So the university studied about obsolescence
I was trying to trace down the origins of something shared by Mitch Wagner – namely, a tweet from Vala Afshar that included the following:
“Investor concern over the threat of new technologies is overstated”
—1999 Blockbuster analyst report
Today, our local Blockbuster Video is a Chase Bank.
When I first read the quote, I placed great emphasis on the fact that it was uttered by an analyst, not by Blockbuster itself. But then I read something that stated that the quote came from a report commissioned by Blockbuster itself.
The “something” that I read was in the Digital Communications Team Blog at the University of St. Andrews.
This blog post recorded the salient points from a lecture by Paul Boag, co-founder of digital consultancy Headscape and author of Digital Adaption. Apparently this lecture was given to staff at the University; I’m not sure if any students were present. However, as we shall see, Boag’s message was primarily to the staff.
The lecture was entitled “Digital Change.” Boag started by talking about the Blockbuster example, where the whole digital media movement passed the company by. Then he moved on to Kodak, another company that was so attached to the physical medium that it never really mastered the digital one.
After that, as Carley Hollis notes, Boag hit a little closer to home.
The inability to adapt to a world which is changing around us is one of the biggest risks to institutions today – and that includes the University of St Andrews.
What? A risk to a university? But people are always going to want to travel to an educational institution and read books, right?
We need to realise that if we do not work to meet the needs of these students – recognise that their needs are different to the need of students of even five years ago – then we will be failing them. And if we are failing students, we are at risk of failing as an institution.
The remainder of the post describes how the University’s digital communications team is seeking to render ITSELF obsolete. Until such time as “digital” is integrated into everything, though, the digital communications team is striving to help students and staff move forward.
tymshft 