124university administrators could streamline operations by considering the burden for stakeholders. For example, if an internal university process requires that every faculty member’s teaching be directly observed and documented by another department faculty member annually, and includes the planning, observing, documenting, and related administrative meetings, this action easily results in at least 20 additional hours of work per faculty member per year.

4.3

Implement Technology Solutions

There is a range of off-the-shelf and customized technologies that can streamline processes for universities. Some software can be deployed for multiple purposes; for example, Arizona State University deploys Salesforce across its four campuses, Reducing Higher Education Bureaucracy and Reclaiming the Entrepreneurial. . .

125online learning, and global entities to manage the end-to-end student experience from recruitment through advancement and corporate relationships (Salesforce, 2021). Universities such as MIT use blockchain technology to issue recipientowned digital credentials (Durant & Trachy, 2017). Andersson et al.’s (2021) study of the entire population of Swedish university administrators reveals that administrative roles that can be automated then lead to a decline in the share of employees in these profession codes, and also in a corresponding decline in the share of wages over the 2001–2013 time period. As the number of administrators grew during this time period, Andersson et al.’s (2021) findings suggest that technological change helped universities to redistribute resources from automatable roles to higher-value work for administrators. One important feature is that technology should be able to talk to other systems, such that an individual does not have to use two different systems to complete the same activity. An illustration is the large suite of available research proposal software to universities: Some software is fully integrated and a researcher can enter detailed information for a grant proposal and submit automatically to a government or another grant-maker, while other software is only internal to a particular university, and does not interface with other programs, and thus the researcher must complete the paperwork twice to apply for the same grant. Technical solutions can also involve automatic notifications for faculty and staff. One caution here is the potential for “robotic bureaucracy” defined as “automated systems generated by organizations, often lacking a human name as a sender, with the objective of streamlining work, reducing the administrative burden on employees or clients or customers, reducing the number of administrative employees required, and sometimes, saving money by shifting burden away from organizations to clients and customers” (Bozeman & Youtie, 2020, p. 158). Originally developed for online medical records and commercial airline check-in, robotic bureaucracy in a university consists broadly of meeting federal research regulatory guidelines. As noted by Bozeman and Gaughan (2011), university scientists spend twice as much time on grant proposals and research administration as on student-related activities such as teaching and advising, and an important solution is staff support and the standardization of automation across universities. Faculty can also employ solutions that support their own rubrics. For example, if a faculty member recognizes emails sent from certain members of an entity on campus, the faculty can use a mail filter to automatically direct those emails into a folder and then address those issues in bulk, rather than as the emails arrive, resulting frequently in one-off interruptions to the flow of one’s work. Certainly, no technology solutions will solve all issues. As Nobel Laureate Robert Solow (1987) noted as a productivity paradox, “We see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

There are a range of new technology solutions that address specific issues and create efficiencies in the system. Students’ time to graduation is a key performance measure and is improved by placing students in classes that garner credits toward graduation. One of the greatest inefficiencies in higher education is that many universities use placement exams that lack validity and reliability, in order to determine which classes students should take. An unfortunate consequence of S. Terjesen

126these substandard screening tests is that many students, particularly those from underrepresented groups, are unnecessarily placed in remedial courses (Scott- Clayton et al., 2014). Bergman et al. (2021) developed a placement algorithm using predictive analytics to combine multiple measures and demographics into a placement instrument, which was tested on 12,544 students in seven community colleges. This new technological innovation led to substantially better placement rates, resulting in reduced costs for students while increasing college credits earned, and reducing costs for colleges.

4.4

Lead Change Management Efforts across all Levels

Change requires extensive communication and is unlikely to come from within. As noted by Hamel and Zanini (2016, p. 9), “those who’ve excelled at the game of bureaucracy are typically unenthusiastic about changing it. Someone who’s invested 30 years in acquiring the powers and privileges of executive vice-president is