This fairly lengthy article is about cross-disciplinary perspectives and language differences making it difficult to create cross-fertilization that would come from productive conversations across disciplines. Much of it could as well pertain to administrative departments, planning processes, and so forth. The book this author recently published also looks interesting.

Many university administrators would like to remedy this situation. Over the past 10 years, numerous research universities' strategic plans have called for increased interdisciplinary work. Nonetheless, there is little evidence that it is happening.

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict. These are significant barriers.

However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture. Differences in language are the least of the problems; translations may be tedious and not entirely accurate, but they are relatively easy to accomplish. What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting "truth"—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind.

A major portion of what planners do is communication. We think this article from EDUCAUSE Review is a nice summary of where we see information streams going in the very near future. It's worth your time to look it over, if for no other reason than that it will provide useful perspective: "For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination; we have viewed accessing information as a process and producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes?"

Note the use of "alignment" in the following quote:

If we consider what it means to be "in flow" in an information landscape defined by networked media, we will see where Web 2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to be attentive in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant, valuable, entertaining, or insightful. To be living with, in, and around information. Most of that information is social information, but some of it is entertainment information or news information or productive information. Being "in flow" with information differs from Csikszentmihalyi's sense of reaching a state of flow, since the former is not about perfect attention but is instead about a sense of alignment, of being attentively aligned with information.

What future role does analytics play in assisting planners to keep constituents' information streams appropriately aligned with an active plan, or planning process?