A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how centralization (or decentralization) doesn't matter, about doing the right things at the right places. With some further discussions and feedback, I wanted to write a follow-up on where IT fits and how democratization of technology is the key to the process.

Mona Heath, our deputy CIO, pointed out that there is an important distinction at play with the path we have taken. We want to empower every user to be able to accomplish what they want. Each faculty member and each student has their own wants and needs for what they are trying to do. For many, the technology used is irrelevant.

• "I want to be able to share my research on the web without having to go through a web person to do it."
• "I want to create an online portfolio of my work as a student."
• "I use my personal iPad to manage my email, write my blog and organize materials for my publications."
• "I want my students to use technology during my lectures to engage with the material and each other."

There is very little specific technology mentioned with those examples. For the most part, each one just wants to be able to do some particular activity. If you look at these things, you cannot aggregate those needs together to provide one solution because there are many nuances to the specifics of what each individual wants. The web publishing examples each have different specific requirements that are going to make some solutions better than others. 

So where do you scale a solution to any of these needs? The answer requires a bit of rewiring for our IT brains since we are almost always trying to solve the problem in front of us. What you scale is the solutions that the users have chosen for themselves. If hundreds of faculty and students have chosen to use Evernote to organize their notes and materials, then you look for a way to provide premium Evernote accounts to them. If dozens of student organizations have independently chosen to use Google Sites to publish information about their meetings, then you build some tools and templates for them to use in Google Sites. If thousands of faculty and students are using mobile devices to access their email and calendars, you make sure that any solution you provide supports mobile devices well.

To summarize, faculty, students and staff independently and individually - in other words democratically - choose technologies they wish to use, and we in IT need to acquire and manage those technologies so that they are appropriately sourced and preferably scaled. Our work in IT is in helping our users find the technology that best meets their needs, helping our users make use of the technologies they have chosen and scaling those technologies behind the scenes to eliminate duplication.

Let's do this!