This summer I worked for the Student Academic Affairs Office (SAAO) in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. My responsibility in the office was to coordinate the revision of the Student's section of the new LAS website. The overall website was being redone by ATLAS, but each department was tasked with updating their own section. SAAO was the first section to hire someone specifically to help them with their section. I was hired by the Associate Dean of Students who is in charge of the whole office, and she only has the main Dean of LAS and the Assistant Dean of LAS to report to. The rest of the office consists of a group of assistant deans, faculty members and academic advisers. There is only one assistant dean who seems to be in charge when the associate dean is absent and he coordinates the rest of the assistant deans.
My job was to understand this structure and to plan the website accordingly. This job was complicated greatly due to this structure, in addition that there were numerous other departments and offices working out of SAAO, such as Secondary Education, International Programs, Honors and many others. The content of the website was controlled by the Marketing Department which was working with ATLAS for the technical aspects. My job was to get the content and pages looking how the department heads wanted, and then deal with the Marketing Department with getting the pages approved so they matched the overall theme set by ATLAS.
The transaction costs I had to consider where mostly the time constraints in getting the website ready by the time the Fall 2014 semester started. From tracking down content, to meeting with department heads, each section was a lengthy process. Then waiting for the department heads to submit content to me and formatting it to fit the web page took a long time too. After that there was the process of having the Marketing Department scrutinize every aspect and word choice of the page till it was the way that they wanted LAS to be represented. Overall it was a busy summer.
My job was to understand this structure and to plan the website accordingly. This job was complicated greatly due to this structure, in addition that there were numerous other departments and offices working out of SAAO, such as Secondary Education, International Programs, Honors and many others. The content of the website was controlled by the Marketing Department which was working with ATLAS for the technical aspects. My job was to get the content and pages looking how the department heads wanted, and then deal with the Marketing Department with getting the pages approved so they matched the overall theme set by ATLAS.
The transaction costs I had to consider where mostly the time constraints in getting the website ready by the time the Fall 2014 semester started. From tracking down content, to meeting with department heads, each section was a lengthy process. Then waiting for the department heads to submit content to me and formatting it to fit the web page took a long time too. After that there was the process of having the Marketing Department scrutinize every aspect and word choice of the page till it was the way that they wanted LAS to be represented. Overall it was a busy summer.
This post, especially the first two paragraphs, might have benefited from providing some Web links. Doing a quick Google search I found this page. I assume it is relevant in some way to your discussion above, though exactly how is far less clear to me. Is this page part of the new design or not?
ReplyDeleteThen the post would have also benefited from some consideration of the question - what is the organization. Is it LAS? Is it the Dean's office in LAS? Is it SSAO. Simply working through that question might have gotten you some substantial mileage. On the one hand, the Web site is for all of LAS. On the other hand, both SSAO and ATLAS are part of the Dean's office. Then, as you said, you worked in SAAO. Part of doing this would be to try to identify which interactions were within the organization and which were between different organizations. In class, we've only considered so far either within the organization or going to the market as the alternatives. We haven't considered multiple organizations interacting one one another, but not in a market setting. Your post suggests we should do that.
During summer, most people are less busy on campus than during the fall and spring. But I suspect Assistant Deans are pretty busy, even then. If so, scheduling when to meet with them may have been arduous. When I was a campus level administrator, I viewed scheduling of meetings as a difficult to impossible task, where I was glad to have a very good secretary who would do that on my behalf.
I'm belaboring scheduling because I want to distinguish from the time actually spent meeting. The scheduling is a transaction cost - something incurred to coordinate activities. The actual meeting is a production cost - to get the the right content onto the Web site. The two are different. On Tuesday in class, we'll try to distinguish one from the other.