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

Contribute how?

[Dynedain]

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.