Context
May 12th, 2010 | Published in Uncategorized | 3 Comments
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.
May 12th, 2010 at 10:15 am (#)
I was with you until the last sentence. I’m not sure I see that we need “first-class IT services” — we need good enough IT services to be a university of the first class. The two may not be synonymous. Do we need “first class” accounting applications to be a first-class university? Or only “good enough” accounting applications?
It would be nice to think so — its much more motivating to try to be “first-class” than to be “adequate” — but I’m not sure I see it, in theory or in behavior.
May 12th, 2010 at 1:21 pm (#)
I probably overdid it with “first-class”, but it does depend on just what that means to you. For example, my idea of a “first-class” payroll system is one where everyone gets paid the correct amount on time. That’s also my idea of an adequate payroll system. In other words, what we should provide is “IT services that do their job well.”
(I think we also need a high standard for public-facing applications. Perceptions do matter.)
May 12th, 2010 at 3:09 pm (#)
I don’t disagree with that. Just to give an example of what I was thinking: a “first-class” application might handle all the edge cases well, whereas a “good enough” application might identify difficult cases and leave them to somehow be handled manually, on the basis that that the work to automate them would not be paid back by the savings on uncommon cases.
Another, perhaps silly example: A really first-class application that took URLs as input might not have arbitrary limits on something like URL length. But a “good enough” application might, if the universe of likely URLs was well known and there were workarounds akin to tinyurl for the possibility that one wouldn’t fit. The latter is obviously not the best case, but if your technology can’t handle open-ended lengths… you could probably live with it. (We have.)