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.

Shadow-IT and the University: a mixed relationship

This post (in German language) by my colleague Prof. Steffi Haag beautifully illustrates the opportunities that the use of shadow IT can also have in the university.

I often think of shadow IT as reinventing the wheel: chairs running their own Exchange servers, NAS boxes stored under the desk in the secretary's office, meeting rooms converted into PC pools. I don't raise my eyebrows at the expenditure of material resources; each professorship should know for itself what it spends its budget on. The difficult part is usually the human decisions behind it. First of all, investing in shadow IT requires a professor who is convinced that the central IT services of the university do not meet her demands for IT services. Steffi Haag writes about this mindset:

However, our research of more than 85 shadow IT cases shows that the use of shadow IT is often rooted in such restrictive corporate practices themselves. Specifically, when employees face an impasse that prevents them from achieving their goals. Whether it's because they fall on deaf ears in their company when it comes to new digital solutions; whether it's because the use of new digital technologies is limited, such as tablets whose use is restricted to certain apps; or whether it's because companies cannot fully meet the needs of their employees, for example, due to legal requirements such as the GDPR. Whatever creates the sensation of an impasse, shadow IT offers employees a way out.

This kind of sensibility seems to be even more widely represented in the university than elsewhere. This is in the nature of things: precisely the activity in research has, by definition, to do with the search for a way out of a dead end! No wonder that professors also apply this to their IT problems. Many interesting IT solutions have been brought to my attention by individual chairs trying them out -- be it edTech tools or electronic lab books. I am happy to discuss this with professors in the designated presidential or senate committee, have these tools demonstrated to us, and many a time also make procurement decisions.

Sensitivity, however, all too often turns into incomprehension when the commission does not want to follow the idea and the proposer does not find this reasonable. The above list of reasons why a company (or a university) does not use a great new solution does not mention one central point: the lack of budget and personnel. Every Euro we spend on IT does not go directly into research (staff positions) or teaching. Every Euro spent on shadow IT takes away one Euro from publication fees, travel, and human resources. Every staff hour spent on Exchange server maintenance takes a PhD student further away from her dissertation.

Despite all the opportunities, for reasons of efficiency, principally I have to take a side against shadow IT in the university.

Translated with DeepL