Thimbles & Care

The world’s oldest working original digital computer

Built in 1951 for Britain’s nuclear industry, it was in use through the early 1970’s and after restoration was rebooted yesterday. More at The Register.

A couple of words I don’t recall hearing at the ASMP meeting were “excellence” and “quality”, and that’s unfortunate. If the University is to truly be “of the first class” it should have administrative IT of the first class as well.

Now, some people hear “high quality” or “first class” and think “luxury”, but that’s not what this is about. We don’t need IT systems with lots of chrome or bells and whistles. Instead, we need systems that do their jobs correctly and efficiently, that require minimal maintenance and upkeep, and that make the people who use them more productive. Systems like this may cost more up front, but that additional cost will be more than covered by savings elsewhere.

When I started working here, our goal was to use information technology to make the University a better place to work, to learn, and to do research. Today it often feels like we’re just trying to keep things running. Can we go back to trying for first class IT?

I heard the word “commodity” used several times at the ASMP meeting last week. The implied message seemed to be that the University should always go with a commodity solution when one is available. Hopefully it won’t really be “always”. Big enterprises don’t buy enterprise-class hardware and software just because they can afford to and are too dumb to figure out that a commodity solution is available; there usually is some additional value that the enterprise solution provides. Since the University is an enterprise-scale organization, we will need enterprise class solutions to some of our problems.