How IT Makes the Impossible Possible

By Terry Calhoun

Information technology is so cool because, among other things, once it becomes an infrastructure for something, there are so many ways for that something to be better than it was before. Sometimes it isn’t even evident that it is in fact the existence of information technology than makes something possible when otherwise it would never have happened.

Here in my day job at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), that’s happening again now. This time, it is the society’s ability to implement a nationwide survey regarding the status of crisis management and planning on college and university campuses. I’ll write more about that upcoming, important survey below.

We already conduct an annual survey of “space” on campuses – space detailed by kind of use: classroom, office, etc. The story of how we are able to do that is the story of how the IT infrastructure makes otherwise impossible things possible. In this case, it is through driving down the cost...

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