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Can Campus IT Outsource to Web 2.0?
4/2/2008
Campuses are starting to outsource e-mail services to popular Web 2.0 mail services such as Hotmail (the pioneer), or to gMail, Yahoo Mail, or others. (See http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_web.htm for a thorough guide to and reviews of the various Web mail services.) Will various office functions also be outsourced? How far will outsourcing to the Web go?Web 2.0 is touted as the new "platform." You launch your work on the Web, communicate, collaborate, teach, learn, create, research, present, and store your work on the Web. The first thought is, perhaps, how nice it would be to reduce on-campus overhead for managing basic technology services. The second thought is, but how do you then support and manage users in this new "cloud?"
As Andy Powell suggested in his recent post, "Institutions, Web 2.0, and the Shared Service Agenda," http://efoundations.typepad.com/, campus IT organizations might start thinking of themselves not as "service providers," but as "service enablers." In other words, the IT unit should help campus constituencies get the technology services they need, whether on campus or on the Web.
But will a land-rush start? Are we at that tipping point? Will campus central IT units start shifting to services 'out there?'
Probably not. Here are some reasons why the great land rush into Web 2.0 won't happen soon:
- The Innovation Cycle. Campuses innovate over years -- the typical grant project takes 3 years to complete, a book may take at least a year, courses are finalized and scheduled 4 to 8 months in advance -- while the Web innovates at least monthly. Can persistence co-exist with evanescence?
- Turnover. Campuses experience an annual constituent (student) turnover that few large organizations could manage, and so must train large numbers of technology novices continually (yes, new students are mostly novices regarding use of technology for higher education purposes). Therefore campus IT leaders are invested in minimizing the number of applications available and maximizing use of those few applications. Web 2.0, instead, is invested in maximizing the number of applications (market growth), the prospect of which presents IT leaders with a training nightmare.
- Stability. Campuses, because of their long innovation and short turnover cycle, need technology stability at the basic services level. Web 2.0 is beta-land, almost by definition, since many applications depend on users to improve the value of the sites. Stability and perpetual beta-releases seem incompatible.
- Obsolescence. Not only is Web 2.0 beta-land, even those applications that are still building-out are constantly superseded or at least challenged by new start-up technologies, either open source or proprietary. Campus IT leaders think of a year for planning implementation, but after that year, the Web landscape is completely new and the planning process must start over.
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