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Central organizations are overwhelmed by demand
Faculty and administrators on our campuses increasingly perceive information technology to be critical to their work, and they want central technology organizations to promptly meet their changing expectations. At the University of Virginia, for example, demand for dial-in lines has increased by more than 100 percent each of the last two years, as have calls to the help desk, network traffic, and requests for UNIX accounts for Web pages. Administrators are demanding electronic forms and information warehouses; we need to replace our legacy systems with modern client/server integrated applications. Faculty need support in introducing technology into their classes; they want properly designed and equipped classroom facilities in which to work. Record numbers of students bring computers to campus, and they want Ethernet cards installed and configured as soon as they arrive. When Internet performance decreased last spring, research faculty demanded improvements in this fundamental resource for their work. Budgets have not increased significantly for the past five years at the University, nor has the number of people to respond to these exploding needs. Many of these problems are common at other campuses, and they are beyond the ability of a single institution to resolve.
Non-linear, exponential growth is not a new phenomenon in information technology. The basic elements driving demand for services, however, provide insight into why today's demand growth curve is so precipitous.
More customers need more services
A decade ago, fewer than 20 percent of our faculty, staff, and students were active consumers of technology services and support. Today, almost all of them are, at least to some degree. Ten years ago, a handful of the campus population was interested in dial-in access. Today, a typical student package includes accounts for e-mail, dial-in, the World Wide Web, and networked file and print services. The educational potential of the Web alone has unleashed a firestorm of support demands, not to mention escalating printing costs in public labs.
Per capita demand for services has increased
Users used to work for months to generate a few tens of thousands of bytes of information. When they moved that information across the network, a few kilobits per second of bandwidth delivered adequate service. Today, a user with a scanner can generate hundreds of megabytes per hour. When a thousand people attempt to view those electronic images via the Web, even 100-Mbps networks are stressed. In forty hours of instruction per semester, we can light the spark that will make a student want to use information technology resources and services forty hours a week to write papers, run lab simulations, and interact with instructors.
New users are mainstream
The factor that has most dramatically escalated the demand for support is the new breed of user. Two decades ago, our users were a hardy group, knowledgeable about and seriously interested in computing. They were tolerant of system idiosyncrasies and failures. Adequate support meant posting signs in the computer center with examples of the control cards users needed in order to run different kinds of jobs. We wrote documentation and they had the motivation and expertise to decipher it. Recent users of information technology are often not particularly interested in the technology itself, and they are willing to spend only minimal time and effort to learn to use it. How we support the last 20 percent of the population that we are bringing into the technology environment is very different from the way we supported the early adopters. New users want "complete products."2
Multivendor, distributed technology requires high-level support
The support burden derives from the increased complexity of desktop applications themselves, and, increasingly, from how those applications interconnect. A typical end-user application today might involve a desktop computer, a departmental network and server, the campus network, and a mainframe information source. The end-to-end information path involves multiple systems and several administrative units. New technologies, such as object linking and embedding, significantly increase the complexity and interdependencies among applications. Users are not satisfied with accessing and manipulating only numbers and text. They expect images, sounds, and full-motion video. Users also demand transparent interoperability between applications, regardless of the operating system or vendor. Two systems that work just fine by themselves can develop problems when interconnected. The number of potential problems increases multiplicatively as more and more heterogeneous components are added to the mix. Simply moving a linked file into a different subdirectory can break applications campuswide. Common user applications, such as library bibliography access, pass through technologies managed and controlled by different administrative units. Thus we must deal not only with technical interactivity, but also cultural and administrative diversity.
Funding models are inappropriate
Many of our institutions are still operating using library models of providing "free" computing resources. This model was probably appropriate when the computer was a fixed-cost mainframe and we were trying to promote use of the network. Now that the value of information technology is well established, many of us still have not shifted into other economic models that will help to better manage demand. Outmoded models cause significant problems, including making it difficult for users to match costs and benefits, promoting excessive consumption of resources, and contributing to the support crisis we are experiencing.
Endnote:
2Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (New York: HarperBusiness, 1991).
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