Volume 7, March 13, 2000

Decentralized Information Technology Requires Central Coordination!"
by Sarah C. Michalak, Julio C. Facelli, and Clifford J. Drew, CAUSE/EFFECT, Volume 22, Number 4, 1999, p. 42

"When IT [information technology] services become fundamental to the daily operation of the university, that is, when they become the equivalent of basic utilities, they require centralized coordination to attain maximum reliability and universal equity of access." (p. 42) "There may be a high level of departmental ownership and reluctance to relinquish control despite the fact that further growth and development of these resources may well depend upon support extended by the institution as a whole." (p. 42) "Provision of reliable IT services must assume as never before a central role in the institutional infrastructure, and IT must remain central to the planning, budgeting, and policy development of the chief academic officer, deans, and chairs." (p. 43)

To provide effective IT services, the institution must fulfill the real and perceived needs of individual users to the greatest degree possible.""(p. 43) "The proximity to and accessibility of IT personnel is another important factor in the perceived responsiveness of distributed environments." (p. 43) "Over time very large systems accumulate significant in-house adaptations to meet real or perceived institutional needs."(p. 43)

"We believe that the difficulty is not with the distributed environment itself, but with uneven quality of implementation and with the common misconception that the benefits of natural evolution will themselves outweigh accompanying difficult technical and organizational problems."(p. 43) "An effective distributed environment is responsive to user needs and is designed from the user’s perspective. Effective IT service requires clear definition of the services to be centrally provided and/or coordinated and those which must be controlled and directed locally. This definition must take place at the highest possible level in the institution and should include mechanisms to enforce accountability of the units providing central services." (p. 44) "To encourage coordination, staff resources and central subsidies should be allocated in a strategic fashion during the budget process." (p. 44)

"In highly decentralized environments there may be no central administrator making institutional decisions or informing administrative leaders about how computing fits into overall university strategies." (p. 44) "To create a reasonable balance between central control and local initiative, it is imperative that university administrations consider central IT units as complementary and supporting agents of the academic mission, not as their competitors." (p. 44)

"Incorporating accountability for service quality requires a transformational change in the prevailing culture." (p. 44) "It is often viewed as easier to create another unit to perform a given function than it is to resolve a performance problem in an existing unit." (p. 44) "On an institution-wide basis duplicative services are confusing to users (especially students), are excessively expensive, and are unreliable." (p. 45)

"The shortage of IT professionals will continue for many years." (p. 45) "Universities will have to compete by using their largest source of talent—students." (p. 45)

"Security is an inherent central function. There is no such thing as distributed security because the security of a multi-element system is only as strong as its weakest link." (p. 46) "Visible central coordination of information policy and enforcement communicates to the internal and external communities that IT will be managed responsibly and for the general good." (p. 46)

"One of the most promising tools to mitigate budget increases in IT is to introduce economies of scale by standardizing hardware, software, and support services." (p. 46) "A properly planned and conducted information campaign must then be accompanied by excellence in the execution of the plan and through appropriate financial incentives." (p. 47)