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With my Bachelor's degree in Business Administration and names like "ExxonMobil" and "KPMG" on my resume, many people might be surprised to learn that to date, the vast overwhelming majority of my professional experience has been in the public sector. In my case, I had over 4 years of work experience in the IT administration of pubic library systems, plus another 2 years volunteering regularly in my middle school library. I would be well-qualified to have gone into that field - and in fact, one of the graduate degree programs that I considered was the top-tier Library and Information Sciences degree at the University of Illinois at Champaign, a program into which I was accepted - but I decided to go another route. I'm hardly the only person in my family with such experiences; my mom spent the vast majority of her life in the public sector in a wide variety of roles, from being a Regional Director of the Girl Scouts to the head of a community development organization to, eventually, small-town mayor.
So all things told, perhaps it was not incredibly surprising that I ended up at a public policy school, but a very interesting public policy school indeed. The H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon, named of course after the highly regarded former Senator from Pennsylvania, includes in its scope several programs in technology management. Why in the world would a public policy school include technology management programs? I pondered the exact same thing as I applied here, as did my mom ("Why in the hell are you applying to a policy school?") who earned her Master's degree in Urban & Regional Planning. From what I have learned, the evolution of the programs included in the Heinz School was rather organic; there was a concentration offered years ago in information technology for Public Policy and Management students, and as it turned out that many of those students went on to do work that had no relation at all to the public sector, academic administrators decided that they might as well capitalize on an opportunity in a rapidly burgeoning area.
Irreconcilable scope creep? Or how about innovation? I tend to think it's the latter option.
I'm bringing this up because today was a very significant day for the Heinz School - which is no more, having been replaced by the brand new "Heinz College" and its two schools- the School of Public Policy & Management, and the School of Information Systems & Management (my home!) You can visit our website here to take a look at the great types of things that we do, and the diverse array of programs that we offer. Lots of formal ceremonies, free food and champagne, and even an appearance by famed philanthropist Teresa Heinz Kerry, whom I absolutely adore. And in fact, she brought up two points that I think are of profound importance at this pivotal moment of American history. To paraphrase:
1) Enough with simply bashing our government institutions. If you're just going to bash them, you shouldn't be in the public sector. If you are in the public sector and don't like how things work there, it is incumbent on you to do all that you can to effect change.
2) There exist some truly marvelous opportunities for public sector and private sector collaboration and innovation. The two should not be regarded as antagonistic, mutually exclusive realms.
Those words resonate fiercely with me. We all know that there are some terrible problems with our current government at all levels - municipal, state, and Federal - problems that cross party lines and geographic boundaries. But it is simply false to deny that government makes a difference - a positive differences - in the lives of millions of Americans and billions of citizens around the world. The senior citizens, such as my grandmother, who would be in abject poverty if not for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The students, such as myself, who would have never made it as far as we have without the public school system and generous scholarships. The people in rural areas who would still be largely separated from the world if not for heavy government subsidization of key types of infrastructure. And abroad, the innumerable poor in the developing world who have been positively touched - in some cases, literally having their lives saved - by American foreign assistance.
Government, in and of itself, is not bad. This is a fundamental truth, and more and more people are coming to accept that reality as time goes on. Nor are associated non-profit types of activities simply a type of "free-riding" for those who could not survive by "creating 'real value' " in the private sector. Yet how many times have we heard these vicious assertions? People who teach, "teach because they couldn't succeed at anything else." Government workers are lazy, unintelligent types who live off of other people's hard work. And earlier in this nasty campaign, mean-spirited attacks on community organizers as somehow being people who eschew "real responsibility."
It is time for us to move beyond those types of pernicious assumptions and trivial divisions, because this country - and the world - faces challenges of a truly unprecedented magnitude in the upcoming generations. To me, the formation of the Heinz College symbolizes the exact manner in which we will overcome many of these significant challenges; through innovative thinking and a partnership of the public and private spheres, not through a divisive and mutually antagonistic game of mudslinging between public and private spheres of influence. Information technology is going to be one of the main drivers of that change, and I'm thinking heavily of the possibilities that exist to drive down costs in healthcare by computerizing patient records. Examples abound in many other areas - after all, the private sector alone will not solve our vast set of global problems, but neither can government left to its own means. What the work at the Heinz College demonstrates is that public and private can work together, seamlessly and amicably, using technology as the common milieu to solve a wide range of difficult, multigenerational issues.
So all in all, this is one of those days on which I feel inspired of the possibilities ahead in my industry. And I can also look back at my own roots - being a teenager working my first job in a public library - and think that I really haven't deviated all that far from my point of origin, after all - not a bad thing.
So all things told, perhaps it was not incredibly surprising that I ended up at a public policy school, but a very interesting public policy school indeed. The H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon, named of course after the highly regarded former Senator from Pennsylvania, includes in its scope several programs in technology management. Why in the world would a public policy school include technology management programs? I pondered the exact same thing as I applied here, as did my mom ("Why in the hell are you applying to a policy school?") who earned her Master's degree in Urban & Regional Planning. From what I have learned, the evolution of the programs included in the Heinz School was rather organic; there was a concentration offered years ago in information technology for Public Policy and Management students, and as it turned out that many of those students went on to do work that had no relation at all to the public sector, academic administrators decided that they might as well capitalize on an opportunity in a rapidly burgeoning area.
Irreconcilable scope creep? Or how about innovation? I tend to think it's the latter option.
I'm bringing this up because today was a very significant day for the Heinz School - which is no more, having been replaced by the brand new "Heinz College" and its two schools- the School of Public Policy & Management, and the School of Information Systems & Management (my home!) You can visit our website here to take a look at the great types of things that we do, and the diverse array of programs that we offer. Lots of formal ceremonies, free food and champagne, and even an appearance by famed philanthropist Teresa Heinz Kerry, whom I absolutely adore. And in fact, she brought up two points that I think are of profound importance at this pivotal moment of American history. To paraphrase:
1) Enough with simply bashing our government institutions. If you're just going to bash them, you shouldn't be in the public sector. If you are in the public sector and don't like how things work there, it is incumbent on you to do all that you can to effect change.
2) There exist some truly marvelous opportunities for public sector and private sector collaboration and innovation. The two should not be regarded as antagonistic, mutually exclusive realms.
Those words resonate fiercely with me. We all know that there are some terrible problems with our current government at all levels - municipal, state, and Federal - problems that cross party lines and geographic boundaries. But it is simply false to deny that government makes a difference - a positive differences - in the lives of millions of Americans and billions of citizens around the world. The senior citizens, such as my grandmother, who would be in abject poverty if not for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The students, such as myself, who would have never made it as far as we have without the public school system and generous scholarships. The people in rural areas who would still be largely separated from the world if not for heavy government subsidization of key types of infrastructure. And abroad, the innumerable poor in the developing world who have been positively touched - in some cases, literally having their lives saved - by American foreign assistance.
Government, in and of itself, is not bad. This is a fundamental truth, and more and more people are coming to accept that reality as time goes on. Nor are associated non-profit types of activities simply a type of "free-riding" for those who could not survive by "creating 'real value' " in the private sector. Yet how many times have we heard these vicious assertions? People who teach, "teach because they couldn't succeed at anything else." Government workers are lazy, unintelligent types who live off of other people's hard work. And earlier in this nasty campaign, mean-spirited attacks on community organizers as somehow being people who eschew "real responsibility."
It is time for us to move beyond those types of pernicious assumptions and trivial divisions, because this country - and the world - faces challenges of a truly unprecedented magnitude in the upcoming generations. To me, the formation of the Heinz College symbolizes the exact manner in which we will overcome many of these significant challenges; through innovative thinking and a partnership of the public and private spheres, not through a divisive and mutually antagonistic game of mudslinging between public and private spheres of influence. Information technology is going to be one of the main drivers of that change, and I'm thinking heavily of the possibilities that exist to drive down costs in healthcare by computerizing patient records. Examples abound in many other areas - after all, the private sector alone will not solve our vast set of global problems, but neither can government left to its own means. What the work at the Heinz College demonstrates is that public and private can work together, seamlessly and amicably, using technology as the common milieu to solve a wide range of difficult, multigenerational issues.
So all in all, this is one of those days on which I feel inspired of the possibilities ahead in my industry. And I can also look back at my own roots - being a teenager working my first job in a public library - and think that I really haven't deviated all that far from my point of origin, after all - not a bad thing.
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