September Transitions

The arrival of September always means “change” to me. In the Midwest where I grew up, it historically signaled the arrival of Fall, with the change in color of the leaves, the final harvests of the season, and that morning crispness in the air that you could literally taste and feel in your lungs. As someone who has spent his entire adult life in school (first attending and then working at institutions of higher education), it has always meant “back to school” for me and the excitement of a new academic year. This Fall in particular I see my oldest child go off to college, and my youngest enter high school, so it powerfully signals “transitions ahead” for my family. That is true for IT at UWF as well.

We have just finished a major transition in moving student email and calendaring services to Google, which continues our ongoing trend of moving significant technology infrastructure services to external hosts. We plan to follow this with moving faculty/staff to Google as well. We are bringing major new commercial software systems onto campus, such as the Medicat system for the new student wellness center. And we continue to look at external systems like the Hobsons client relationship management (CRM) system for admissions. All this means that our IT environment will continue to become more complex, and our work will increasingly focus on integration of technologies from various sources.

At the same time, the forces of commoditization are at work, as an expanding plethora of client devices – increasingly small and mobile – become consumer electronics wares. Students are arriving at the university with their IT infrastructure already in hand – be it their devices, their communication and collaboration environments (e.g., email, Facebook, Twitter), or their electronic identities. Students consume ever-expanding bandwidth and IP footprints (as they connect their cell phones, their computers, their game consoles, and other IP-enabled devices). This signals more powerful pressures for the university to adapt to this new Internet-based culture.

There is much being written about the need for IT departments to change in significant ways as well. Traditionally, we have viewed ourselves chiefly as service providers. And indeed we are. But if we allow that to be our only persona, there are some serious implications that result. First, it means we tend to be REACTIVE – express a need or ask for a service, and we’ll provide it. But that means we’re always in catch-up mode, scrambling to meet an already-developed demand. Second, as the forces of commoditization work in the external IT world, it makes us subject to those forces as well – that is, the relentless need to compete with, or at least react to, outside providers that deliver services cheaper and faster and with greater economies of scale. It is axiomatic that commodities become valued by consumers chiefly in terms of low price, and most all services – including IT services – are being relentlessly driven toward commodities in the new global online environment. What this means is that in-house IT service providers become driven chiefly by pressures of cost control. What the forward-thinkers are instead urging is that IT departments – particularly university IT departments – need to shed themselves of the “service provider” image and instead seek to be strategic partners in creating new “products” and strategic capabilities – that is, new sources of value – for the universities they serve. In ITS, our move to continue finding the “right source” for services – which will increasingly be external sources – is part of our move towards freeing up both our creativity and our time to focus on more strategic uses of IT.