poorly governed and lack of responsibilities (i.e., temptation to rely on a laissez faire principle)

Setting the coordinates

Assumed that the organisation is willing to commit in the long run and appreciated the time that it takes to valorize the new IT skeleton of the muscles of education and training initiatives, without a concrete networks of parameters setting milestones of reference, it is most likely that the organisation will soon loose focus and interest in what they are doing – and why they are doing so…

With inadequate preparation and in isolation to important STKHs, any investment of time and efforts will be most likely perceived as a burden rather that a concrete opportunity (i.e. lost at sea effect) – not to mention the risk to put money on the plate without any real benefit.

IT and digital awareness

• The experience of the EU and international training and education system throughout the pandemic demonstrated that the LLL network is severely unprepared to provide for “organizational” continuity beyond traditional and status-quo paradigms and models.
• This fact imposes managers to acknowledge the harsh reality: the organisation they work for, most than likely, has not in place a robust, reliable and consolidated understanding of what they might do with digital technologies:
  • Neither in the sense of IT for education offer deployment,
  • …nor IT for streamlining and scalability of good practices / organizational change.

Answering to the basic question what do we need?

In the case of training and education institutions / organizations, the topic should be kept relatively simple and streamlined as most of the physical and software element they might needs are largely available on the internet for free

…and why do we need it?

Meaning: why are we committing our self – and our resources – in the first place?

The answer that managers will give to this question should pretty much relates to:

• Who will benefit from it? (i.e., learners, teachers and the organisation as a whole)
• What will be a cost-effective first approach to scale digitalization?

The group of methodologies applied to budgeting

• ANALOGUE benchmarking from past (and similar) experiences, if available
• PARAMETRIC historical data are recalculated on the basis of the current   circumstances and contextualised accordingly
• TOP-DOWN from the grand amount, distribute the budget on each specific   cost-category (software vs hardware)
• BOTTOM-UP from the budget allocated to each cost category, generate the   overall budget adding up the voices

The impact of change

A systemic awareness of how the organisation, and people, are reacting to the process will leave managers with a better view on how to:

• accelerate the process – and scale more efficiently
• minimize risks and conflicts
• strategize even more impactful milestones
• focus on which area of interest is lacking of adequate attention
• prevent disconnect between the organisation vision for the digitalization pathway and its grass-root perception
• allocate resources more strategically
• consolidate and capitalize on good practices
• pinpoint lessons-learnt and system flow on which to intervene

A feedback-loop system for quality

Organizations and managers will not have a “definitive” evaluation on the reliability of the process currently in action until they will not receive experience-based feedback from:

• Learners, concerning the impression they have and manifest towards their learning experience
• Teachers and professionals, concerning the impression they have and manifest towards their education experience

It is essential that the organisation puts in place a feedback system informing the outcomes from the newly adopted pathways and how the concrete users’ experience is impacted by it. 

A mechanisms as such should be built-up taking into consideration the following two features:

1. Tailored-made feedback system, configured with quantitative KPIs (i.e., rate your satisfaction from X to Z) and qualitative parameters of evaluation (i.e., difficulties in handling the education content and resources made available by the organisation), addressed to both learners and teachers
2. Tailor-made good-practice-centered decision making model that supports the organisation in understanding with low efforts which changes / interventions are most suited to progress and develop

Traditional budgeting

Production and service companies formulate their budget taking into consideration:

1. Expected economic flows (profits)
2. Expected financial flows (ROI, return on investments)

In its most intuitive visualization, the budgeting translates typically in a 3-steps flow:

Operative budget		Economic budget		Financial budget
Operative programming Forecasts of workload and resources needed to implement it		Programme consolidation Analysis of coherence and consistency to the organization long-term and strategic’ objectives		Financial viability Availability of adequate resources to cover on-going and future needs

Budgeting for IT development

Education and training organizations are called to embrace this very same logic of programme → consolidation → viability and apply it within their ecosystem:

• In which measure IT technologies can help us to widen the cohort of people addressed by our offer?
• What further opportunities for long-term development lies beyond?
• How do we identify the indicators of our returns on investment?
  • Learners’ satisfaction
  • Professionalization and capacity building of staff
  • Scalability & economies of efficiency