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Opinion
A Utility Model or Innovation in IT?
10/10/2006
So somewhere along the way, people began thinking of IT not as a source of remarkable new ideas and opportunities, but rather as a simple utility. The sad fact is that utilities, for all their importance, lack pizzazz. And pizzazz is a concept that we ignore at our peril.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not just talking about creating excitement around something that’s actually fairly pedestrian. If I were interested in doing that, I’d get a marketing job at a breakfast cereal company. “Pizzazz,” as I am using it, is what you get when you do something really new…something that delivers obvious, measurable value to the institution.
Here’s a pizzazz primer:
Delivering e-mail with attachments? Zero pizzazz. Automatically separating the attachments and dropping them into Web-accessible storage where they can be accessed or revised by all the correspondents, complete with version control? Mucho pizzazz!
Deploying a bunch of PCs into student labs? Lack of pizzazz. Deploying a bunch of diskless thin clients into student labs, eliminating the cost and trouble of keeping all those PCs free of malware? Lots of pizzazz!
When we start to think of ourselves as utility providers, we lose sight of the very thing with the power to reignite the passion our users have for technology (and, by extension, for us): innovation. Sure, we can provide reliable systems all day long. Forgive my saying so, but that’s too easy. You do not want your provost to look at your budget the way you look at your electric bill. As IT professionals, we are uniquely qualified to design novel and creative ways for the institution to instruct, investigate, cut expenses, or attract donors. By creating such opportunities for the campus, innovation leads to a virtuous cycle of bigger budgets, greater resources, and more innovation. And that, my friends, has got pizzazz.
E. Scott Menter is the director of infrastructure services, Network and Academic Computing Services at the University of California-Irvine.
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