As cute and humorous as the title is, West Point cadets found ingenious ways to destroy their homework. Without dogs to blame and an honor code, the cadets then blamed the technology rather than realize the problem was staring at them in the mirror. Given West Point was trying to build lifelong habits of the mind, we didn’t want these future strategic leaders to distrust technology but instead use it responsibly. So, we build a network-based hosted backup system for all cadets and faculty and started including some backup options with the cadet purchase.
There was a secondary issue in that cadets, like all other college students and many professionals, would blame their laptops for malfunctioning instead of themselves for waiting to the last second to do something. We would get the reframe of cadet X said they turned in their broken laptop weeks ago and they couldn’t do their homework because they didn’t have a computer. We would check and “weeks ago” was actually three days ago, the assignment was a semester long assignment, and we offered a spare laptop while we worked on it and they had declined. Rather than blame the customer, we set out to innovate and fix the problem. This required a multifaceted approach:
- We engaged with Dell to ensure that we always, really always had the spare parts onhand to fix computers the same day they were turned in. This was a very difficult supply chain problem for Dell but they rolled up their sleeves and we jointly built a solution that worked. We would have all the parts we needed to guarantee same day repair of the 4,000 cadet computers.
- We changed our computer diagnose and repair processes to limit how much time we tinkered with the computer before we reimaged the laptop and reloaded the cadet data from our backup system.
- Finally, we built a searchable website so that faculty could check on the repair status of any cadet machine. This became a system of record and trust.
This had both intended and unintended consequences. Cadets had much fewer mishaps with technology and their homework. Cadets were delighted with same day repair. Faculty and cadets grew to trust the networks and technology overall. By 2006, a third of the final exams required the use of technology to complete. The faculty had come to trust the technology and had taken advantage of it in their cadet evaluations. All of this was awesome.
If you are progressing through this journey sequentially, the next chapter is The March of the Lemmings.