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Morphing Technologies: Defining Needs in Collaboration & Document Management

Presenter: Brian Nielsen, Northwestern University

IT organizations within higher education are facing growing demands for technology-centric solutions in a seemingly ever-widening range of campus activity areas, from classroom and course management system support to new business processes, from helping students making computer purchasing decisions to re-thinking the campus telecommunications infrastructure. In this expansion (and exhaustion?) phase our habits of mind gravitate toward compartmentalizing areas of concern, considering some range of options within a single defined problem set for issue A, another approach for problems around issue B, relying on common understandings of what solution type is appropriate for what issue type. But as technologies develop, such reliance on well-understood categories may lead to half-solutions, in which a technology is "morphing" to address problems across what were once distinct domains. Such is the case with technology for addressing the handling of electronic documents.

This facilitated discussion will consider how two distinct technology areas, file storage and document management, may morph so as to offer IT executives new creative solutions to different problems in ways that both improve service and save dollars. By describing how one university is re-thinking document management and file storage issues to improve institutional performance in a wide range of areas, discussion participants will be given opportunities to share common concerns in this rapidly-evolving technological arena.