Preconference Seminar
1995 AIR Forum
May 28-31
Boston

James L. Morrison
Professor of Educational Leadership
Editor, On the Horizon
CB 3500 Peabody Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
919 962-2517
morrison@unc.edu

The organizational vulnerability/opportunity audit, originally developed as vulnerability analysis by SRI (1977), is a strategic planning tool that surfaces subtle or overlooked threats that may adversely or positively affect the organization's future. The focus is first on those threats that fall outside the normal sphere of organizational actions. However, often a threat can also be an opportunity, an opportunity that may not have surfaced without first focusing on threats and vulnerabilities. Hence the name, vulnerability/opportunity audit.

Vulnerability/opportunity audits are based upon five assumptions: (1) organizations exist because they serve some need; (2) organizations rely on support from the environment in which they are expected to operate; (3) organizations are vulnerable to the changing external environment; (4) some of these vulnerabilities can also be opportunities, and (5) organizations are undergirded by the following: needs and wants served by the organization, resources and assets the organization relies upon, stability of costs relative to competition, the organization's target customer base, technologies, special abilities, corporate identity symbols, barriers to competition, social values important to continuance of the organization, sanctions, perceived integrity of the organization, and the availability of complementary products or services.

The organizational vulnerability/opportunity audit reviews these supports from the perspective of current strengths. The supports are turned into questions: What needs and wants does the organization meet? What resources does it rely on? What cost advantages are available? What special abilities does the organization have? What technologies underpin it?

The vulnerability/opportunity audit then examines the support's vulnerability to removal, alteration, or substantial disruption. The key question embodied in this tool is: "What supportive elements, if suddenly taken away, might seriously impair or even destroy the organization?"

Needs and Wants Served by AIR: Strengths

The initial step in the process is to identify as many supports on which the organization depends as possible and then identify those forces, conditions, trends, and events that could damage these supports. A support can be tangible (e.g., a physical resource) or intangible (e.g., legislation, or social values that make a service/product desirable).

For the seminar, we focused only on one of the categories: needs and wants served by the Association for Institutional Research that underpin the demand for AIRŐs products and services.

We used the nominal group technique (NGT) to identify the needs and wants served by AIR. Participants were given 10 minutes to think how AIR served society and asked to write down their thoughts. We used a round robin approach where each participant in turn was asked to state how AIR served needs and wants in society. Only one nomination was given by each participant. Each statement was typed on a computer and projected via a LCD panel to a screen so that all could see the nominations. The next person was asked to submit their "best" candidate; during this time the only person talking was the person nominating a statement; all others were requested to think about the statement to see if it stimulated an idea that they had not had before.

This process went on until there were no more nominations. We then went back over teach nomination to clarify, discuss, edit, remove redundancies. The value of this process is first to have participants think before talking, and to get the thinking of all people in the groups.

The needs and wants that AIR serves as identified by the group were as follows:

For IR Professionals

1. Provides opportunities for global networking with fellow professionals and with leaders in intersecting fields
2. Provides a forum for testing IR member's ideas
3. Provides professional development opportunities for members
4. Provides encouragement and opportunity for AIR members to test ideas on informed and sympathetic audience
5. Promotes professional satisfaction
6. Contributes to wellness (e.g., families accompany members at meetings, provides opportunity for social interaction, rest, relaxation, break in routine, interacting with similarly isolated individuals)
7. Initiates new members into the profession
8. Offers professional validation for its members
9. Promotes awareness of career opportunities in IR

For IR as a profession

1. Contributes to developing appropriate IR theory, methodologies, standards, procedures, and practices
2. Validates IR as a profession
3. Recognizes and promotes important work in the field
4. Invigorates the profession
5. Identifies critical resources (e.g., people, studies, etc.)

For higher education

1. Provides information, analysis, and interpretation to external decision-makers (e.g., governmental leaders, accrediting agencies, stakeholders, opinion leaders), thereby improving the quality of their policies/decisions relating to higher education
2. Lobbies for the benefit of the membership and for higher education
3. Provides a professional counterpoint for policy declarations of political agencies
4. Coordinates efforts to address common threats
5. Promotes efficient and effective delivery of education
6. Catalyst for causing shifts in higher education paradigms by communicating new models of thought and patterns of behavior
7. Activities (e.g., publications, listserv, electronic AIR, conferences, seminars) inform educational leaders about the educational environment in which they exist and may exist in the future
8. Promotes cooperation/competition with such organizations as CAUSE, EDUCOM, and SCUP
9. Provides a channel for external organizations (e.g., NCES) to communicate matters affecting the profession or higher education
10. Provides network for development of studies and interinstitutional collaboration
11. Provides for peer interinstitutional collaboration and benchmarking

Needs and Wants Served by AIR: Vulnerabilities

The next exercise was to identify the vulnerabilities that AIR may have in serving the needs and wants of IR members, the profession, higher education, and the larger society. Relevant vulnerability questions asked were:

• Could a need or want be served some other way by some other organization?
• Could the need for a product or service disappear? If so, under what circumstances?

We again used the nominal group technique to identify the following vulnerabilities that AIR may have in this area. In order to prepare these vulnerabilities for further analysis, we edited the vulnerability statements into event statements and categorized them into vulnerabilities that would affect AIR directly as an organization and potential events in the social, technological, economic, and political macroenvironment that would have an effect on AIR if they should occur. These event statements are as follows:

AIR as an organization

1. Other national organizations (e.g., SCUP, CAUSE, EDUCOM, AACRAO, AAHE, and other organizations at One DuPont Circle) subsume functions of AIR
2. Regional or state IR organizations subsume functions of AIR
3. Other regional or state organizations subsume functions of AIR
4. AIR survey reveals that IR functions diffused throughout 50% of all colleges and universities
5. 30% membership decline in AIR
6. Graduate programs in higher education train 80% of new IR professionals
7. 50% of AIR Forum evaluation indicates dissatisfaction with quality of presentations
8. 50% of IR offices required to do policy analysis
9. AIR leadership group becomes ossified in its thinking

Social

1. 25% of high school graduates with SATs over 1200 enters labor market via corporate training
2. 50% of FTE based on Internet, distance education sources
3. Development of international education standards

Technological