The Changing IT Organization in Higher Education

Presidents and Provosts must continue to pay attention to the status of information technology on other campuses. Watching states like New York, California, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, and Florida struggle with funding is requiring academic leaders to reevaluate the usefulness of all the support organizations on campus and to revalidate earlier decisions on how to provide service functions campus-wide. I believe the only communities that will continue without significant change are teaching, library functions (information access), and research. I am certain all traditional administrative functions will be reviewed to ensure their contribution is enhancing the core mission of the University.

It is clear that the funding problems will not abate quickly and that state legislatures are looking for methods to minimize traditional cost. A large number of organizations are looking at outsourcing general services. At one time Information Technology was immune from consideration for outsourcing, but no longer. Two very large and different higher education organizations have successfully outsourced Information Technology: Arizona State University and the Kentucky Community and Technical Colleges. All Presidents and Provosts should become familiar with the two models of outsourcing used. Arizona State is a very large traditional university that has outsourced administrative applications and all campus email systems. Arizona State’s 62,000 students legitimize the upcoming “cloud computing” model works. Kentucky’s Community and Technical College system is located statewide with 67 campuses. KCTCS has over 90,000 students at the different campuses and have outsourced the entire IT function, including administrative systems, networking, telephones, course management systems, email, and video systems. Combine the examples with the efforts of state legislatures to control or lower the cost of higher education, and the day of accountability is here for the universities’ Information Technology organizations.

The pressure to change will only mount as the economic problems refuse to go away and legislatures refuse to change revenue producing practices (taxes) of the past. Information Technology in higher education is inefficient and has redundancy organization-wide. Further, all innovation that appears relevant to today’s faculty and students seems to be coming from technology savvy companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft. As you look at the large technology companies serving higher education, you see large investments being made in cloud computing: just look at the recent investments made by Oracle, IBM, PeopleSoft, Google, and Microsoft. If the providers are making 100 million dollar investments in changing the corporate methods of selling to user communities, should universities undertake a thorough review of practices in deploying technology on campus? I suspect Arizona State and Kentucky have initiated a trend IT cannot avoid, only delay.

Senior Academic Officers must look at the university organizational structure and determine what to do with the technology organization. The next few posts will provide several models that should be considered.