"IT Doesn't Matter," an article by Nicholas Carr, created an uproar among people who work in various information technology (IT) sectors when it was published in the May 2003 Harvard Business Review. Carr states: "as information technology's power and ubiquity have grown, its strategic importance has diminished." He believes that even though information technologies are an important element in an organization's infrastructure, their ability to transform industries is in the past.

Many IT leaders in higher education do not agree that technology has already transformed their industry - at least not completely. Yes, we have seen IT dramatically change academic research, which has rapidly adopted advanced information technologies, creating new fields, such as computational chemistry and biology, and new technologies, such as grid computing, extremely large databases, and very high-speed networks. These innovations continue to transform how much of today's research is conducted. Additionally, many universities have invested significantly to modernize their administrative environments to meet the standards required by regulatory and oversight bodies. These changes have already resulted in advantages for the entire university community.

However, we have yet to truly transform the core of higher education - teaching and learning. Carr's controversial stance does prompt us to consider how IT should be strategically employed to realize this transformation - which is coming. Presently, we have very few faculty members experimenting with innovative new models of instruction and not many experimental learning environments to compare and evaluate. We are still very much a lecture-based enterprise. Duderstadt, Atkins, and Van Houweling make this case exceptionally well in their recent book, Higher Education in the Digital Age:

"To date, the university stands apart, almost unique in its determination to moor itself to past traditions and practices, to insist on performing its core teaching activities much as it has done in the past. Our limited use of technology thus far has been at the margins, to provide modest additional resources to classroom pedagogy or to attempt to extend the physical reach of our current classroom-centered, seat time-based teaching paradigm. It is ironic indeed that the very institutions that have played such a profound role in developing the digital technology now reshaping our world are the most resistant to reshaping their activities to enable its effective use."

I argue that academic institutions that are smart and nimble enough to take advantage of advances in information technology will be better able than their peers to compete for great students, faculty, and staff. Successfully incorporating IT into their operational and educational fabric will probably not enable any institution to corner the market on National Merit Scholarship winners or National Science Foundation grants; however, the advantages will be real, and they will matter in the day-to day culture that sets one institution apart from another.

It is clearly difficult to envision and then implement innovative interactive learning environments that really work, and there have been several high profile failures to prove it. However, it is important for the experimentation to continue. Learning is a universal activity that is ripe for strategic transformation. And as much as educational institutions like to resist change, transformation is coming, and it will be fueled by information technologies.

Although budgets are being cut throughout UC and other academic institutions, the higher education IT community must continue to move forward. At UC Berkeley, for example, IST, the central information technology organization, is currently implementing a 10% reduction in its permanent budget. In order to continue making progress despite the current budgetary climate, IST staff members are working closer than ever before with faculty and staff in other units. We have a campuswide working group exploring ways of reducing overlaps in IT services. In addition, we are submitting more proposals to outside agencies and are working closely with students in IT courses to find ways of leveraging their project work.

A high degree of collaboration and sharing is common practice within higher education. Colleges and universities share a belief that by working together they can accomplish projects that are strategically important for the entire education community, and that would not happen with each institution acting alone. Examples of IT collaborations in which the University of California is active include EDUCAUSE , CENIC , the Digital California Project , Internet2 , and the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative .

With resources declining, we need more than ever to build upon this collaborative culture within the University of California system.

On a systemwide level, we should be focusing on the most strategic issues and finding ways of leveraging and sharing knowledge and expertise. We should build on successful UC collaborative IT programs, such as the Larry L. Sautter Award , which identifies, recognizes, and encourages best IT practices throughout the system, and the annual UC Computing Services Conference ( UCCSC ), which gives our campus computer professionals a forum for professional development. More recently, IT leaders throughout the University of California system have been working together to form a new organization, the UC Information Technology Leadership Council ( ITLC ). An important goal of the ITLC will be to foster collaboration among the campuses, laboratories, and the Office of the President to increase effectiveness of "local IT initiatives through sharing of technological approaches and lessons learned on individual campuses."

Even though the future is uncertain in California and beyond, there are several things about which we can be reasonably sure. First, organizations with an inferior IT infrastructure will be at a competitive disadvantage and will find it difficult to stay in business. Second, information technology is still in its adolescence and will continue to evolve rapidly. Third, higher education has yet to transform its core learning environments but must do so eventually. Fourth, we need to collaborate and share more within the IT community of the University of California. And finally, IT management is not likely to become boring in our lifetimes.

Carr is wrong; at least in higher education, IT certainly matters.