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Deferred Maintenance—What Does It Mean for IT?

5/21/2003

Other examples abound: the University of Wisconsin has just decided not to renew its licenses for Microsoft products (see IT News: "U. Wisconsin to Stop Licensing of Microsoft Products"). And the Harvard Crimson reported an important network went down just before final exams (see IT News: "Network Crash Near Finals Startles Harvard Students"). What if that is your campus next fall, and it stays down, and data is lost? Who's going to care that you've been short-staffed since April?

All of these changes are forms of what could be viewed as deferred maintenance of campus IT and we believe the most forward-thinking IT departments are hard at work trying to meet short term budget constraints while not "eating [the] seed corn."

That's a line from a University Web Developer forum participant who wrote that, "In traditional agricultural societies, one failed harvest was bad. Two years in a row meant you had to sow your seed corn, and your back was against the wall. People went hungry. Three bad years meant famine. It's been two bad years in a row."

Every campus IT department should realize that not renewing a license, or not building a system that students or faculty are anticipating, or temporarily not filling a staff or managerial position are all forms of deferred maintenance. But in the IT world, it's not quite as easy to predict how long you can safely wait before the roof starts to leak.


About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Deferred Maintenance—What Does It Mean for IT?," Campus Technology, 5/21/2003, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=38697

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