The Commodization of the University IT: does IT matter?

We usually think of a university as a geographic place, with buildings on a campus where knowledge is created, shared, and taught. Such a place needs infrastructure: computer networks, WLAN access points, and servers. Really? Whether researchers need to work in a geographic location is likely to be questioned quite a bit, at the latest after the Covid pandemic. Individual disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, almost wholly retreated to the home office, and for many universities, it takes work to bring them back to campus for face-to-face teaching.

So is returning to the University necessary for research disciplines that don't use equipment or labs? Well, yes, shout the students! Ahem, no, say those researchers who had positive experiences lecturing over Zoom, sharing materials with Moodle, and organizing stuff using Teams and OneDrive. If the students can not convince them to return, is there an argument for conducting research on-premise?

Not likely. Scientists are tasked with gaining and disseminating new knowledge through research and publications. Most publications are co-authored with other researchers, preferably at another university. Thus, authors co-edit the research work on commonly available platforms: M365, Google Docs, and Github. Why? Because it does not require to access proprietary infrastructure in another university, usually requiring cumbersome remote access procedures, VPNs, and temporary guest logins. It is just easier to use commonly available, commercial cloud-based systems.

Does it make sense for a university to provide digital resources to individual researchers? The university app, where the canteen plan is the most used feature; the costly lab management software that only two research groups use; the ample data space on university servers, where nobody ever deletes obsolete files? Depending on the scientist and the discipline, providing exclusive hardware and software can be very complex and costly, and the "return on investment" (ROI) for the particular university is questionable.

University IT is on a clear path from being a unique, competitive resource to a commodity infrastructure. Nicholas G. Carr started this discussion for other sectors, but it took some time to reach higher education. Ultimately, digital transformation may thus result in a maximum internet connection on campus so scientists can share their data and texts using digital infrastructure from a commercial cloud or a supercomputing center. Of course, the university would have to pay annual fees for access to the cloud or the data center; but they would save investment in buildings,  energy resources, compute servers, and data servers. The new problems that this creates, are subject to another blog post.