Isn't this a development of the Universities early policies? I was at a technology meeting last month where the adoption of services was discussed and the thrust of it was that the individual colleges were not given a central solution, but had to come up with their own. In this case it is unfair to point the finger at the individual colleges and call it waste when in fact it is survival, and now that we have systems that we like to use the specter of wasting taxpayer dollars to have us throw out as system we were forced to develop on our own and to ditch the people who helped us do this?
That seems equally unfair. Central services are one thing, but to demand a one size fits all solution in the name of efficiency after we have something that a) we like and b) that we had to do for survival is patently unfair.
When you are low on money where do you make cuts then? It seems to me that when you have duplicate providers of a service (the university computer center AND the individual colleges and other organizational units) you eliminate redundancy BEFORE you eliminate vital services and BEFORE you ask students to pay a higher fee. In my opinion, if the problem is a lack of customer service or resources your can greatly improve quality of service at the core by reassigning just a few of the staff and resources you have deployed at the colleges (etc.) to work in the computer center and then you will still have a surplus of staff and services to redeploy elsewhere to meet unmet needs. Remember, this is just E-mail NOT some sort of unique software package. E-mail is a utility we all share, like power and telephone service. Just because we were wasteful before does not mean we need to continue wasting, in my opinion.
If it were just the case of email and if the cost were minimal and if the interruption of services to faculty were minimum then I would be inclined to agree with you. I do not think it is that simple, and I think it is wrong to imply that it is. A long term plan to switch the colleges over might well be effective but the people maintaining the servers in these areas have often taken on other services / servers / functions.
Have you considered that a poorly implemented switchover would cost money?
We are talking E-mail here, not rocket science. E-mail is standardized to the point of being almost a utility, like phone dial tone. You set the old E-mail addresses to forward to the campus E-mail servers, put a tiny fraction of what we spend on redundant systems to improving customer service and you are done. Taxpayers save money and/or students get a broader range of services!
I have been working in IT for 23 years.
Commenting by HaloScan
