This talk by Richard Katz (Vice President of EDUCAUSE)

Richard has been working with (or building?) ‘ECAR’ – the Educause Centre for Applied Research – and is planning to expand it’s activity to Europe and Australasia. I’ve not come across before – but it sounds interesting, as again it comes up against this question about who does research into supplying computing services to HE – I need to try to put my thoughts about this together a bit, but it relates to my thoughts on how JISC is caught between providing services and doing research.

Anyway, Richard summarises some stats for the HE sector in the US. He says there is negligible growth in HE (which is an interesting contrast to the figures yesterday from HEFCE about rising numbers) – and he is outlining impending enrolment declines – so very unsettled sector at the moment.

ECAR has been carrying out research about ‘top concerns’ (as with the UCISA top concerns, which are modelled on the EDCAUSE methodology). So – ECAR has been looking into those issues appearing in these lists:

ICT Funding – high fixed costs, low investment in innovation, few new funds, private universities outperform publics. Overall, lots of similarities here with UK HE, apart from the private/public issue (although it would be interesting to see if there is any similar 2 tier resourcing in the UK)

Infrastructure – network now seen as strategic, wireless catching up with wired. I wonder if we are going get some backlash here – currently we are likely to have finished rolling out 802.11g when 802.11n or WiMax stuff is coming on stream – are we going to have to replace our wireless infrastructure in the next 2 years? If so – where is the funding?

IT Security – being taken more seriously – lots more control now. With increase in this being raised at the highest management level within HE institutions.

Identity Management – Wide awareness of issue by CIOs – not well understood by Senior Management (this sounds extremely similar). With effort being funded internally by IT organisations there is only slow progress (see Budget Dust)

Richard finishes by asking “What should we be tracking” – that is, there is a load of stuff that is falling outside our lists of ‘top concerns’ – which are mired in ‘keeping the show on the road’ – but we aren’t looking beyond the next curve…