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3.2.4.1. History & Approach
Because of its decentralized governance structure, the Natural Sciences and the Computer Science department were the first to procure computers. Other departments followed suit, contingent upon need in the acquisition of computers. Thus, there was a long tradition in the FU to leave IT matters to their separate departments without a comprehensive university overseer.
Given the lack of top-down organization, it comes as little surprise, that two chemistry students pioneered the FU’s connection to the internet, and in 1989 the domain fu-berlin.de was registered. However, it took until 1990 to connect the FU to the science web WiN; again, web development was left to individualistic ambitions, until 1997 when a central web-team was formed by the central IT department (ZEDAT) and the library. A new web-server and site were developed on behalf of the president.
Nevertheless, even today some natural science departments prefer to run their own servers and services.
Despite the idiosyncrasies of the university, today there are basically three specialized IT institutions. The first is the 1970 (FU web) founded ZEDAT (Central IT Service Department), which is in theory [i] responsible for all hardware and basic services (like email). The CeDiS (Center for Digital Systems) is, as can be seen by observing its staff and budget growth rate, a very dynamic institution specialized on e-learning and multi-media production. The library runs quite a substantial part of its services on their own IT infrastructure. The eAS (electronic Administration and Services) department has been setup recently with the mandate to introduce a higher education resource planning system. And last but not least there is the university’s web-team. Also a quite recent creation, the web-team is responsible for the application of the corporate design to the website and facilitate the transfer (or creation) of web content of all administrative departments to the content management system.
In order to coordinate this swarm of specialized institutions, and to conciliate between them, a Chief Information Officer (CIO) institution has been setup. The CIO Panel as it is named, consists of the chief administrator (chancellor), one vice-rector, and one IT professional. They meet every quarter to work through and decide on issues put on the agenda by a CIO secretary [ii].
With regards to internet based innovation appropriation, the fragmented IT functions each have their own individual practice. The ZEDAT is responsible for the basic setup of most machines and as such prepares the ground for potential opportunities to be optimized. The library provides systems for research practices and most notably the CeDiS is scouting and introducing innovative teaching & learning, as well as research practices [iii].
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[i] In practice there are a host of exceptions where institutions prefer to use their own solutions.
[ii] This position had not been staffed during the case study.
[iii] The web-team understands itself as responsible for content and thus follows the mandate to introduce an effective practice of creating and updating FU’s organizational content. eAS is introducing administrative innovations which are not the focus of this research.
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