The Return of the Opportunity Manager

Richard Katz muses about the possible opportunities that we may be overlooking as we slash budgets: "Amid the gloom, I wonder if this might not be the ideal time for the IT community to assert its role as an opportunity developer. Rather than — or perhaps alongside — cutting the IT budget, shouldn't we be asking how information technology, along with process reengineering, can fundamentally change the way we do things? Can we not only reduce the IT consumption of campus power but also implement environmental systems to monitor and control building temperatures and other sources of energy consumption? Can we continue to create the incentives and the infrastructure to promote the effective consolidation of servers, storage, and other campus IT services? Can we deploy the analytical engines and develop the predictive models that will allow our colleagues to optimize classroom (and other resource) utilization and to engage in "what if" scenarios that help us understand the economics of hybridizing courses or other e-learning strategies? Can we organize and harvest information from our student and learning management systems to identify at-risk students and harness this information to improve retention rates? How might the exploitation of these and other IT-enabled opportunities change the financial complexion of our institutions? . . . Didn't someone say something about not wasting a crisis?"