A couple of weeks ago I read a really interesting article by Jon Stokes in Ars Technica titled IT consumerization and the future of work where he talked about the impact that consumer IT services are having in the corporate enterprise IT world.
I posted a comment on the article noting how those same forces are having large effects in higher-education IT, and last week we had a chance to chat on the phone about it – it was a lively and highly enjoyable conversation. Now Jon’s published that conversation in Ars Technica.
There’s a related article that Trent Batson from MIT wrote in Campus Technology titled The Next Phase For Academic Computing. Trent talks about the impacts and uses of cloud-based Web applications can support scholarly work and how central IT units in higher-ed institutions are not always good at supporting innovation. While I’m not sure that I agree with his conclusion that academic technology needs a separate organization because of that (I think it’s likely to be the case that any central organization within a large institution will have similar difficulties in leading innovation, which will always come from the edges), it’s worth reading the two articles together for a picture of some of the thinking around the impact of consumer-based IT in our universe.
