What could be the point?

I recently gave a presentation at the EDUCAUSE annual conference with colleagues from Brown, Johns Hopkins, and UNC-Charlotte on supporting digital scholarship services. The presentation itself was a rewarding experience, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have worked with such knowledgeable and driven colleagues. As someone who mostly advocates for such services rather than provide them directly, I needed to learn a lot to catch up in this area.

Some hours after the event, A colleague from another Big Ten university who had attended our session wrote to me, and he said possibly the most intriguing thing I heard during the conference. Like me, he heads technology services for a college within the larger university, and has been working every effectively to shift scalable commodity services to the central IT organization. He said (I'm paraphrasing), "What if digital scholarship was the primary idea of what we do at the college level, rather than a component of our services?" We talked about it briefly the next day, though we were both mostly trying to wake up, it being 6:30am according to our Central time zone-adjusted selves.

The idea has certainly set my mind going on this. We've shed a lot of our hardware-based infrastructure, and are already considering ways to reduce even our virtual servers to a minimum number as we adopt cloud services for file sync/sharing, virtual desktops, and applications of all kinds. So what if we mostly abandoned the traditional IT philosophy of a standard service catalog and adopted digital scholarship as the focus? Our organizing principle then becomes about supporting as many edge cases as possible, knowing each faculty member or lab represents an edge case. Underneath, we need a set of sustainable platforms to ensure deep technical expertise on our part and increased longevity for the projects built on those platforms. We need to continue to foster partnerships with other groups in this space, like central IT and the University Library, and build ever stronger relationships with our faculty and students. We need to learn quite a lot about digital scholarship and the disciplines we enable. Perhaps most importantly, we need to embrace the primacy of the end-user experience as our focal point rather than consider it the lowest rung of our services and capabilities.

I'm not yet sure how this could work. In fact, this seems like a pretty scary proposition - we've never done anything like this and don't have the skills and experiences already built into the team fabric. But the potential for transformation seems so high that we have to at least try it on and see how it fits. More to come.