Rob Thompson

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Universities and Email Outsourcing

Working in higher education, it constantly surprises me how IT department across the country are so willing to adopt others technology as opposed to innovating themselves. Watching this thread at http://www.insidehighered.com/ it is apparent that there is a disconnect between the IT legs of Universities and the research mission of the same institutions.

With respect to concerns about control over their own IT resources at Arizona Tech:

.."As they weigh the benefits of third-party e-mail services, they must also consider the consequences of moving students’ and faculty members’ personal data to off-campus servers over which they have no control. Often, these concerns are accompanied by institutional opposition by employees who have long been invested in the existing messaging framework.

Sannier’s team had the same concerns, but he eventually overcame them: “I look at my army — I certainly have a formidable force, they’re sharp characters, but ... compared to Google’s army? I have a police force, and they have the United States Marines.”

I know that some will say that email is no longer a field rich for innovation and that email needs to be treated as a utility, not a research area and I completely disagree. It is the day-to-day struggle in your own sandbox that leads to innovation. Email is not set in stone. It will change drastically or completely disappear in the not so distant future. The new email won't have spam issues, it will have authentication mechanisms, delivery guarantees and more. All of this needs to be tested and developed and Universities have traditionally been a part of where some of this happens.

Where does outsourcing end? If IT functions at Universities become complete commodities and the only role of IT department at Universities now become, as Saniers writes in the article, "..agents of value-added applications...", where does that leave room for innovation at the institution itself?

We are very lucky at my University as these questions have been brought to the fore-front. At other institutions it seems as if they have adopted outsourcing as a way to solve short-term frustrations over here-and-now stuff like quotas and glitz, completely ignoring their own mainstay and the reasons why students flock to these same institutions.

In my opinion, the very essence of this debate is what separates the Universities who strive to be a community colleges or a technical school and those schools who hold their research mission close.

11/28/2007 10:15am

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