Painting the Clouds: Outsourcing Ourselves!

The writer is writing of information technology administrators, but . . . can you see parallels in other parts of the institution?

One of the great ironies for those of us in higher education information technology is that, in the coming years, doing the best-possible job for our institutions will mean finding the optimal ways to replace our functions with outside services. In other words, a critical part of our job will be to outsource ourselves as effectively as possible.

The reasons behind this new job responsibility are several developments that people may already be weary (and perhaps wary) of reading about: cloud computing, outsourcing, software as a service (with the cute acronym SaaS, which sounds oddly Swedish to me). Sometimes writers will give that usual list and finish it off with “and other things,” without venturing a guess as to what the other things might be. In any case, what this comes down to is that much of what the current IT organization does for its institution will be performed by external entities in the future.