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IT in Higher Education: There Must Be a Better Way
A Perspective on Collaboration on the Evolution of Open Source in Higher Education to Provide the Next Generation of Digital Needs for the Campus
Tony Holderith, Vice President of Business Development, Unicon
Volume 2, No. 1
Published October 4, 2005
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Introduction
This paper presents ideas on how higher education might organize itself to become more efficient in filling the digital needs of the campus. The focus is not on the technology itself. Instead, it focuses on how the campus and technology fits together, how to manage its evolution and the structural changes the CIO will have to deal with to gain the benefits. The need for community agreement and the important role of open source run through this paper as a theme.
Today the typical campus maintains digital systems for learning, financials, content and community. These systems are an amalgam of software from vendors, in-house developers and open source. Generally, these systems do not work well together, often repeating security access and integration methods that ought to be done only once. With the advent of new, better internet standards and methods, it is time to consider a new approach.
Just as factories and automation revolutionized the manufacturing industry, they will do the same for software. Once manufacturers started leveraging machines and automating processes, efficiencies were captured, product quality increased, labor costs declined, and profits increased
A typical institution has as many 50 integration points to maintain. Building point-to-point solutions for these integration points is costly. Supporting them, since each tends to be unique, is also costly. This paper addresses emerging technologies that will reduce these costs by applying a single consistent and uniform approach instead of solving the same problem over and over and over again.
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