8/4/2009 10:53:39 AM

Hi Ron -

That's a great article.  As someone whose University employment has largely centered around major administrative computing initiatives, I keenly appreciate the dilemma that Kretzman articulates - how to convey a sense of the weight and urgency of IT infrastructure expenditures to a general audience for whom technical concepts are often dimly understood.  At a public institution like ours, there's the added need to justify these expenditures in terms of value-added to the taxpayers and legislators - which is, to put it mildly, an up-hill battle.  Add to that the stresses of the current economy and the attitudes generated by stagnating salaries and state-mandated furloughs, and you can understand why many would understandably gravitate to the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' mentality.

That this attitude is definitionally unsustainable is, of course, the whole point.

My personal 'roof project' would be training / knowledge transfer.  And here I would simply reference the figure I've often heard quoted that approximately 40% of the Unversity's workforce is at or past the age where they can retire.  That's an unprecedented amount of the University's institutional knowledge that's about to walk out the door; concomitant with that is the realization that we will need to on-board an equally-unprecedented number of new faculty and staff.  I think that this will be one of the key challenges we face as an organization in the next half-decade, and our success will largely be measured by the extent to which we can let go of (shall we say) sub-optimal aspects of our institutional culture while at the same time preserving that which has made the University of Wisconsin excellent and unique.

Gareth Green