Thimbles & Care

Sometimes while in the middle of big changes or decisions it’s easy to forget the big picture, so today I want to step back for a minute and look at the context of our technology decisions.

The mission of The University of Texas at Austin is to achieve excellence in the interrelated areas of undergraduate education, graduate education, research and public service.

This is the official mission statement of the University. Notice that it doesn’t say anything at all about information technologies. If the University could run without IT, it should, because that’s not what the University is about.

However, the University can’t run efficiently without IT. Students must be registered and their grades recorded, faculty and staff must be paid, supplies must be purchased—performing these and many other necessary activities without IT would impose a prohibitively high drain on the University’s resources.

If we truly want to have a university “of the first class,” we need a quality administrative IT infrastructure. The University will not be able to attract and retain top faculty and students as effectively if they are forced to deal with slow, buggy, or difficult to use administrative applications. Costs to the University will rise if staff are forced to spend excessive time or effort working with or even circumventing poorly designed applications.

The problem we’re trying to solve is to provide first-class IT services without consuming so much of the University’s resources that it detracts from fulfilling the University’s core mission.