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IT from the Ground Up

8/23/2005

What are the advantages and challenges in working on technology infrastructure planning from the ground up? The advantage is: We have no legacy. The challenge is: We have no legacy. We have to put up things that will work, day one; we don’t have existing systems to fall back on. So, the challenge is to put in systems that are as close to state-of-the-art as we can get, without pushing it so far that we might put in something that d'esn’t work. And we have to build services that will scale to 25,000 students, though without the resources [yet] of a 25,000-student university.

And the main advantage of working from the ground up? We can choose the best systems—even those developed at other institutions that can’t deploy them themselves because they have different divisions and schools each running their own services. We can take the best practices and deploy them campuswide.

After the opening of your new campus in a few days, how will your focus change? We’ll continue to build out services, make them more complete, and add in new technologies. The next two interesting challenges will be unified communications—including VoIP—and digital video. We’ll move into a completely network-based communications infrastructure with new functionality, and integration of video, voice, e-mail, conferencing, directories, and data that can be passed among all sorts of wireless devices. We’re assuming that will all be happening, and in the next two or three years, we’ll see software that’s going to make it really interesting.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Rich Kogut joined UC Merced as CIO in 2002 to help build the nation's first new research university to debut in the 21st century. Kogut brings more than 35 years experience in IT to the process, including 10 years with Compagnie IBM in Paris, and long appointments at Brown (RI) and Georgetown (DC) universities.

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Mary Grush, "IT from the Ground Up," Campus Technology, 8/23/2005, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=40461

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