One of my technology transfer departments recently went through a day-long session where we discussed our current status and our future goals while examining how we work together as a team. It was a rather interesting view on the office, and so I wanted to talk a bit about the method that was used and its results. There is definitely something useful for everyone. The meat of our activity was centered around a personality test using the DISC assessment system. The letters of DISC stand for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. Most people have a large variation among the personality traits, and usually one of them is dominant over the others.

Christopher Koch writes a blog for CIO magazine that usually has some good ideas in it. One part of a recent entry struck me, and I added my own input.

Think of information as food and think of the business as starving and think of IT as controlling who gets the food. Now you can see why there's so much emotion in the relationship [between IT and business in an organization].
- Koch's IT Strategy, Go Ape

I've been in a handful of small organizations and worked within IT in a variety of ways, and it can be difficult to rebuild a good relationship between IT and business when things have been sour. If information is the food of the apes in an organization, I can see where IT can improve the relationship by giving business better and more useful information. In my organization, management and users are always more impressed with access to new information or information presented in better ways than they are impressed with new technology alone. When IT pulls back into its corner and business's only experience with IT is when IT is snippy about a problem that business has caused or wants resolved, business sees IT has keeping things hidden and making it seem as though IT is somehow magical and not possible for business to understand. Being open with business while providing avenues to access information is what will win the hearts and minds of the people in the business side of an organization.

It's a rather basic view of how to do IT well, but I think it holds some wisdom for how to approach IT management.

In 1980, the US government passed the Bayh-Dole Act which gave universities and other institutions receiving government research funding the right to own the inventions that arose from their federally-funded research. This law is viewed as a catalyst to getting scientific research funded by the US government into products that help society or reach consumers. Once a researcher has a new invention, a university typically assesses it to determine its potential value and patentability. After a patent has been filed, the university can begin its efforts to license the rights covered by the patent to companies which then make products based on that patented invention. In this way, a lot of people benefit - consumers get new products, industry makes more money to create jobs, universities get more money to fund more research, and inventors get to benefit financially from their ingenuity.

In my current position, I work for a couple different technology transfer offices. Technology transfer offices at a university are an interesting environment that combines the non-profit aspects of higher education with the big business aspects of trying to sell a product, ie. the university's patents. While we deal with millions of dollars each year and try to maximize licensing revenue, we do not have direct competitors like an auto manufacturer or an online retailing giant does. Obviously we compete with other licensing offices for the attention and licensing budgets of businesses, but we don't compete in any traditional sense. This dual profit and non-profit style leads to some interesting benefits.

There's a relatively steady and stable support system of the university that keeps the department in operation and makes it possible to not completely focus on the bottom line. In business, every time IT asks for budget, it can be difficult to demonstrate how a cost is needed or what benefit might be gained. In most university departments, people have the same issue except creating something that can positively impact the bottom line is very difficult. There are no IT improvements that will bring more sales into an academic university department, mainly just improvements that improve the quality of life for faculty and students. However, having customers in the form of licensees, we can do IT projects that improve customer relations and perhaps generate more licensing opportunities.

Not being in direct competition with our peer institutions, it makes it possible to network with other IT professionals at tech transfer offices without worrying about giving away information or knowledge that could be seen as competitive advantage. The Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) is a society that links together tech transfer organizations around the world, primarily discussing issues and operations of tech transfer in general. In the last couple months, I have begun to build a network of tech transfer IT people to share ideas and maybe even share some solutions.

If you're involved with IT management or implementation in a tech transfer office, feel free to contact me about getting on board networking with other tech transfer IT professionals.

In small businesses and organizations with either internal or outsourced IT services, there are three approaches or states of dealing with IT. In the first state, only basic IT service is done to maintain the status quo. The second state consists of looking at business processes and finding ways to make them more efficient or effective using information technology. The highest level state of IT management looks at the business and comes up opportunities to offer real competitive advantage through new ideas, new services, and new products.

Following the concept of the Capability Maturity Model (Wikipedia) for software development, I am going to give a label to each of these stages. In the simplest IT service state, things are very much in a Basic management state. If a printer breaks, it gets fixed. If someone needs an update made to the website, IT makes the change. In general if something is broken, it gets fixed, and that's about the only time something is done. When IT management is done to improve the operations of the business, the IT services are Optimizing the functioning of the organization to improve efficiency or sometimes to increase automation. When IT is able to be utilized at a higher level, it is able to see business opportunities and capitalize on them. At that point, IT becomes Innovating and can bring new possibilities and competitive advantage to the organization.