One of my earliest posts on this blog was about an open letter I wrote in which, among other things, I argued that before doing a mainframe migration assessment we should develop a strategic vision for administrative IT at the University. Well, here we are, ten months later, and we have a migration assessment but no strategic vision. So how are we supposed to evaluate this assessment?

(Although, while it may be just a lack of imagination on my part, I can’t imagine any strategic vision where the kind of migration envisioned in this assessment makes any sense. If I’ve understood the ROI section, even  the least costly scenario has a negative $1 million return on investment after 11 years.)

Anyway, things like hardware and operating systems and even programming languages, databases, and other development tools are, ultimately, tactical issues. Without a vision of what administrative IT will be like—what kinds of services we’ll provide to students, faculty, and staff, and how those services will fit into their workflows and lives—without knowing where we want to go, how can we begin to decide if we have the right tools to get there?

Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)