Managing the Digital Ecosystem: Administrators Must Lead Their Universities Into a Future in Which Every Constituency Has Distinct Needs and Every Decision Has Implications for All‪.‬

Benjamin Disraeli's ironic comment, "I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?" aptly describes the feelings of many college and university administrators as they develop institutional plans for information technology (IT) that will support research, teaching, and learning in the coming decades. The context in which we are expected to lead our institutions in IT decisions has changed dramatically. We are experiencing unprecedented technological change emerging from a much greater diversity of sources than ever before. Students, faculty, and staff arrive at the beginning of each school year with new ideas (and associated hardware and software) for using information technologies that will enable them to accomplish their diverse goals--educational, professional, and personal. Technology firms along with increasingly influential open-source software development efforts present us with a staggering number of technologies that hold promise for enabling our fundamental missions of creating and transferring knowledge. What leadership strategies are appropriate in such a complex, dynamic, and unpredictable context? We've gone through a qualitative rather than merely a quantitative transition in the nature of IT. We have recently become accustomed to thinking of IT as one of the many infrastructures we provide on campus and for the national academic community. But the complexity and dynamism of IT, especially in academe, now warrants thinking about it in different terms: as an IT ecosystem. Computing in higher education has evolved from islands of innovation, to activities that depend on campuswide and worldwide infrastructures, to an ecosystem with many niches of experimentation and resulting innovation. These niches are filled by faculty and students who do what they do with IT following whatever motivations they may have, undirected by a central authority. But, as in any ecosystem, they are connected to the whole and often depend on a set of core technical, physical, and social services to survive. Many innovations depend on services--networking, authentication and authorization mechanisms, directories, communication protocols, domain-naming services, global time services, software licensing, etc.--becoming widely available beyond the niche in which they develop. A simple example is the dependence of almost any IT innovation that uses the network to share information on the "domain-naming system" to find the devices with which it needs to communicate. Managing ecosystems calls for a very different set of strategies than those used to administer islands of innovation or the more static, top-down services that characterize many infrastructures.