Cloudy EDUCAUSE

Weather at EDUCAUSE.  This year's EDUCAUSE conference held in Anaheim, California was overshadowed by clouds everywhere overhead. I was waiting for rain all five days on my west coast trip. Finally, on friday there was a bit of drizzle before I left to return home.  The wind was picking up coming from the north influenced by pending colder air as the comfortable summer slowly ends and fall begins.

What do I mean by this metaphor? Visiting the exhibit hall and conference sessions, I was overwhelmed by the volume and intensity of everyone talking about cloud computing and the pending storms that lay ahead as the vendor community tries to disrupt the monolpoly on-premise infrastructure opening the flood gates for new IT spending.

It was so prevalent everywhere I turned. The vendors and booths were all about collaboration, sharing, outsourcing, lowering costs and reducing complexity. There were also many expressing methods to improve services and methods of delivery following the cloud - such as offering new mobile apps.

Mobility was a hot topic with many offering new services delivered in the palm of one's hand retrofitting processes and methods that still retain the legacy of institutional meaning transformed. These are primative applications canabilizing business models as vendors attempt to shift away from expensive legacy and on premise computing business models.

We are seeing extremes. On one hand, we see further fragmentation of computing power across devices and on the other we see the consolidation of large scale computing resources to serve aggregation and information management - and an attempt at centralized decision making driven by calls by policy to simplify, standardize and align sectors of the industry to improve outcomes from the public investment in education.

In the US, we spend 7% of the GDP which is $1.4 trillion I think.  That is a lot of dough - especially in tough times when people across the world are skeptics and lack confidence in their future given present circumstances.  And, as a proportion of priority, it is far more than most countries around the world.

The conversation and choices about on premise computing versus moving to the cloud was segregated by those seeking to reduce complexity and costs and those discussing new killer applications that would enable collaboration, sharing and improved services with loosely coupled technologies.

Conversations were all over the place with obviously different levels of understandings of the movement and meaning hidden in the clouds and the pending storms facing the education ecosystem outside our control.

Vendors, implementers, users, techies and subject matter experts were talking about moving to the cloud and what it meant to them and how they projected the impact on their products and services. Some are trying to reinvent themselves.  There is some self serving motives implied by all this since the vendor community would benefit from the increased costs to move to cloud computing.

Along with these discussions and to a lesser degree, SOA (service oriented architectures) and web services materialized. This usually instigated privacy and security issues underlined by unknowns and fears.  Who would want to invite hackers to open services - adding more efforts to lock down the IT infrastructure?

The pending political winds as this year's election is around the corner also weaved into the conversations. It is one of the unknowns and no one was predicting the outcome.

I did not hear much discussion on SOA Governance which did not surprise me. But, many discussions were had around private clouds which does address conclusions taken.

We have obviously entered a new stage of computing much like the previous stages where things get very stormy and disruptive. From my view, the precipitation predicted is more like farmers praying for rain during a long draught. It is not a scientific process. There is a bit of ritual.

We have to remember the economic disaster and the impact on the huge IT investments already in place. The storm is still materializing some say and their perspectives differ by distance. The complexity and accuracy of predicting rainfall is like the weekly weather forecast changing every time you tune in with more information.

On premise computing I believe is in the trillions. Much like the large acres of land seeded to bear crops with the expectation of rain, farmers must wait for things outside their control. They bunker down - sheltering from the political and economic winds outside their control. The billions spent each year fertilizing and watering the on premise systems designed around institutional interests reveals the gaps and flaws in consumer facing outcomes because we don't have a one size fits all system that is easy to comprehend.  Our systems are evolving.

Many systems are failing or will fail without sustainable business models. Without a means to support the land covered by what we seed, we can't harvest what we sow. This is a fatal mistake farmers living on the edge of break even fall victim to, just like many colleges and universities are economically surviving borrowing from the future or pushing to make their enrollment quotas leveraging the federal and state support they get.

What does this mean for the long term? Just as farming consolidated as food production moved from local control to high production, does it mean we will see massive consolidation in education?

Another stream of thought trickles down. Many confuse architectures that have long been accepted on the basis they buffer change and handle scalability with fixed investment. The shift to leverage scalability over control and expansiveness over fixed resources across the education ecosystem is also mixed with potential hail damaging crops further. The hail being the vulnerabilities and risks we do not see coming.

Any rain or moisture would help I guess when there is a draught. Yet, given the drastic economic and market shifts brought on by our past global circumstances and disruptive innovations unfolding at a greater rate, I think we will have cloudy weather over head keeping the sun out while debates and challenges unfold about priorities. The sun won't shine for a while until the atmosphere overhead breaks up. This is why it is cool to fly over the clouds missing the disruptive air movements.  It gives us the ability to see things we could not see on the ground.

Cloud computing and virtualization is growing in popularity driven by the promise of lower costs and greater good. But, the greater opportunity is the opportunity to redesign systems to address the driving movement consumers need to succeed as innovations of delivery continue to evolve. 

My long term prediciton or forecast of moving to a consumer centric education system is still supported by what I see.  We need to build tools and systems that cater to people's needs, which begins with how we create and use data systems designed to mask the complexity and deliver the right information at the right time to consumers as they navigate their place in the continum of life long learning.  Like online or virtual games, we have to have levels and a means to track progress that is easy to follow.

Our tools, methods of delivery, information management overall, decision making and our ability to empower learners is constrained by how the education industry has generally designed offerings and delivery oriented toward institutional conveniences.  Learners learn with varying learning styles.  Concepts like TERM and SEMESTER are artificial ways of packing learning overtime wit.  We have COURSES packing content into chunks.  We have GRADES which reflect assessment.

Rain nurtures. Like data, it helps fuel growth, confidence and attitudes. Every rain drop is also unique.  And, in order for us to foster a greater return on the IT investment, we need to realize data is a commodity and our systems should be designed around data standards, enabling the collaboration and sharing consumers seek as they transition geography, artificial borders and varying practices.