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How To Help With a University ICT Strategy?
An anonymous reader writes "I have been asked to contribute to my university's revised ICT (Information and Communication Technology) strategy and I am curious what fellow Slashdot members consider to be the main advice in this context. What are the major mistakes that organizations like universities make? Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience? How does one promote open source in a managerial culture? How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"
I saw askslashdot in the tag line and thought it answered this question.
I am almost finished with my undergrad at a large public university. I worked in several of the branch libraries during my years here, including a full-time stint this summer. The computers in our library allow anyone to use one application: IE7. We have no time limit on computer usage or have any web filtering. The problems that arise from misuse of these computers from non-university community members are astounding. In just one branch library here this year alone, several incidents have been reported of non-university people masturbating to Internet porn. All incidents were reported to staff by young female co-eds, who were visibly traumatized by the experience. These kinds of folks have also brought along other problems for us to deal with: drug use and selling, theft of personal property, theft of library materials (including computer peripherals), etc etc.
With incidents like these in mind, don't let idealism confound your tech policies. Think of the people who are going to interact with the public that are using university technology. It is maddening to have your hands tied by some lofty IT person's idealistic vision of free data access for all when you're trying to deal with serious breaches of public safety.
but I don't care, either. Seriously, how about a fucking story that doesn't suck dick like CmdrTaco at a truckstop bathroom?
If I don't know the answer - does still make me a troll?
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
Niggers! Spics! Kikes!
Snickers! Pies! Kites!
There, fixed that for ya.
Just outsource all the work to Google and sneak out for a round of golf!
"How does one promote open source in a managerial culture? How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?" The major mistake universities make is in finding poltically motivated people to develop their strategies. Promotion of Open Source should not be part of a strategy, that's for implementation, *if* it's appropriate. And what exactly is "the curse" of the VLE? In my institution it's having a profound effect on delivering learning.
Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience?
It's simple: Relatively Unrestricted WiFi - (You can block off the obvious Battle.net and filter anything involving porn) and this allows any student with a laptop to research anything they want. Alot of kids today are getting laptops for the sake of college and university. Its almost a must.
Then you completely lockdown outter-access to anything within the physical domain of the Campus - being the plugs in the wall. Let them access their shared drives if they're in that kind of course - let them use the library printers, let them use outlook for email - (or your own campus built email). Other than that, they shouldn't need anything outside of the campus available to them on Campus computers.
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
You tell them the benefits. How else do you promote Open source. (Rhetorical)
How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"
Everything they NEED to use should be EASY to use. The things that most students use the University domain for are - Campus Library Book Tracking, Grades, and updates from teachers.
Thus if you can build those in-house and KISS, you won't have any problems. The LAST thing you need is a seperate piece of software that doesn't work fully with your current system. If a student has to remember more than one username or password - its not a good system.
FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products scaling from a soft-phone up to a soft-switch. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow. We support various communication technologies such as Skype, SIP, H.323, IAX2 and GoogleTalk making it easy to interface with other open source PBX systems such as sipXecs, Call Weaver, Bayonne, YATE or Asterisk. FreeSWITCH supports many advanced SIP features such as presence/BLF/SLA as well as TCP TLS and sRTP. It also can be used as a transparent proxy with and without media in the path to act as a SBC (session border controller) and proxy T.38 and other end to end protocols. FreeSWITCH supports both wide and narrow band codecs making it an ideal solution to bridge legacy devices to the future. The voice channels and the conference bridge module all can operate at 8, 16, 32 or 48 kilohertz and can bridge channels of different rates. FreeSWITCH builds natively and runs standalone on several operating systems including Windows, Max OS X, Linux, BSD and Solaris on both 32 and 64 bit platforms. Our developers are heavily involved in open source and have donated code and other resources to other telephony projects including openSER, sipXecs, The Asterisk Open Source PBX and Call Weaver.
You're being very vague. University IT policies have many many stakeholders (Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, department heads, just to name a few) and a lot of interdepartmental politicking needs to be taken into account. Is this a 30k+ student body with hundreds of staff in the IT department or is it student body of 1,000 with only 20 IT people? Is the IT department merged with the library system or is it independent? Does IT bill the other departments for services or do they operate with a predefined budget? Is the reason for getting your input to provide direction for overhauling the IT department's network and services, or is the goal to change the general technology culture of the staff and student body? Should IT be involved more directly with students or are they just a necessary service like janitorial and maintenance? Does IT set policies, or is that handed down by decree from on high? Is the head of IT respected at the same level as the dean of a specific school or is he fighting for attention? Do departments/schools manage their own IT resources does everything have to be centralized?
Perhaps if you were a bit more specific as to WHY the University is asking for your specific input, and WHAT kind of input they expect from you, /. readers could provide you with appropriate responses. The open/closed source debate should only be one tiny aspect of an overall IT strategy, especially in an organization with differing needs as complex as a university. For example, CS/CE departments will certainly need and want a lot of open source tools and systems, but Fine Arts is better left alone with OSX and Adobe CS.
As your question is phrased now, I think your respsonses are going to be mostly of the variety "use/avoid product X" or "push for open source" and not really of much help in providing specific input towards the strategy you are mentioning.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
...revised ICT (Information and Communication Technology) strategy
Cut out the pretentious titles, buzzwords and acronyms that really have no meaning.
Exactly, in simple terms, WTF are you supposed to accomplish?
Because, I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen if you keep using ICT or whatever you want to call it, folks are going to keep asking you, WTF do you mean by an ICT strategy.
P.S. Slashdot's text entry field for comments still sucks ...geeze guys!
Universities should run IT the same as any business.
You are a service. You are a red line on the budget. Your only reason for existence is to provide IT services to your customers (your faculty and students). You don't make policy, you don't have an agenda, you don't enforce a strategy--you follow and obey.
People who spend their lives in academia lose touch with reality, so help bring some semblance of it back into their lives (this as close as you will get to having an 'agenda').
Let the individual divisions of the school give you their needs, and you meet them. You can certainly try to provide some real-world advice to promote where the real world stands, but you can't dictate anything.
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
In other words the college has purchased some tools that do work for them. You want them to dump their investment and go with open source tools that can takes years to perfect.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Certainly you must determine their needs, but don't let them get involved in the solution. You will have a History professor who's a computer hobbyist (and whom the other liberal arts faculty consider an expert) offering you helpful suggestions based on a James Martin book he read a decade ago, some guy from Electrical Engineering pushing for end-to-end quantum crypto, deans trying to preserve their schools' autonomy, etc., with the end result looking like it was designed by a committee of monkeys.
Give us (research groups) the freedom to set things up so they work for us, but offer help in achieving that. All research groups are different, and we all need different things. Often we know (almost) enough to do things ourselves, but a bit of central infrastructure is always helpful. We run a mixture of Windows, Linux and Solaris - I think this is quite common. What would be really useful would be a few webpages describing how to configure things (services like LDAP or SAMBA) so they work with the central university structure. And please, Windows only solutions don't work for some of us. I have known several people who keep two computers on their desk because of this. But most of all, don't lock it down unless you really need to.
uPortal is open source and allows for easy information access, and has groups and stuff built in. We use it in Cal Poly, it works quite nicely...
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
While that is very valid view to take - choosing the best tool for the job - I don't quite agree with it here. Or well, I do agree but I think that "open source" is a very valid criteria in choosing the best tool.
No, tools aren't automatically superior in security, features or such because they are open source. In fact, deciding to prefer open source harms this because it leaves some of the competition out.
Depending on your political views, how you view Universities in the society might vary. However, if you think that they are supposed to promote freedom of information, openness, be as independent from corporate control as possible, embrace ethical choices, etc. etc... Choosing open source is part of it.
Some people don't believe that those are the reason we need to have universities or that open source helps in those things... I am sure we can all argue about that for dozens of posts and get nowhere. :)
I have found that, in all arenas, people assume that the individual technology is so good that an integrated plan is not needed.
The first step is to PLAN! Ask yourself these questions:
1. Will I have enough PCs, printer, Macs, whatever required to service the university?
2. Will I have enough labs of this stuff where it is needed?
3. How am I going to connect it all?
4. What kind of knowledge do I need to make this happen correctly?
5. Is my solution scalable? Can is adapt to new technologies (like WiFi or WiMax)?
Start with that and you can figure out the rest.
Get the budget balanced and as rational as you can: every year.
An example: It is not uncommon to see one part of an operation (e.g. phone lines) subsidize another (e.g. networking). There can be great reasons to do that kind of thing but it tends to bite eventually.
People may abandon the expensive service (especially in a tough economy) and come to expect the cheap subsidized service as a right (understandably). In this particular example the cheap networking can replace the expensive phone lines and suddenly you are laying off dozens of people and seeing sarcastic plays written about IT management in the local University bookstore.
Not that this has ever happened.
There are times when OSS is the best choice and there are times when it is not. And be sure to let the powers-that-be know that FOSS software is almost never "free as in beer" - there are costs associated with it in all situations. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's time, sometimes it's the learning curve, etc. Be ready to handle the pros and cons of OSS.
Figure out what their real needs are and meet them.
Learn who can be ignored and who can't.
In general, if they feel you are listening and understanding them,
you will get along ok.
First rule of thumb: zero tolerance on M$ products, formats and protocols.
and recommend the best solution to the tasks at hand. You sound like you have a OSS agenda to push without regard at to what the issue that needs to be addressed is. I can tell you, as someone that has managed teams of engineers, that I will be convinced by a logical discussion of why software package A is preferred over software package B. If I hired a guy who had an agenda of pushing a particular software vendor over another due to personal agendas, I can tell you he wouldn't be around for long. Pushing OSS, just because it is OSS, is equally as pernicious as pushing BigSoftwareCoX's products. Right tool, right job. Of course $ is always a consideration, so OSS may have a good "Right Tool" argument, but you need to make the WHOLE argument.
Universities are well down the road to making the same mistakes printed newspapers made - trying to fit transformative technology into their outdated business models. Universities have a large investment in buildings and real estate that they are not likely to shed in the lifetimes of anyone reading /. today. They need to fill those buildings with warm bodies - students and profs to make them pay off.
As such, look for ways to make miniscule improvements using simple technologies that tie students to the physical classroom. The Kindle is an excellent tool for making miniscule steps down the technology path while giving Universities control over the business of selling and trading eBooks.
Hope is the currency of fools
This question can't be asked without the context of the institutional strategy. The poster mentions open source, but open source is not a strategy. It is a means to a particular end. Most universities today are focused on increasing student services through technology. Thus, it seems likely that the IT strategy for your institution should dove tail with student services goals. A portion of IT strategy could be basic infrastructure questions if they are big and important enough -- e.g. you need a new data center, you've neglected your infrastructure for X years and a complete overhaul is necessary, etc. Simply stated: figure out what your institutional strategy is, and you'll be able to create a meaningful and coherent IT strategy.
My university was laying a bunch of new cable underground, and wanted to know what kind of cable to install that would be useful for the longest time. They asked the networking professor, probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the area on such matters. He told them that the cable type didn't matter, as long as it was installed with some sort of pull-through mechanism so that new cable could be easily installed at any time in the future without digging up the cables.
They ignored his suggestion, and installed whatever was good at the time despite his protests. I think they'll be due to re-trench a couple thousand yards in the not-too-distant future.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
The most important thing is to give them a mix of technologies so they don't get this slice that isn't useful. If you teach Java, then Teach Hibernate, Spring and all the other associated technologies...
1) Wait for 2
2) Zimbra + DimDim
Would most organizations benefit from a Building Maintenance strategy? A strategy for Safety and Security? Not really. These are just departments that support the main business of the organization. If the organization identifies a specific need, e.g. "reviewing all building foundations every 10 years," or "providing 24-hour outdoor security patrols," then these departments simply implement whatever changes are necessary to meet this need -- preferably within their existing budget and service levels, but with a higher budget or modified service level if necessary.
The strategy for running these departments should be as simple as "do our jobs."
Spending more than an hour talking about the overall strategy for these departments (including IT) is a waste of time that could be better used in the actual operations of the department.
Push them far away from Blackboard (the software). I went back to school for a Masters and it was the single, most frustrating part of the experience.
Take a look at Trinity University (the one in Texas). I doubt you'll be able to find any policies helpful to you on their website, but internally the school is shifting towards open source. The CS department has been open source since forever (I believe they're using Fedora right now) but the IT department is moving in that direction as well. The students are being moved from an Exchange-based system to Google Apps for Eduction. Blackboard is being replaced by Moodle. The IT department gladly installs Firefox for faculty and supports Macs as well as it does Windows (Linux is supported but you're kinda on your own). About the only thing they use that really gets in the way is Cisco Clean Access.
Note that they aren't changing their solutions for political reasons, they are truly better, not just open source and not-Microsoft.
In my experience, two big mistakes that university IT shops often make are:
-Esme
When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.
Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.
Some things to remember from someone who has worked in Academia IT for a few years no...
1. Everyone there is smarter than you, and will go to great lengths to make sure that you know this.
2. As a follow up to 1, Everyone has a better idea.
3. Anything you do (even if it is necessary) that is in any way inconvenient will quickly become a "barrier to the educational process" and you will be ordered to remove it by the dean of whatever dept. whines loudest.
4.Keep your skills current. I don't mean networking, SAN's etc. I mean things like second life, facebook, and other equally horrible wastes of existence. These invariably come up and become instant Must Have's.
5.Anything that goes wrong is your fault and should have been prevented. It does not matter if the classroom is occupied 16 hours a day nonstop. You should have prevented whatever from happening, even if is a direct result of student/faculty actions. What's wrong with you IS people anyway?
6. There is no difference between plant staff (maintainence) and you. You will just keep getting calls about spilled drinks, new wall installations, problems with the HVAC, etc. There is nothing on earth that you can do about it. They will never pay enough attention to get the difference.
I could go on, but I'm sure you will find more as you go, so welcome to a new type of suck...
FWIW, I was not this bitter when I started, it took years to develop.
I study at UIB(norway) and I can tell you about the things I love about the IT department: - They have AD accounts for all users(students and employees) and the profile is avilable through ftp (that is if you want to use it at home) - they provide firefox and thunderbird (and thunderbird is even pre set to use your university e-mail account) on all machines - about 50% of the machines use Fedora and the rest is XP. - When you enroll you get your ID and that autmoatically set you up with an e-mail account, an AD account (probobly not real AD but that Samba flavor but who cares anyways), a log on for the wi-fi(just a password program on the proxy, or you could use VPN), an account on a schedual/classorganizer they use and they set all of this up pretty nicely(like the touch about thunderbird I mentioned earlier) -they got a really nice printer system (you can retrieve your documents at any printer you want)
Here's a great resource:
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/Browse/ICT/18086
sorry.
Desire2Learn Sucks.
Dynedain's "Contribute How?" post hit the mark, and I have no idea what it is you're really asking. However, having worked in university IT for about a decade I can offer some advice that can be applied broadly: you have an amazing resource at your disposal - smart people - and you should exploit that by developing software to suit your needs.
A lot of universities spend millions on proprietary software like PeopleSoft when they could get much better value and results by hiring competent programmers, work-studies, grad students, postdocs, etc, in-house to create software that does exactly what your institution needs it to do. Your custom software will do whatever needs to be done, it will be infinitely flexible because you have complete control over what it does and how it does it, you will not be at the mercy of any external vendor for support, and the ongoing licensing costs will be $0.
CCA (Cisco Clean Access) if implemented well is a very useful tool. We mainly enforced it on the dorm networks since most students never update their computers, or when they call and ask about problems they lie and say they are updated. We're all human and lie to the tech or whoever is on the phone so we can get our issues resolved. CCA can do alot of the update work for you as far as getting those updates out and such. Sure the student still has to do some work but if they ignore it, off goes their internet. I concur with the Blackboard nay sayers, although I never had direct issues with the package it was very unwieldy and I knew plenty of folks who had issues with it. Back to the poster, you would have to give a little more background into what your current strategy/setup is. Are you wanting to work on remote/distance classwork? Is the campus wanting to go wireless? Are you using only windows and want to explore other options? Linux is nice but if it doesn't have a nice desktop and user friendly environment then there's no point in using it for someone walking into the lab wanting to write a paper. With that said some linux installs are perfect for that, most people wouldn't even know the difference unless they asked where the Windows XP logo went to. If you're looking at going forward options, then you need to lay down what the current issues are with the current infrastructure. Some universities have made mistakes with setups that others have done superb jobs with. Using CCA to require downloads but not making those downloads available on local servers seemed to me like a bad implementation of the utility. Granted the infrastructure might not have been in place to support internal traffic and large amounts of storage, they shouldn't have half assed it. What it comes down to is money. When I was working at the help desk, we had a new Director of IT get hired. He got turned the help desk into a student repair center and got us new PCs with dual monitors, which really does help when troubleshooting some stuff while working on a machine. Not one year later he was gone. He seemed to have shaken too many trees and in reality, spent money, which I guess was a ghastly thing to behold. So keep that in mind when coming up with ideas, if you're going to spend money be ready to show some possible positive impacts from the spending.
Seriously. No support needed. Start from there and make someone convince you to do anything different. Anyone who wants something different has to pay for it themselves. Tools like GMail and Skype are ever present and all around us. The analogy is to consider how Universities thought about electricity in 1900. I'll bet each University had it's own electricity generation and procurement department is its own hierarchy of management. Today they just get an electric bill from the same provider that services private homes near by. Someday soon, basic IT will be the same.
Keep the internets FREE! Don't encyrpt any wireless and always create a guest account to login into machines. Your not going to prevent a real hacker by making the terminals a b*tch to use and will create major problems and setbacks for many people who are more important and busier than the network. If the network goes down from an open terminal, you screwed up yesterday and already have bigger problems. But take consolation; for the best of plans: sh*t happens. Remember: Accessibility with Reliablity (Redundancy and Backups) create great networks, not rules and passwords. And don't use any tech with the word Micro in it or no one will feel sympathy for when everything crashes.
When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.
Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.
The Devil "Blackboard" was aquired by "Angel" as it's replacement.... somehow this seems like collusion between the forces of darkness and light..... Time to get back to digging my bunker.....
I went there and this sounds rather familiar.
If your background is from the corporate sector, be wary of any strategy that does not fit in. Corporate easy wank strategies, such as consolidating systems, outsourcing, changing working hours - directly or indirectly. Will simply not work.
Consolidating systems: each department could be completely financially independant. Just because it has the same name, does not really mean it is. Thus meaning and consolation will not work. Your job title will mean jack, everyone knows that, so you will never be able to use that to force a department to do what you want. Tenure and research grants from just a couple people in a department can crush any poor IT strategy that.
Outsourcing: Some of the university unions are very powerful. A lot of the IT staff are in the same union as the academics. Piss on the IT staff, means angering the academics. If a strike is called, and where I am they are some what frequent, expect massive disruption beyond just the IT department and the head of the university blaming you! Bizarrely this is happening to my work, but the reality is, you can't outsource support for hundreds of bespoke programs on thousands of bespoke platforms. If Dell, Microsoft, IBM, Redhat, Sun, Google and HP (often in combination) can't handle one small project, how the heck will they handle a couple of a universities bespoke apps?
Indirectly changing working hours: Working at a university IT is a lifestyle choice. If you start messing with that lifestyle, which often comes at a significant loss of income, expect shit to hit the fan.
I'm at a university that had WebCT, which then morphed into Blackboard and has just recently been replaced with Moodle. Having using those systems, both as a student and in teaching roles, I have to say that Moodle is just plain better. It's cheaper (TCO), more versatile and more usable. And much less prone to inducing rage :-)
Of course, that doesn't mean that it's invulnerable to screw-ups. If you lock it down from on high with One True Way of Using The System, then you're probably not going to suit the needs of different academic departments and their different kinds of students (CompSci versus English majors, for example). On the other hand, too little structure can lead to ongoing support problems in security, maintenance and training/helpdesk services. The trick is to find a balance that works across your institution.
University IT policies have many many stakeholders (Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, department heads, just to name a few) and a lot of interdepartmental politicking needs to be taken into account.
The Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, and department heads of my institution are concerned that they can get and send email, that neither the administration stuff nor the website is hacked, that no screw-up risks escalation to a PR disaster, and that it doesn't all cost too much. And that other people don't bitch about it, and all in all that it can be left to run itself -- because they have more than enough other, IT-unrelated concerns of their own. As long as they can plug their own laptops into the LAN they don't care what hardware or software the masses are using.
In the relevant committees, you're likely to find deep conservatism, even from people who themselves use Gentoo or whatever. Elementary classes in "computer literacy" are likely to be in mere secretarial skills, and their teachers can argue for MS software on Windows as they can truthfully say that this is near ubiquitous in the corporate world. Students and staff want to use software with which they're already familiar, which for the huge majority will mean MS software. Staff find it easier to tell people who are mystified by spreadsheet problems to look up the matter in an actual book on Excel than to do so in a non-existent book on Gnumeric. Still, there's no reason not to install FOSS in addition to the shrinkwrapped stuff, and so my institution has OOo, Gimp, etc sitting unopened on just about all of its computers.
I'm a college faculty member and I pitched Moodle at a college-wide meeting last year when the Admin types were looking for cost-saving ideas. The idea was quickly shot down on the basis that our college has "tens of thousands of man hours" invested in developing Blackboard content that cannot be directly imported into Moodle. This is what the suits call "sunk costs." It's what the rest of us call "good money after bad." And it never occurred to any of them that the lack of portability of Blackboard content is 100% deliberate---for the sole purpose of preventing migration to other platforms.
This is what the suits call "sunk costs."
Interesting that 'the suits' use the phrase 'sunk costs' to justify a poor decision based on the sunk cost falacy. The logical basis for decision making is to ignore sunk costs and consider only future costs and benefits. It may be that the transition cost outweighs the benefits of moving, but that would be an entirely different reason.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
Sakai is also far superior to Blackboard, and the ability for student groups to set up their own sites (including places for documents, wikis, chat, and other stuff) is incredibly helpful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakai_Project Besides, it's named after an Iron Chef... what could be better?
There are many aspects to an ICT policy. I'll just address a few points related to procurement versus in-house development, which is one key issue. Universities tend to draw tech advice and management from people who overapply lessons from the corporate world and forget things that are unique to universities. For example:
(1) In my university administrators have consistently bought expensive proprietary tools from companies that do not specialize in academic software, e.g. modifying e-commerce tools to be student course registration and tuition systems. This can lead to mismatches in the user experience - the student's course list becomes a "shopping cart" with a "checkout", and functions that are necessary on a local level either don't get implemented or have to wait in a long list of changes that are expensively requested from the vendor, such as accommodations to allow for flexible credits when that wasn't built into the system or didn't follow readily from the original software model.
(2) Part of the reason for going with off-the-shelf solutions that are poor matches for local needs is the bizarre and usually mistaken belief that there is insufficient in-house talent to get the job done. In few places is this less true than at a university with computer science students, who will often hack cheaply and or even for free and have created some truly terrific tools that blow away expensive proprietary ones. IT personnel are also often more available to hack at a university than elsewhere. University IT departments often attract good programmers who are somewhat underemployed because they like working in a university. In most cases, a tailored solution, open source generally, will be cheaper to produce and certainly to maintain in a university than it will be to buy software from a vendor, even if the vendor specializes in university software. This is less true as you move toward very specialized types of software such as graphical modeling tools, but universities often spend huge amounts of money on vendors to buy stuff with really simple interfaces that could have been developed locally or in consortium with other universities.
(3) Another mistake is letting software drive policy. Software maker says "from now on, courses can't meet at nonstandard times" or "instructors can't change the grading basis", etc., and rules that used to be determined by academic committees get made de facto through programming choices that no one at the university had a say in. Another argument against outside vendors and in favor of in-house development when the software is not terribly complicated.
(4) In some universities the concept of open source goes ideologically against what the powers that be want to promote, e.g. students graduating and forming companies based on proprietary software, or not pissing off donors from such companies. It's not clear this can be called a mistake in the context of the school's overall economic model, but it is a mistake to forget this bias when explaining why a school's IT policy does not favor free/open source software.
Service Level Agreements... Works for all sectors.
One of the key oversights in most academic environments is funding for sustaining efforts and maintenance.
That can also be used to leverage your approach to open-source efforts with (presumably) lower maintenance costs.
Many academic institutions still procure equipment with grants and bonds, etc - but are dangerously lax in providing funds for ongoing support.
That is something you want to try and minimize to the extent possible. Awareness is the first step.
I'm a biologist at a university with about 25,000 students and administrators who need IT to come out and show them where the off switch is on their computers. (Really. That happened.) IT convinced them that they should go off Apache and onto the whole MS .NET server schmier. They're also absolutely set against any open source VLS, so we're paying additional $$$hundreds of thousands for WebCT (Blackboard) even though there's a whole Moodle consortium among the big regional universities. (Right now they're shopping for a replacement.) For one quarter the amount they're paying, they could hire their own in-house support staff if they needed to.
Why is this happening? My personal theory is that IT wants to be sure there's a big corporate entity to whom they can hand off support issues, so that they don't miss any golf games. The people we have in Admin don't know enough not to be relying on IT for this. They're also not relying on the faculty. Not a single faculty member, not even the ones in Computer Sci have had a chance to give any input that I've ever heard about.
So, in these economic times, with courses being cut, enrollments being cut because the classes aren't there for the students, we're spending close to a million dollars on proprietary "solutions" that
a) do NOT work with the diversity of software you have in a university. That diversity is not optional. Very often there's only one program written by one professor that runs on one platform that's essential to getting your class taught or your research done.
and b) do not work with any platform except Windows / Vista, not even Macs. This doesn't work in a university. See point a).
So the take home message is to collate all the total cost of ownership stats you can find (not sourced from Microsoft), and to remember that IT wants to avoid dealing with support no matter what it costs (for someone else). I can't say I blame them entirely, but it does need to stay in perspective. Also, send around a well-crafted questionnaire / query to all faculty about what their needs are and what *they* think would be a good solution. Follow up with the ones who seem to know what they're talking about. There might be a few things there IT hasn't thought of. Do what you can to keep your university from wasting millions on software that is way more frustrating and less usable than open source alternatives.
We're in the process of switching from WebCT to Blackboard. Moodle was (very) seriously considered, but the self hosting was not an option the University wanted to consider (for Moodle anyway) and the hosting provider (who was a Moodle Partner) underwhelmed the committee.
Moodle itself was highly regarded by the committee, but although they liked it better than the other alternatives, the new Blackboard was enough of an improvement over WebCT that the contrast was not as overwhelming as it could have been.
Don't discount the "sunk costs" in developing content. Most of that content was created over a great deal of time by non-technical users (i.e., faculty) and the inability to easily convert most of it would be a huge problem. *They're* not going to be able (or willing) to redo it from scratch, and if your IT department doesn't have an automated method to convert it, it's going to take a lot of time (with limited staff) to hand tweak it. It's do-able, but a strike against any system unable to automate the conversion.
Blackboard offered some financial incentives to stay with them and help in the conversion. The local Blackboard will be hosted here (as WebCT was before it) but with Blackboard support. I suggested finding a Moodle Partner that would provide a similar support (as opposed to hosting it) but that was not done in the time we had to make the decision, and as I said, this particular Moodle Partner was unimpressive, particularly in the support realm.
Personally, I'll continue to run my departmental Moodle server, and none of our classes will be using the campus Blackboard, but I do understand the campus decision.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Your University has already precluded one common mistake; they asked someone who checks slashdot. At my university many IT decisions are made by non-technical administrators listening to buzz words.
ICT supports the Business to achieve its objectives. The first document you need to look at is the 5 year business plan for the University. The ICT strategy takes into account the Business Strategy for the 5-10 year outlook. Other keys documents are the Business Process diagrams for each key business area. You might like to document a Business Information Model that looks at how data/information flows WITHIN the University and EXTERNAL information flows. Hopefully the Business Strategy takes into account any key government or other Policy changes that are on the horizon,if not you need to gather these as well.
Higher-ed is so political, it doesn't matter what great ideas or strategies you have- they're going to be quashed. Communication issues are rampant because of politics and poor leadership, not because of lack of good IT strategies. And solutions are typically biased to the uninformed desires of those d faculty. If higher-ed institutions only ran like (real) businesses instead of (worse than) government, you'd have a chance.