A while ago I submitted a proposal for a talk entitled “Does Web 2.0 Herald The End Of In-House Development And Provision Of IT Services?” to The Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social conference. The proposal was accepted, but by the time I had received confirmation, other commitments had cropped up. Fortunately this topic is of interest to my colleague Paul Walk and, as he has described in his blog, Paul is very keen to receive input from readers of his blog about his talk.
This is an approach I’ve adopted recently, as I described in a posting on Web 2.0: What Can It Offer the Research Community. On that occasion, I received some useful examples of use of Web 2.0 technologies in a research context. And yesterday when I gave the presentation I encouraged the participants to visit the posting and, if they felt motivated, to engage in discussions and debate themselves. I coined the term ‘blended blogging‘ to describe the process of using a blog to inform the production of slides for a presentation and to allow the blog post to provide a channel for discussions afterwards.
Returning to Paul’s presentation at the “Shock of the Old 2007: Shock of the Social” conference, the title of the talk is intentionally controversial, intended to challenge conventional thinking regarding software development. This was an issue I raised recently with my posting on Dapper – Web Mashup Development For All?
Clearly, Web 2.0 won’t herald the end of in-house software development. But to what extent does it challenge the norms of software development? At one stage there might may have been a belief in some quarters (perhaps within further education colleges, for example) that institutions didn’t have the expertise or resources to engage in software development, and needed to purchase commercial off-the-shelf software. However many institutions are now reaping the benefits which development using open source software within an open source community environment can provide.
But where do Web 2.0 services fit in with this approach? And with a model of ‘software as a service’ does it really matter how the software was produced? Will making use of open source software be the equivalent of purchasing electricity from green providers – one might feel good about this, but it is just one of the factors to consider when seeking a solution for one’s needs?
And what about the provision of IT services? Do institutions need to do this? And could we see the debates that one still encounters within IT services over whether, for example, to migrate email from an open source environment to a Microsoft platform (or vice versa) being made redundant by institutions simply renting email services from a company which gains benefits of scale (perhaps Google, for example)? Or, as Slideshare have done, purchase storage capacity from Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service)?
Quite clearly there are many issues which need to be addressed. But rather than getting bogged down in the details, what are the merits of such an approach? And what are the major concerns?
A very simplistic response:
Merits:
Fairly obviously if you don’t rule any hosted/web 2.0/open source or commerical solution because of some technical prejudice, you’ll have a much broader range of options in pusuit of a great user experience.
Barriers:
Paid of services: none. It’s the same as any other commerical decisions.
Free services:
You have to consider the risks (ie data lost, support) a lot more carefully if you have no binding contract. ie I would love to make a lot more use of slideshare institutionally, but it would be a high risk strategy to rely heavily on this as a key service for providing learning material without any contract.
Going back to the first point about user experience, authentication is key – we can’t expect our inexperienced uses to sign up for a host of services seperately and remember lots of different usernames, passwords and URLs.
BTW we’ve all outsourced our student’s social networking to Facebook/Bebo anyway by default because we didn’t take any action…
“BTW we’ve all outsourced our student’s social networking to Facebook/Bebo anyway by default because we didn’t take any action…”
Your students don’t go clubbing?
On a more serious note, thanks for raising the point that inactivity is a form of decision making 🙂
As Web 2.0 is at the moment, I don’t think it really changes IT Services provision all that much. Most of the successful Web 2.0 applications are very much new areas, areas which aren’t “competing” directly with services provided internals. Sure, some do use extra instances of certain services (such as GMail or Hotmail accounts), but these are often used for different purposes than institution provided services.
Michael makes the 2 key arguments against outsourcing to free services: authentication and data integrity. Ultimately, it just comes down to Quality of Service.
In the longer term, if or when Web 2.0 services take off, I visualise what I would call “IT Services 2.0”. If you look at IT Services at the moment, typically the balance is that there is more of a reactive service provision (ie. support call-based) than a proactive service provision (ie. provision of services). I see that as changing around, with IT Services becoming more involved in a combination of in-house and external data and services in Mash-Ups, and more people who were doing support-based roles, becoming more involved in light development and consultation and customisation for end users. This would open up the software development guys and gals to concentrate on bigger, longer term and infrastructure projects.
Hi Mark – I think the “IT Services 2.0” concept is very interesting. Scott Wilson makes a similar suggestion in a response to Paul Walk’s posting in which Scott suggests “a role in IT services for providing consultancy and expertise to students and staff when they want to do things outside of their current capability“.
Of course IT Services have been through several transformations in the past: I have seen a change from providing niche services to the research community to supporting the mass market of students, admin staff, etc.; the move from mainframe computers to, initially standalone and the networked PCs; the move (or threats of moves) from a centralised provision of support to distributing the support across the faculties and, of course, dealing with the advent of the Web and other Internet services in the mid 1990s. So maybe we should be talking about “IT Services 5.0” – and the real difficulties lie with User 1.0 🙂
Every sector is reaping the benefits of Web 2.0.The critics should rather target how it has been a boon in the research areas rather than picking out what went wrong.Suggestion for its improvement have to be given to make it a more successful in IT services.