Today I received an mass email from the chancellor at Syracuse University with a message about the university's approach to addressing the financial crisis. At the heart of the message was that the university will be cutting central administrative costs by $8 million this year and $11 million next year. If I interpret that correctly, IT budgets are going to come under close scrutiny at Syracuse, with a lot of pressure to cut out the fat where possible. I am sure many other colleges are already looking ways to jettison dead weight to make their IT departments float. I also would love to know how this will impact the funding of open source software adoption on campuses. I am particularly interested in how this will affect the adoption of Sakai by new schools.
I suppose it depends on the leadership in place at these schools and how they have positioned themselves with regard to the priority of "taking control of their IT destiny" as a strong strategic direction that they wish to (or MUST) pursue. For the bulk of schools who are looking to maximize ROI on their investment, they need to look carefully on how they will measure their investment returns. We know too well that open source software is not necessarily cheap. Sakai requires a sophisticated infrastructure to scale up to provide service to a large school and a skilled technical staff to maintain it. Switching from any one software to another is a very expensive proposition.
On the other hand, there are vendors who are poised to provide inexpensive hosting that may be compelling for schools that are looking to adopt an eLearning platform. You might think that using an "off the shelf", vendor supported solution would be counterintuitive to the whole idea of open source software. In the Sakai community the brightest lights usually shine on the biggest "innovations", but I think that when the rubber meets the road, the advantage of open source software comes when an institution can pinpoint its resources to address their highest priority support items. Time and time again I hear that the main reasons for many schools to move away from their chosen proprietary vendor is that they were not able to provide good support.
When you choose an open source vendor, you not only get that vendor's added value and support promises, you can also participate in that effort and eliminate your top support headaches by fixing local issues and contributing them back to the community. It is harder to articulate the value of the support tickets that you did need to field because you weren't waiting for the next major release of software or for a vendor response. Of course, convincing your local leadership that this is a better investment than completely relying on a vendor for everything may be a tough sell if they are simply looking at short term costs.
