Technological Decisions by Storytelling: From Correspondence Courses to Brokerage Universities In this story, we start out with institutions such as the U.K.-based Open University. Today, we find only a limited number of institutions that would count as higher education institutions in this quadrant; some of them are huge like Indira Gandhi National Open University with its at least 1.8 million students. But we also need to acknowledge the great existing tradition of "people's education" in forms such as that of correspondence courses and study circles that have helped numerous people to advance their careers or just satisfy their curiosity. This is the existing basis for competition when IT disrupts the balance through consumerized means of production like Web 2.0 and revolutionized means of distribution through the death of distance of the Internet. Figure 1. Gartner's Higher Education Business Model Scenarios 
Source: Gartner (September 2009)
The Future: All About U in 2019 — Extreme Characteristics It is at the end of the All About U story where we can paint the most avant-garde scenario. In the lower-right corner(see Figure 1), we do not even have institutions in the traditional sense. If there are institutions at all, they are more like brokers of just-right, just-in-time education and research services (i.e., bringing together the right minds at the right time). These institutions rely more heavily on reputation of individual teachers/researchers as documented by open Internet-based reputation systems like RateMyProfessors.com
than institutional brand. The "academic curriculum" is governed more by direct perceived usefulness than official accreditation and documented through a high degree of recorded activities stored in a personalized e-portfolio. The great restraint that this type of institution has is that it can only work with what can be delivered virtually (mind over matter), disregarding all situations where "matter matters" (the need for physical delivery). Why You Would Work at an All About U Institution? "Here, it is all about you, and you have extreme personal flexibility. But you have to take full responsibility for the content of your own education, the course of your career, and how to pay the bill each month."
Needed Technology: The Technology Strategy Map for All About U 2019 To visualize the technology needs that enable a successful All About U scenario, we use the Gartner Technology Strategy Map. In our version of this map, we emphasize the inherent need in higher education to balance organizational efficiency with personal productivity. Organizational efficiency focuses on cost-effective standardized processes to drive down the overhead (administrative) cost of an institution and maximize any return on investment from a collective point of view. Personal productivity focuses on individual researcher, teacher and student productivity to maximize the individual experience and satisfaction at the institution. Figure 2 is not an extensive mapping of technologies but rather a selection of technologies to demonstrate how the technology map can be used. Positioning of the "technologies" is as of September 2009. Figure 2. Balancing Organizational Efficiency and Personal Productivity in an All About U Scenario 
Source: Gartner (September 2009)
The technology strategy map answers the CIO question, "What key investments in information technology will be most strategic in positioning the institution for long-term success in fulfilling its mission?" In this scenario, the technology strategy map is geared to "mind-over-matter" IT services such as virtual worlds, social learning platforms and self-service administrative Web-services-based applications. IT services overall are likely to be built for mashups and plug-and-play. Administrative cost-effectiveness and scalability are huge issues as all of the projected 3 billion people (by 2019; see Note 1) that have access to the Internet are potential "customers." The IT services and the personal infrastructure need to be standardized and affordable to maximize the market potential. This puts an emphasis on the infrastructural strategy for integration with technologies like SOA and user-centric identity and access management, as well as sourcing strategies using cost-effective cloud services and standardized business process outsourcing services. IT for Organizational Efficiency In the broker university, enterprise resource planning, especially business intelligence (BI), is crucial, and predicting cost per student per "credit" and cost per tutor per credit are key metrics for launching a course. Scalability, both up and down, has to be practically instant, and cloud-based services (cloud commodity) as well as business process outsourcing (BPO) that can be throttled according to need are key. Interestingly, customer relationship management (CRM), as in managing individual prospective student relationships, will not be prominent but "tutor relationship management" (TRM) will be as most tutors will be freelance, and called in when an opportunity has been identified. Because of the potentially huge scale of student relations, CRM is replaced by skills in managing relations with social communities, which can be seen as a modernized version of the marketing department (in its original meaning as those who research and understand the customers, not just create advertisements). This is driven by the just-in-time nature of the brokerage university, combined with a huge number of students that prohibits any larger investments in the relationships with the student (to keep cost down). Any prolonged relationship has to be basically self-managed by the student. Consequently, fundraising is not an issue, but securing direct payment for course delivery is. In principle, very little identity management is needed besides securing payment capability and consistency between payer and access to course-related activities and material. Most proofs of acquired knowledge will be handled through existing social software sites, where the tutor directly vouches for the student's attained skills. However, dependent on the student's need for proof of the acquired knowledge to be used with, for example, a prospective employer, strong authentication and a persistent proof "degree of proficiency" will need to be issued. This official examination and record keeping are best run as a separate service from the brokerage university (but associated and for a fee), and are a part of the international "claims ecosystem" (see "Governments Need to and Can Play a Role in the Online Claims Ecosystem"). IT for Personal Productivity In the broker university, personal productivity depends on using publicly available tools that can be "mashed up" to support a particular course. Prior acquaintance with the tools used is key to be able to focus on the topic of the course rather than the technology. With lots of people coming and going, group management is key; using open identity and access management (IAM) standards and solutions (such as OpenID). Google's and Microsoft's education-related cloud offerings will be the basis for some brokerage universities' user-facing activities, and will have to be extended to include e-portfolios that keep "students" coming back to their services for life and solve a lot of the informal needs for a curriculum vitae. Services that can increase the social cohesion and improve retention will be important, including all social software sites that are prominent in the target market of the brokerage university. Virtual worlds will increasingly play this role, but also will fill pedagogical needs as a vehicle for many types of simulations and visualization. Combined with tutor-led courses, the brokerage university will also need to provide self-service education catering to different learning modes based on such components as interactive texts, podcasts and simulation software. This latter capability is crucial to enable the scalability needed due to a foreseen tutor shortage. Underpinning all of the brokerage university activities are standards-based enterprise architecture and SOA that plays a large role in keeping the brokerage university flexible enough to quickly change with market needs. Standards in this context are not just open standards but also de facto standards that are driven by market adoption of open services (compare with Facebook's open application programming interface; API). A very helpful tool for identifying and populating an institutional technology strategy map is the Gartner Hype Cycles. In the case of All About U, we recommend the following Hype Cycles:
- Social Software
- Business Process Outsourcing
- Consumer Technologies
- Software as a Service
- Global Consumer Communications Services
In this environment, IT services are mission-critical, and a trusted-business-partner-type CIO with excellent understanding of the core processes and the IT services that enable them is needed.
Where Are We Headed? Signposts, Likelihood and Competition An important part of scenario planning is to tell the middle part of the story. What "signposts," macroforces and technologies will increase or decrease the likelihood of a particular scenario? When looking at signpost for a scenario, we use the STEEP (Societal, Technological, Economical, Environmental and Political) categorization as a methodology in general to ensure a broad view of macroforces. In an actual institutional strategic planning process, a useful method is to ask the stakeholders to write down "news headlines" of the future that would mark enablers or disruptors for the scenario under consideration, keeping STEEP in mind. Here, we use only the terms "enablers" and "disruptors" to present our assessments. Below we list a few examples. Enablers of This Business Model The biggest enabling factor of this business model is the trend toward a global service economy fueling a huge need for knowledge workers. This creates the demand necessary to break with more-conventional business models such as Everybody's U and seek to leverage educational material and tutors across national borders. Availability of inexpensive Internet access, including terminals (such as netbooks), is crucial. But the cost of physical travel, both long and short distance, will offset some of the investments needed. Further incentives will be the "carbon footprint" of travel. The general trend of the increasing cost of education will also make this type of education more palatable. Pressure to cut costs from governments that are subsidizing their citizens' education will be an especially important factor as this model enables global economies of scale. Events like the current financial crisis will speed up the transition as both radical cost-cutting measures force innovation, and increasing masses of unemployed with a lot of time but less money will seek cost-effective measures to get ahead while waiting for the economic rebound. From a technology standpoint, the development of interoperability on many levels through open standards is crucial. Metadata standards in all forms especially will be key — for example, reusability of learning modules. A thriving OSS community will also be a technical enabler for meeting the needs of the brokerage university. Disruptors of This Business Model The biggest disruptor for this scenario to become true is political protectionism. A combination of channeling funding (either directly or through subsidizing/financial aid restrictions) only to national education institutions with strict control of accreditation can effectively reduce the potential of this scenario. Furthermore, increased sociocultural isolation trends combined with language barriers can create walled gardens that limit the potential economies of scale. On the technological side, failure to develop standards, especially on the IAM scene, will severely limit this business model's potential for success. Likelihood and Competition This scenario is the one with the highest growth potential because the need for higher education is exploding and that competition in this scenario is low at the moment, with few protoplayers with the foundational know-how to evolve into a true brokerage university. Just as IT entrepreneurs eventually were not the ones to successfully exploit Internet retail opportunities, but rather mail order companies with "industry know-how," the distance educators of today like Open University will be the likely winners in this scenario tomorrow. The All About U business model is arguably better suited for continuing and further education for an older segment of the population, but already the examples existing today (see Note 2) show that these types of institutions will be a competitor in the education market, especially with the Everybody's U-type institutions, potentially taking a large chunk of the bread-and-butter income generating bachelor's courses. Subjects such as language, mathematics and culturally related social sciences are ripe for this model already. However, if All About U "institutions" are skillfully integrated in, for example, a national educational ecosystem, they can prepare many people for courses with higher entry-level prerequisites and increase the base of eligible students for higher education. The All About U is more of a just-in-time business model for immediate needs, and Everybody's U is more of a just-in-case business model with a longer time horizon, so both business models can complement each other and might well learn to coexist in a win-win fashion.
In order for strategic planning through storytelling to be useful, it is important for a well-constructed team of stakeholders to go through the scenario-planning process. The journey is the goal. The methodology and the data presented here are by no means exhaustive and should be used as input to an institutional process, not as a substitute for it.
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