The sourcing of IT systems and services takes many shapes in higher education. Campus central IT organizations are increasingly responsible for the administration of enterprise systems and for the consolidation of operations into a single data center. Specialized academic and administrative systems may be run by local IT departments. In addition,…

IT leaders today must not only provide but also decide: which tools and services should they continue to supply, which are better delivered by others, and perhaps most critically, which methods from among the bewildering array of alternative sourcing strategies will best serve their faculty, staff, and students. In 2009, the EDUCAUSE Center for…

Mobile use of the Internet is on target to surpass fixed use by 2014. Three-fourths of all college/university students have purchased or intend to purchase an Internet-enabled handheld device within the next year. The smartphone market is changing almost monthly. Attempting to manage even just one or a few "devices" is becoming a lost…

On February 9 and 10, 2010, fifty leaders from colleges, universities, corporations, professional associations, and state networks met in Tempe, Arizona, to discuss cloud computing and the impending shift in the mix of where infrastructure, applications, and services are sourced. This group identified a set of actions that colleges and…

Increasingly, IT organizations will move from providing IT services locally to becoming an integrator of IT services--some provided locally and others provided outside the institution. As a result, institutions must immediately begin to plan for shared services and must understand the essential role that identity management and trust services play…

Some of the most significant changes in information technology are those that have given the individual user greater power to choose. The first of these changes was the development of the personal computer. The PC liberated the individual user from the limitations of the mainframe and minicomputers and from the rules and regulations of centralized…

The concept of today's cloud computing may date back to 1961, when John McCarthy, retired Stanford professor and Turing Award winner, delivered a speech at MIT's Centennial. In that speech, he predicted that in the future, computing would become a "public utility." Yet for colleges and universities, the recent growth of pervasive, very high speed…

Defines middleware, often called the "glue" that makes the elements of the cyberinfrastructure work together. Discusses how the National Science Foundation (NSF) Middleware Initiative (NMI) is consolidating expertise, software, and technology to address the critical and ubiquitous middleware issues facing research and education today.…

Over the last ten years, the use of the Internet has moved from a small number of specialists to the population at large, including all ages and social groups. More recently, for those with access to computers and broadband, the Internet has become almost ubiquitous, with people using it at work, on the move, and for all sorts of leisure and…

This article begins with a recapitulation of some well-known technology trends that make current platforms so exciting. Leveraging this technology into highly desirable forms of learning is then briefly discussed. This is followed by an examination of an IT-oriented education research agenda prepared by a consortium called the Learning Federation…

College and university administrators everywhere are struggling with the challenges of trying to "do more with less" in terms of balancing mandates and resources. The Internet has enabled new approaches for teaching and learning, vast interinstitutional collaborations in humanities and scientific research, and a renewed focus on the…

Today, at the end of 2007, there are evident consolidations in wireless, storage, and virtualization and the path forward seems clearer now than previously. Trends from last year continue strongly, particularly Web 2.0 and the shift to user-driven environments and Internet sites where significant data and video processing is available to those…