Campus licensing
After the previous announcements of Adobe and Microsoft licensing, in December the campus announced site license agreements for Matlab and Mathematica, two of our most widely-used scientific applications. All these announcements are good news for L&S departments, who have spent a lot on licensing and even more on managing licenses over the years. It is worth noting, however, that this isn’t a free lunch; these are multi-year licenses being paid for with temporary funding this year, with no defined funding model for future years. The expectation is that these costs will be rolled up into the campus IT common good funding model which is scheduled for implementation this coming July.
There’s an interesting bit of strategy going on here. Brad Wheeler, CIO at Indiana University, talks about pursuing a “philosophy of abundance“:
Members of the IU community should be able to conduct their work without thought of IT constraints. While financial resources must always shape reality and some policies provide essential protections, the university should consider all possible approaches that develop IT services in unmetered and unrestricted ways that approximate a philosophy of abundance.
Berkeley IT exists in a culture of scarcity. Users expect that IT services will be expensive, poorly run, or be discontinued without warning. Departments try to retain local funding and local control of IT because they doubt that central or shared services will meet their needs, or even take them into account. Hoarding of resources increases the total cost of providing IT and reduces the overall quality of the results, but it is the natural and expected outcome when shared services are not trusted.
The campus is trying to shift the culture. By entering into these license agreements, they are saying, “Here. We know that you need these things, and we are going to provide them for you. In exchange, we are going to ask you to participate in a common good funding model once we’ve gained your trust that the funds will be used to address things you consider important.”
When the details of the common good funding model come out, there is going to be push-back from departments, fueled by the expectation of scarcity. These licensing agreements exist to help build trust, which I hope will facilitate the adoption of the fundamental changes required to improve the success of IT operations at Berkeley.
