Page 126 - Crisis in Higher Education

98 • Crisis in Higher Education

Chapters Chapters 11,
6, 7, 8, and 9 12, 13, and 14
Customers Resources

Students
Chapter 10
Resources
Third-party Product design • Acquire
payers (curriculum) • Manage

Potential
employers

Strategic planning process

FIGURE 5.1
Relationships among strategic planning, customers, product design, and resources in
higher education.

When customers are not properly identified, strategic planning is based
on a false premise, and this takes universities in the wrong direction.
As shown in Figure 5.1, the solution proposed here has three key
components. They are as follows:

1. Customers: As part of the strategic planning process, universities
focus on developing a better understanding of the multifaceted,
trifurcated customer (Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9).
2. Product design: Once universities understand their customers’ needs,
they can design effective curricula (Chapter 10).
3. Resource management: With knowledge of the customers and an
effective product, universities can acquire and manage resources to
achieve appropriate outcomes (Chapters 11, 12, 13, and 14).

Customers and product design (curriculum) issues are discussed in
Section 5.1, an organizing paradigm is described in Section 5.2, and
resource issues are discussed in Sections 5.3 and 5.4.