This might be long. Let’s start with a quote from an article in the Economist linked by Tim Bray:

“I hate programmers,” replies this dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur. “They only cause trouble.”

The article, by the way, is about the appalling state of IT at major banks, with some “buy vs. build” discussion. Anyway, since I’ve been saying my job is to cause trouble for quite a while, here I go again.

We can identify three basic paths the University could follow in moving to “open systems”:

1. Convert to commercial products like Peoplesoft or Banner and stop developing our own administrative applications.
2. Convert to shared source applications like Kuali and Sempai and collaborate on application development with those communities
3. Select new development tools (programming languages, databases, etc.) and continue to develop UT-specific applications.

There are variations within these plans—especially the last one—but I think any roadmap we could come up with fits into one of these three categories. So what criteria should we use to pick one?

The most probable first response would be to ask which one costs the least, but that won’t really work. I expect that whatever path we choose the transition will take five to fifteen years and cost five to fifteen million dollars. (I picked those numbers based on the Migration Assessment Software AG did for us; anything we do will likely take about the same amount of time and cost about the same amount of money.) The uncertainties in predicting what the costs will be are much greater than the differences, so that can’t really be used to differentiate between the options.

At this point you may be saying, “Wait, the Mainframe Migration Assessment was rejected by the BSC because it didn’t provide any cost savings, and now you’re saying that’s going to be true whatever we do? Then why should we do anything at all different?” Well, for the kind of migration that Software AG assessed the only conceivable benefit was lowered costs, so when those weren’t forthcoming it was correctly rejected. But these other paths might have other benefits, and what I’m trying to argue here is that we should be looking at those other benefits to make the decision.

But before we move on from cost, one of the things missing from this discussion is a consideration of non-IT costs. To really make a cost-based decision we need to include how IT decisions (or lack of decisions) impose costs or provide savings to the parts of the University that use our services. After all, we could completely eliminate all administrative IT spending by going back to the kind of labor- and paper-intensive processes that were used before computers were invented, but that certainly wouldn’t save the University any money overall. I had hoped that the BSC and other governance structures that came out of SITAC would provide this kind of big picture thinking, but if it has I haven’t seen it.

Anyway, to finally get to the title of this post, whatever we do it’s going to take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. So whatever decision is made, we’ll need someone at a high management level to champion that decision and push it forward. Otherwise, when we get into the inevitable difficult parts of the transition second-guessing, politics, and other obstacles will derail or delay things and make failure more likely. We’re at an important decision point for the future of the University, and whatever decision is made needs to be pursued whole-heartedly, which can’t happen without forceful leadership from a high level.