Thoughts on university governance: 04 University Cultural Cringe
Some musings about consultants and expertise.
We Australians have this concept of cultural cringe. Some argue that it stems from a feeling of inferiority but, when taken together with our Tall Poppy Syndrome, I think it reflects a deep seated under-assessment of capabilities already near us. Those we know cannot possibly be good or experts and so we must reach outside for “real” expertise.
When I was at another institution in Sydney many years ago (no, not the sandstone one!), I sat on a number of university governance committees. I recall many years sitting on the Faculty IT committee and a few of its subcommittees. These were the days when the web was a new concept and the website of my department was served from a 486 PC in my office. I can't recall offhand what software are used to serve it; all I can say is that those were the days of hand coding HTML.
Not long after my department informally set up its website, the faculty decided that we need to take a holistic approach to this. Consequently - and I make no assertions of corruption here - we hired an external consulting firm that was to develop our web presence. There were many meetings focusing on look-and-feel, but less on functionality. The outcome of the entire process was that approximately $1m got spent while nothing tangible was delivered.
At the very same time, one of our IT support people - you know, the guys that walk around and help you with your PC and your software - in his spare time with some colleagues developed a functioning web presence for a large cinema chain, where movie times could be determined based on preferred movie or cinema, or cinemas found based on movie, etc, together with ticket purchase functionality.
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Now, I'm not sure what this colleague’s salary was at my institution. But I'm pretty sure that if we had cast around inside the institution we could have developed a functional web presence for a lot less than the amount we spent on external consultants.
Is the penchant for hiring consultants merely a university phenomenon? I know it certainly isn't because of recent media stories about the Commonwealth government using consultants. When you have a diversity of experience and knowledge (what else is a university?) surely you should investigate your existing resources before reaching outside.
After all, remember that consultants are just people whom you pay for telling you stuff that your organisation already knows.
Problem solver and change agent with a passion for logistics, customer care and identity security.
1 个月I really enjoy this series Robert. You are observing what Popper would call the situational logic of institutions, universities at that. There are real objective tendencies - sometimes harmful and pathological, sometimes just annoying, that deserve to be attended to.
Consultant, Risk & Insurance, Entrepreneurship/Innovation, Sustainability
1 个月Ranking roughly at 15 on the GDP league tables, Australia ranks fourth in annual spend on management consultants. Here is the data https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065188/management-consulting-market-size-country/ Most of it is driven by government expenditure, as we have moved to a political system where ministers rarely have either an experiential, and/or educational preparation for the management of their portfolios. Hence, voting now means selecting the political party who will in turn select the consultants to outsource not just the hard thinking, but increasingly, the execution of governance requirements for the country.
National General Manager at AFL Masters; Honorary (Fellow) at University of Melbourne; Bestselling author; & one of Australia's leading tax & superannuation experts.
1 个月Sample size of one from a few decades ago? Need to get more current data than that Rob if you are going to provide vigorous academic research. And website development has come along way in this time as well - moving from a virtual business card to place of conducting business which generates significant percentage of turnover (such as online lectures). As an business operator, there are pros and cons with consultants/contractors. The simplest pro is that you can turf the dead wood once the contract is over. Their costs are variable rather than fixed overhead (unless you keep on rolling over contract after contract). Invariably the service is better, faster and subject to rectification costs if an error is made. Public institutions use them to “CYA” and shift liability down the line. The biggest con is that you pay a premium for their service but it covers all the on costs as well as the “risk” associated with the service.