Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Slashdot doesn't really have a mod for "uncivil discourse" though there is a pretty broad consensus that such antics should be modded down. So "Troll" tends to be used for disruptive comments in general. I think these are supposed to be hit as "Flamebait" but the difference between trolling and flame-baiting is not well understood. Honestly I don't think the "Flamebait" option gets used too much anymore.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I'm still waiting for the much-needed "-1, Asshat" and "-1, Incorrect" mods. Call me an idealist, but I believe that you need the right tools for the job when moderating.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law