Options for Academic Technology

The Chief Academic Officer will soon have many opportunities to determine how to use technology to support faculty and students on campus. We have written about the opportunities the CAO has in the area of desktop services: Google is providing a number of services beyond email and Microsoft is matching Google service for service. Take an inventory against you own campus offerings. Do you provide your students:

1. A full featured email system with at least 5 gigabytes of mail storage that is optimized for all Web 2.0 services and offers everyone mobile-friendly access.
2. A location to save your files: today it is common for Google and Microsoft to offer you another 25 gigabytes of storage space for your PowerPoint slides, your PDFs, your Word and Excel documents, and the ton of video and pictures you want to keep to reuse in your courses.
3. Now we find a number of companies teaming up with service providers to offer additional core services. Dell has combined with MoodleRooms to offer a course management system a faculty member can access from anywhere. Google has decided to offer a product called CourseSmart that will offer a service that will look a little like a course management system and a little bit like a course registration system.
4. Several large companies are offering cloud-based research computing by teaming with low cost server providers and specialized university researchers to offer access to specialized research data sets in the cloud. No longer will the liberal arts college or the regional university faculty member be at a disadvantage because the university cannot offer computational computing on campus.
5. Just this year two new Web 2.0 web sites have emerged: Academia, a location where faculty with like research interest can collaborate or can develop curriculum together, and Einztein, a site just entering public beta where faculty can share their content with the world or can develop a course with peers.
   

What this means to the CAO is you no longer have to invest in significant technology infrastructure capital unless you would rather spend money on technology instead of your academic programs. All of the above do not require a capital investment for the host hardware or software and only a small (or no) recurring services cost. The CAO needs to task the CIO in researching the options available today to create a roadmap that would allow the university to shift capital funding previously associated with technology to academic interests. It appears the only future funding for campus applications will focus in two areas: the devices the faculty, student, or staff uses for access, and a few programs governed by compliance laws that should remain on campus.

Two Cloud Reports

Two reports of interest have been issued recently: the first is Shaping the Higher Education Cloud and the second is The Future of cloud Computing. The chief academic officer will find both reports informative and should assist in future planning efforts.

The first report, Shaping the Higher Education Cloud, is a joint report from EDUCAUSE and NACUBO. The report provides the findings from a meeting held earlier this year in Tempe, Arizona attended by CIOs from many colleges and universities. The outcome of the meeting was a list of issues each campus must address prior to implementing cloud computing services; the topics are all the familiar ones led by security and content location. The CAO needs to be aware of the issues that are coming from a single voice on campus, Information Technology. Another report needs to be developed from a faculty and/or student perspective. The right plan for a campus will always exist between the early adopters and the departments being asked to change. IT has always been eager to ask colleges to change but have been reluctant to follow that advice with emerging cloud computing technologies.

The second report is from the Pew Research Center, The Future of Cloud Computing. The theme of the report is two emerging technologies will impact higher education by 2020. The first is change will be future access to university IT resources will be with a mobile device. The success of the Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are defining the future requirements of our students. The second change will be cloud computing. Microsoft and Google have established a new model for campus IT departments and have shown many CAOs that the University can save money using the cloud. Recently the State of Kentucky moved 700,000 students and teachers to Microsoft mail and saved millions of dollars. There are many examples of Universities implementing Google’s mail solution and experiencing similar savings. The future will be defined by many of today’s university IT application providers moving their software to the cloud and sell the application to the university on a software as a service (SaaS) platform. What this means with regard to students, faculty and staff has yet to be imagined. The report is very clear the change is coming, and universities need to be prepared.

Wait-and-See Approach to Cloud Adoption

It is interesting that higher education seems to be taking a wait and see attitude with cloud computing. Earlier posts suggest that the college and university environment would benefit from leading the transition to the next era of computing. Instead it appears higher education has selected a more conservative action: wait and see. The most interesting issue is we are in an era of economic downturn that has caused many states to take drastic actions to curtail costs, and higher education leaders are not taking advantage of proven solutions from industry leaders. I would suggest there are several reasons for this response:

1. CIOs are uncomfortable with a transition in technology that is controlled by the provider and the consumer, not the local IT organization. It is well documented that a university can offer state-of-the-art email to students at minimal cost to the institution. Universities like Arizona State, Notre Dame, Boise State, University of Maine, and Temple are successful, yet only 35% of universities are taking advantage of this offering. It is clear there are millions of dollars in savings being left unclaimed.
   
   
2. Universities are using security and compliance as the reason for not implementing cloud computing. This is a valid concern which has a number of documented solutions that are being ignored. The real problem is today’s universities are highly decentralized and the adoption of cloud services requires a comprehensive authentication infrastructure. It could be that the first hurdle to migrating to the cloud is the IT leader getting the university's security practices in order, having a disciplined security staff in place, and having best practices in place.
   
   
3. The Chief Academic Officer has not focused on the real savings that are available in using cloud resources. It is time for organizations providing leadership to the Presidents and Provosts to provide education and solutions to allow leaders to make the best choice for the institution. It is clear most CAOs have given total control of technology to the university IT leadership. Should funding issues continue, CAOs will be required to take charge if they want to realize the millions of dollars of savings available today and even more in the near future.

The next 24 months should be interesting to observe. Students are aware of what is available in today’s technology environment. Consumerization of IT is out of the box, and legacy practices will not dominate in the future. Attempts to control technology at universities has not been successful in higher education, and it will become even less so in the era of cloud computing.

Higher Education IT in Transition

We recently spoke at the Internet 2 conference updating leaders on what was happening with cloud computing in higher education. The scorecard presented was based on a nationwide survey to leadership groups such as Frye Leadership Institute alumni, Internet 2 technology and academic leaders, and to the Quilt Group.

As we were preparing the scorecard we became aware of an EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) study, Alternative IT Sourcing Strategies, a report focused on how higher education IT departments were utilizing cloud services in 2009. Our own survey findings were similar to those in the ECAR survey. Our top findings:

1. Higher education funding is at one of the lowest points in recent history; many staff are being terminated, increasing fees and tuition are at unprecedented rates, and states are still cutting budgets. It is very interesting that CIOs are avoiding adopting technologies that would significantly lower costs. It is clear CIOs value control of the technology over providing the university significant recurring savings.
   
   
2. The cloud service with the highest adoption is student email. Adoption is low, only 30-35% of higher education institutions are using the service. Survey results show that offerings (for free) from Google or Microsoft are superior to local email support. The response should be concerning to the Chief Academic Officer; hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on technology that could have been redirected to the academic mission, and academic leaders are not questioning the situation.
   
   
3. Course management systems are the second most cloud-enabled service adopted by universities. The adoption rate is in the single digits, far behind cloud-enabled email. Course management systems in the cloud have significant opportunities to grow for a number of reasons; most important is the faculty will lead the adoption. Many colleges and universities have limited staff to support course management systems resulting in dated systems with limited enhancements. Cloud vendors will offer feature-rich services by leveraging the advantages of crowdsourcing and web 2.0 vendors.
   
   
4. There are several very interesting projects underway, one being OCLC's Web-Scale Management Services. Imagine a comprehensive Web 2.0 integrated library system. If you understand the wealth of content OCLC manages, you are awed by the possibilities of this offering to students and more importantly to research. Keep your eyes on this project.

Cloud Summary from Gartner Symposium

From last week's Gartner Symposium, here's a summary of the top 5 cloud-related things from the conference:

• Clearer conversations about the cloud
• Demonstrated examples of success in the cloud
• Real commitment from Google for the enterprise
• Seeing a mainstream "conference 2.0"
• Acknowledgment of a "new normal"

Read more about each of these. Also, Appirio has published a list of the bottom 5 cloud-related things from the Gartner Symposium last week.

Cloud Computing Survey

For those at higher education institutions who work with cloud-based collaboration or social networking tools, please consider completing this survey. We are working on a presentation about cloud-based tools and are looking for examples and experiences from other institutions. As part of the presentation, we are creating a summary "scorecard" which will highlight the top twenty campus collaboration tools as well as the top twenty offerings from vendors.

If the survey doesn't apply to you, please consider sharing it with others who might have an interest. Thank you!

Back to School in the New Technology Landscape

This fall will introduce a new era of computing to the Chief Academic Officer, one shaped by consumer choice rather than the mandated standards of the university. First, each university must determine its response to the rapid adoption of applications available for smartphones . The iPhone has reformed the landscape of customer expectation through what's possible with applications. The student once happy with out-of-the-box student systems has been exposed to the 65,000+ applications available in the App Store and wants a portfolio of choices that complement his/her lifestyle.

The next product to impact the university technology landscape is the Amazon Kindle, the first highly successful eBook reader. A number of universities are reviewing how the Kindle fits into their environment. Students are vocal about the increasing cost of tuition and textbooks. The extended recession with high unemployment is simply fuel to the fire. University administrators are questioning the traditional methods of acquiring textbooks and are looking at partnerships with publishers. The transition to e-textbooks will be much easier to accomplish technically than it will be able to accomplish politically with the faculty.

The next technology to watch this fall is the cloud offerings from Google and Microsoft. Until a month ago, Google was the outright leader in this area. Google had experienced great success with Google mail (gmail), Google Apps (word processing), Google talk (IM and Voice) and Android (smartphone OS). In July, Microsoft answered Google with Microsoft Office 2010. The new offering has two components: the first is the traditional upgrade to Microsoft Office that has happened every three years for the past 15 years. The more exciting announcement was the offering of Microsoft Office 2010 online for free. We have all been aware of Microsoft Live services available online for the past three years and have considered the product equal to Google Apps. The real difference maker with Microsoft Office 2010 is it will blend the traditional desktop with cloud computing transparently. Microsoft will have an advantage in building on the skill base of millions of students who have used its traditional office products throughout their existence. Microsoft’s vision of cloud computing will have several real advantages and was good enough to level the competitive playing field with Google.

So what do you and your CIO do for the fall with limited budgets—that is the real question. The most important thing you should expect out of your CIO is a two-year vision on where he/she is taking your university. The vision must be comprehensive and include the needs of the faculty and students. You must see a clear road map for commitment to Google or Microsoft. The plan must address the steps your university is planning to take with cloud computing and the partnerships that will make the transition possible. Students will demand that your university address mobility and will expect a response to applications that will make their university experience relevant. Don’t forget to include all the traditional IT expenses that seem to be growing rapidly.

Academic Computing Support

The Chief Academic Officer will look at all areas of the university to restructure costs from the administrative functions of the university. One of the first areas to be evaluated for restructuring will be the information technology support areas. Faculty and students are getting tired of having to go to so many places to resolve an issue. Support organizations will need to rationalize themselves. Two events will ensure the evaluation happens in the near future: the first has been discussed in prior posts, the state of the economic downturn for the foreseeable future. The second event will be the influence of cloud computing on functional areas. Legacy practices have allowed IT to request and be allowed to oversee and set the rules for all areas of technology on a university campus. Too often this has allowed support practices to focus on what is expedient for IT rather than the core mission of teaching, research, and service.

The current deployment of applications from off campus cloud computing vendors, known as Software as a Service (SaaS), will allow faculty and students to experience personalized technology support. Legacy practices of IT departments will be challenged by relevant and flexible applications from off campus. Faculty and students will be quick to point out the off campus applications, and these will often cost the university less than legacy campus applications. The probable result will be the CIO meeting the deans to determine the future direction of computing.

The fragmentation of service will highlight the need to restructure technology support on campus. Major SaaS providers will offer point product support, and the campus will continue to support central campus applications (ERP). The university community will require transparent support across all technology. Support might find itself being offered in one of the following scenarios:

1. A likely area to emerge as the technology support area is the library. Why? The primary reason is the library administration has transformed from a campus-based resource to a largely virtual resource successfully. Additionally, the library has introduced the Information Commons that has been a hit, widely received by the students and faculty. Further, the library has been able to transform to the digital world without losing the trust of the faculty. The academic community would welcome one-stop technology and research support located close to the college. The major issue will be if the library is willing to change its traditional culture to become the “information resource” for the academic community.
   
   
2. Another option would be for support to remain in IT. IT will need to create innovative and transparent relationships with the faculty and students to establish a transparent support organization in the minds of the academic community. IT has the skills to be very successful in offering support; the issue is credibility. Many faculty and staff feel that IT has not made the successful transition to the digital world and often suggest IT is a better gatekeeper than a customer service advocate.
   
   
3. The dark horse for IT support on campus would be an outsourced vendor. A number of large organizations have outsourced the customer support function to one of the large service providers. It is clear that an outsourced customer support contract would provide a university with a large number of scenarios that would meet the different needs of individual colleges. An outsourced vendor with clear service level agreements would ensure a defined level of service is achieved. The greatest difficulty with an outsourced relationship will be to get buy-in from all vested user communities. I fully expect individual colleges to establish outsourced vendor relationships and if successful could become the central model of support.

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.

The Cloud and Libraries

Most libraries, including university libraries, typically offer at least a few computers available for use by the general public. In the university library, the purpose of these machines is primarily to provide the general public with access to the library catalog, subscription databases, and in the case of federal depository libraries, government information. For obvious reasons these public machines are pretty locked down, and they generally offer few applications beyond a web browser and perhaps word processing software. Some libraries have moved toward thin client solutions, but many still manage expensive desktops which barely make use of the 80GB or more hard drives. Utilizing cloud technologies could potentially make these machines easier to manage and less costly. Read more on the ALA TechSource blog.

The Tower and the Cloud

In addition to The Big Switch, The Tower and the Cloud is another must-read for those interested in the effects of cloud computing on IT as we know it. The Tower and the Cloud is a collection of essays focused specifically on higher education and how these technologies will impact higher education institutions and the IT organization. Librarians, CIOs, faculty, and other experts describe the role of technology in the higher education enterprise and predict where we are headed in the future.

The entire volume is available online.

Translational Technologies on the Academic Front

Historically, academic computing at universities has basked in the shadow of academic freedom. This implies that issues related to supporting the faculty and student has been open to an unstructured environment. It is often possible to find multiple technologies deployed to support a single campus-wide need...an example would be course management systems like Blackboard or Moodle. Often you will find multiple course management systems at a university. The diversity has led to innovation that is often not evident in other areas of the campus IT department. Going forward it appears the instructional areas of information technology will need to become standardized. This does not mean the innovation will be absent, but does imply local control will possibly give way to “cloud applications.” I predict the course management vendors will begin to migrate applications to the “cloud” to ensure a place in the marketplace. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft to offer a course management system to compliment the “Live” services it is promoting to the higher education world. I would expect the other leading vendors to respond aggressively. Do not be surprised to find you will have alternatives to campus-based solutions by 2010.

The good news is the cloud solutions will remove the many “religious wars” that take place today on whose application is the best and focus attention on developing course content. The migration to the cloud will also encourage many campus IT departments to address authentication and authorization using directory federation. Simply put, campus IT staff will be responsible for ensuring its student and faculty are legitimate, and the course management vendor will be able to offer virtual meeting services between higher education institutions. I have high expectations that this service will offer faculty solutions that will enhance their course materials at a very reasonable cost the university. This concept has been maturing in the social networking world and will be easily portable to the academic community.

Next, consumerization of IT will influence campus technology solutions in instructional computing. Campus IT will have to recognize its ability to “tell” users what to use to login is limited. The user will vote with their pocketbook on what device they want to use to access campus applications, some will use a laptop, others will want to use an iPhone, and many will want to use the computer in the home or office. Bottom line is the campus IT department will need to know what the end-user is using and ensure the campus applications will work with that device. The cloud vendors will offer the faculty and students this flexibility. We can be sure the device of choice is going to become increasingly mobile. Over the next 24 months faculty and students are going to migrate to the “smartphone” or “netbook.” The campus IT support organization will need to react to the needs of the user community. Good news is the faculty or student is going to pay for the mobile device, the bad news is the campus must be nimble and able to react to the needs of its community.

The changes coming to instructional computing will be positive to the university. Campus IT departments that are customer embracing will have little difficulty adapting to the emerging environment. Universities that resist the change will find the faculty and students will become frustrated and will use resources offered off campus when possible. The truth is the user community will be strongly influencing IT’s decision and that is good.

Top 5 Issues for Presidents and CAOs in 2009

The top five translational technology issues Presidents and Chief Academic Officers will pay attention to in 2009:

1. Funding issues will top the list for many reasons, the greatest being all revenue sources will be at their lowest point in years and relief is not in sight. State funding is being slashed, endowments are low, and student financial aid is problematic. The funding issues will cause the Office of the President to consider reducing expenses in all areas; one area of interest will be technology. A new funding model will emerge.

2. Chief Information Officers will be asked to consider new ways of doing business. Many universities will follow the University of Washington and sharply cut technology development budgets expecting the CIO to find the resources needed in the Web 2.0 world rather than developing specialty software applications on campus.

3. Presidents (CAOs) will finally ask hard questions about the university technology organization. Duplication of staff will be of primary interest. The questions will be a result of financial pressures, but will also have momentum from projects other universities are undertaking. An example of this will be the question: “Why are we still buying hardware and software to provide student email?”

4. Presidents (CAOs) will evaluate where the CIO should report in the organization. In recent years the CIO has moved from the President’s cabinet to the Chief Financial Officer or the Provost. The trend will not subside and a greater number of CIOs will not report directly to the President.

5. Consumerization of the campus technology infrastructure will become important as students and faculty request equipment such as the iPhone to be connected to the university's administrative and academic applications . CIOs will be expected to address integration of consumer products into the campus enterprise architecture.

The book that started it all

My interest in cloud computing began after reading Nicholas Carr's book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. Doyle had suggested it to me and was so impressed with the book that he gave copies to his staff. We had several lively discussions about the book which ultimately led us to where we are now, writing and presenting on how the cloud will change higher education IT as we know it.

If you haven't read Carr's book yet, we encourage you to do so. Carr draws a thoughtful, carefully constructed analogy between the evolution of the power utility and the future of computing. The idea of computing as a utility is not new, and especially not now, a year after the book was published, but it makes for very interesting reading. What I find particularly compelling is covered in the second half of the book--the economic and social impact of cloud computing, i.e. what will this all mean for us?

That will be one of the main topics of discussion on this blog--stay tuned.

What is Translational Technology?

As a result of translational technologies, colleges and universities are at the precipice of change in technology deployment. Translational technology is the perfect blend of three organizational shifts in deploying technology to the university community. The first change is the consumerization of technology deployment to all segments of the IT community. The second change is increasingly receiving the attention of early technology adopters and can best be defined by the term “cloud computing.” The final organizational change is the shift of technology decision-making away from the IT department, a result of the current financial markets and the eventual death of traditional IT funding sources.

Many university IT organizations might have managed their way through one or two of the above changes but will be challenged to overcome the concurrent momentum from the total environmental shift. Most IT departments will oppose these changes and will grasp the power found in past campus IT models. Tomorrow’s leaders are already embracing the change and are welcoming the transition that ultimately results in a customer friendly and organizationally relevant technology leader.

This blog will discuss these and other changes on campus as well as how to successfully transition into the support organization of the future. You'll learn more about how we got here--funding models, Web 2.0 applications, millennial culture--as well as where we're headed--IT as service provider, distributed customer support, trends in unified communications, cloud-based services, new university partnerships, and more. We'll describe how to get away from "mother-may-I" IT and move into a more open, user-embracing environment. We'll post examples, best practices, suggested reading, and commentary on navigating this shift in IT culture. Join us on this journey into the new era of IT.