A cartel of ignorance - ICT Investments in African Universities

This has been a very heavy topic in my heart of late, I better get it off my chest. I have had various discussions with senior University admnistrators in Africa on the potential that outsourced ICT services can have on their institutions, both as a means of cutting costs and a way of guaranteeing reliability and availability of ICT services. This I can attest has mostly fallen on deaf ears.

The core business of a University is not ICT. A University or any other Educational Institution for that matter, should only use ICT as a tool to drive its outreach, increase efficiency and productivity, improve its learners learning experience and support its research and dissemination of its research findings. This is clearly realised. The problem has been the unwarranted investment in the establishment of internal ICT environments that are marred with constant availability problems because of lack of redundancy, inability to guarantee security, integrity and confidentiality of data plus appropriately trained ICT personnel to man the technological platforms hosted within the Universities.

To give an example, many African Universities are struggling to offer reliable email and group collaboration services to their students and researchers yet these are available as a free alternative through Google mail and groupware solutions. Why would a University invest in establishing an expensive server farm yet this services can be obtained at a very low cost from service providers who offer this as their core business. Why establish a very expensive video conferencing solution when there are scalable alternatives at very low costs?

I fail to understand this unwarranted expenditure in times like this of global economic recession. In today's web/internet based age, it does not matter where your services are physically/geographically located as one can be able to access services hosted anywhere in the world. The fact that an institution has its computing environment located internally under "lock and key" does not necessarily guarantee the security of its data. It is logical and not physical security.

What would happen if Universities are able to share resources? Economies of scale will be a sure advantage. Risks will be minimised and scarce resources will be utilised more effectively. It is more important that more resources go to guaranteeing end user computing needs e.g students acquiring computing resources, establishing more powerful local area networks etc. These are services that can be offered by a stripped down ICT support service located within the University. By interconnecting University networks, one can be able to guarantee the sharing of resources by both lecturers and students from one institution with the others. Educational and Research networks will have to work extra hard to achieve this as there a very strong inherent competition between educational institutions themselves.