I found a statement in Twitter is your IT support interesting:

For reasons I won’t go in to, I haven’t been able to get [a WordPress install with the FeedWordPress plugin] done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I’ve spoken to people at others unis and it isn’t isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don’t require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

(For those of you non-British/European readers, VLE are Virtual Learning Environments which are often also called Learning Management Systems on this side of the Atlantic.)

It is true the higher education IT has change with online class systems, but I think that part of the symptom and not causal. Chief Information Officers, Chief Academic Officers, and presidents all get recognition for big things. Enterprise level solutions are sexy because it is something that makes them look decisive and effective. Employees who report to them know this, so enterprise level solutions have the priority. Everything else fits into the dwindling extra work time.

What extra time?

The good news though is the small things have gotten much easier for anyone to go off on their own. At my last job, I sat as an ex-officio member of the Faculty Senate technology committee. One of the hot topics one year was a couple faculty members taught students how to use the LMS adopted by another college system in the state. It was two courses. Should we spend $20,000/yr and take up a significant amount of my time running a second LMS? Or should they continue to pay $800/yr for Blackboard to do it? The answer ultimately was to continue with Blackboard. Now days, they probably would be directed at CourseSites. At the time my to-do list was several pages long and hundred plus hour weeks were not uncommon just to keep top and high priority items timely done. The ETA for anything not top or high priority was over a year.

I prefer working with innovative technologies. Custom solutions that require creative thinking and problem solving make me feel like I accomplished something special. They give the biggest rush. Enterprise level software is steak and potatoes, so it is the core. The enterprise is the minimum. I just wish I more time to devote to achieve going beyond the minimum than I did. Well, do. This is a top level decision. Improve staffing and flexible team management so that people can spend time working on the things that make them happier.