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?"

Comments

Re:First rule of thumb

[Magic5Ball]

Yes, zero tolerance on those specifications (or, really, anything not otherwise illegal) would be a mistake since that would make the university non-interoperable with students, faculty, other researchers, industry, government, and the rest of the world. University IT departments (really, all IT departments) should have at least the purpose and goal of enabling the organization to meet its business objectives (efficient output of high quality teaching, research, advocacy, other products) through the effective management and provision of ICT tools. IT departments, like accounting departments and the loading dock, are means to informing and fulfilling other broader strategic objectives, and should rarely be ends unto themselves. More sophisticated IT departments should certainly form strategy around their own operations and aspire to become more than a supporting department, but not at the expense of achieving the organization's regular business objectives.

At one university in which I participate, the CIO decided that nightly six-hour backups of 13 different legacy mainframe systems was inefficient, and increasingly costly as upkeep and replacement parts became increasingly expensive. However, the systems had co-evolved with the business operating procedures of the entire 40-year-old institution, providing great efficiencies at the human business administrator level, such that processing was swift, accurate, and responsive to the needs of the students, faculties and other customers. Everyone on campus had two credentials: the library card and the IT (AIX) login. IT signed with [that system that Oracle bought] on the understanding that the business logic and VT interfaces from all of the legacy systems would be ported over to the new web-based system in two years, such that the data would be seamlessly carried through and users would require minimal retraining on business processes. The vendor-supplied consultants, it was thought, would be able to magically absorb decades of institutional knowledge about the university's documented business processes, without any consideration for the many more legitimate but undocumented exceptions. They did no meaningful consulting with the users of the proposed new system. Oddly at the time, the management faculty applied enough pressure to largely not participate in this migration on the grounds that their system (which replicated the functions of the central system on recent platforms) would not be made more efficient by this plan.

Three years after, data from two of the silos were ported, the interfaces and business logic were completely new, and average administrative processing time in many customer-facing units rose from hours to weeks. Some of the more experienced administrators left in frustration, taking valuable intra- and extra-institutional knowledge with them. Others stayed and became "[platform] translators" who would take old paper forms completed by faculty, staff and students, and manually key them into the various parts of the new system (the system also assigned new terminology to things like "semester", "term", "quarter", "credit hour", etc. which had different meanings elsewhere in hardcopy and departmental regulations). IT deployed a new helpdesk specific to the new platform, and customer-facing staffing for faculty and students (and the queuing area at the registrar's office) had to be more than doubled to deal with the increased volume of exception handling required. This $35 million migration was already $10 million over budget, and perhaps 15 per cent complete. At this time, elsewhere in IT, people were implementing different SSO systems for students, faculty and administrative staff, and yet a different system for wireless access.

Over the next five years, they migrated the remaining silos, disappearing probably over $50 million in various kinds of internal accounts in the process, including federal funding, some of the smaller endowed chairs, etc. (For three years, our relatively small research group couldn't access around $2 million in f