March 2005

Edutech Report March 2005 full issue PDF
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Fourteen Forms of Pressure You Need to Resist
By Thomas Warger
Managers of information technology come under an unusually wide range of pressure ploys in the course of doing their jobs. Few positions in academic administration can match the scope of involvement that is the everyday reality for IT. In addition to faculty, staff, and students there are vendors, parents, trustees, alumni, professional peers, and organizations. These disparate client groups make the IT job fascinatingly interesting but also have a go at an amazing variety of tactics in their efforts to influence IT decision-making.

Newsbriefs
ECAR study on IT networking in higher education, a new report on online education, IBM faculty awards for innovation

Treating Your IT Vendors Like Dirt (Instead of Like Partners in Your Success)
By Linda Fleit
An IT vendor, whether of hardware, the institution’s ERP, backup services, outsourcing, or what-have-you, can be an extremely important partner in helping the CIO achieve the institution’s IT goals. But instead of using this valuable resource to its full potential, the CIO may, for any number of reasons, view the vendor in the most unfavorable and unfortunate ways. For a vendor on whom the institution is dependent, this kind of behavior can be so off-putting that retaliation of some kind is a very likely response.

Edutech Responds
users' knowledge of basic computer functioning, replacing a longtime staff member, changing from a home-gorwn administrative information system to a commerical ERP

Quotes