The Invisible Army

Perhaps, because I am an academic, it seems strange that I bring this group up for discussion before I bring up the academics. However, since their role is to be invisible, their visibility is a problem that requires one to address it.

The administrative staff in any academic institution is there to support the main functions of the educational organization and not to directly participate in it. No one will believe an admin staff when they claim to have supervised students to graduation because that is not their role. Their role therefore, is supportive. The more "invisible" they are, the better the job they are doing. Students who graduate from educational establishments without recalling the name of a single person there, are students who dealt with extremely professional admin staff. Students who know the names of the people there, are students who are dealing with inefficient admin staff.

One issue that many people neglect is that there are publications worldwide for best practice trends that have been accumulated from several hundred universities by professional bodies. These trends are likely to help any admin function improve its output by following the leader in this regard. If the suggested practice has been applied to 300 Universities prior to this one, then what is the likelyhood that it will produce a catastrophic response. Literature is available through subscriptions restricted to educational established as in the case of AACROA for registration practices.

Another essential admin function is that of financial services, whether it is to the staff and/or students. This department can also benefit from best practice with regards to financial affairs management by implementing an IT project specific to educational organizations. They may have an initial high cost, but will eventually pay off, by making the lives of both staff and students easier. They will also present the establishment will detailed statistical analysis of where the money is going, by highlighting where losses and gains take place.

Now here we always find a problem. It is difficult to pinpoint how to evaluate performance in this sector. Number of books is not good because they may not be in the right subjects. The number of students who borrowed books, and number of staff members who used the services, may be a more accurate measure. Still, this would not reflect how recent or influential the books in the library are. Once, I ran a detailed comparative study of libraries around the world and discovered that per department the library should be allotted at least BD500 per month. This would then be divided into two parts; half for journal subscriptions (multi-user) and the other for buying new books. If one is to regard it as the pay of one potential employee that represents the department in the library, it would not seem high at all.

Organizations and IT is a matter that confuses many. The defintion of where IT fits and the limitations of its role in any establishment is not clearly outlined which essentially resulted in one of two scenarios, either the IT people are undermined and they resources as limited to an extent that they cannot fully contribute to the organization or that they reign by using technological lingo that the ordinary person on the street is impressed with and deliver things that were never required nor beneficial to the organization. Finding an IT center or department that is given just enough attention, but not too much or too little is extremely difficult to materialize. The question that people do not ask, is simply, how will this future project help me get closer to my target. In our case, the target that we wish to approach even if we never reach is the number 1.