Manifesto on university IT departments¶
Alternative title: Challenging patterns with university IT for research
This was written in 2025 and first publicly read on 12 June 2025. It’s now being released publicly.
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In my travels, I’ve met many people and seen one pattern: at every university, people are upset at their (central university) IT departments. Why is this? I’ll argue isn’t not because of the people: individually, at my university, all the people I know in our IT Services unit are quite competent and motivated.
I think the problem goes deeper. Organizations have learned that IT can become just as chaotic and unmanageable as any physical objects can be. Enterprise IT has adapted to treat IT like any other infrastructure: make sure it is stable, secure, and efficient over long-term. Since IT is so critical and not simply something to be thrown away if it goes wrong, IT departments must make sure that nothing goes wrong.
Some research just needs reliable and normal IT tools to do their work, since their work isn’t about the computing. For them, an IT department is just what they need - it’s a basic infrastructure department like plumbing or electricity.
But for those of us for whom the computing/data/software IS the research, it’s different. By definition, we move fast and break things, and for us, it’s the IT stuff we are pushing against. For any impactful thing we discover, we’ve iterated through many wrong paths along the way. By definition, we do many things wrong all the time. We are collectively trying to enable “radical creativity” and “game changing” using IT departments which are designed to make sure that there is no risk of anything going wrong. Imagine every architecture student needing to go through city planning permission to make a model building for a student project - it’s just not appropriate given what the project is and the risk to society! This is what’s I think is wrong with institutional IT departments: it’s not designed for the purpose for which we are using it. It’s infrastructure, not research support.
This doesn’t work, and in fact produces the very outcome we so much want to avoid - a bunch of researchers going wild without control, since they have learned that asking for help doesn’t actually help. We want our IT related research to be secure and well managed. But we are trying to make that happen by a department which is working on a whole other level, one that hardly shares the same language with the researchers who so desperately need help. The result? The researchers (either more actively or passively) ignore the IT department and do their own thing. If you had a fixed deadline for graduating, finding your next job, or being promoted, would you not also do the same?
Said another way, research computing is not an IT system. Maybe technically it is, but, it is fundamentally different. An IT system processes data. A research system is a tool for a researcher who is the prime processor. You can spend all the time you want trying to make the system perfect and compliant, but in the end, it’s for naught, since you’ve evaluated the system, and not the use of the system.
So what to do? It’s not a problem with the IT departments. It’s not a problem with the people within them. They are good at what they are supposed to do. It’s a problem with how they are being used. We need to recognize that an enterprise IT department is a reliable base to build on, not a research support unit. Our management needs to properly separate the concerns of basic IT infrastructure and research support. Some do this by separate departments such as “research computing” or a “computing center”. If they are included in the same unit, there needs to be proper firewalling of the different concerns. If they must stay the same, we need managements who will provide a better mission for IT departments, and IT department leadership with the vision to handle both halves at the same time.
We’ve built the worst of both worlds: computational researchers who aren’t supported, and IT research that isn’t controlled or secure. We can do better. In the current world, we have to do better.
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