| | FEB-MARCH, 20178By Donald Z. Spicer, AVC & CIO, University System of MarylandGiven the competitive orientation of most corporations, the ability to cooperate and/or collaborate is limited to close partners and suppliers. While higher education institutions compete for students, faculty, and research grants, the overall environment in this sector might be viewed as "coopetition." Institutions compete where necessary, but there is a strong element of cooperating and collaborating in areas that support, but do not directly impact their mission activities. This is particularly evident in Information Technology (IT). This article will describe several of these initiatives, some of which could be beneficial in other contexts.Technology Cooperation and Collaboration in Higher EducationStarting at the lowest level of the technology stack, networking, higher education was the original context for the development and promotion of the Internet. For many years, the Internet was a network of regional higher education networks. Twenty years ago, as the commodity Internet was gaining non-educational attention, higher education created a next generation Internet, Internet2, to support high bandwidth research, network based research, and collaboration among its member subscribers. As even high-performance networking has become a commodity, Internet2 has added above the network services--commercial and shared member to member--to its portfolio. This is also articulated at the state/regional level. Maryland has created the Maryland Research and Education Network that provides Internet2 access to K20 education other than direct Internet2 members in Maryland. Other states have similar organizations. Maryland has also created an "above the network services" sharing organization. Security is another area where there is no competitive advantage in going it alone, but there are clear benefits in cooperation. Many educational entities have a very small staff dedicated to IT security. They must deal with the same threats as other enterprises, with the additional concern about knowledgeable student insiders. Most educational CISOs are heads-down and overwhelmed. Cooperation allows joint awareness of a fluid environment, common policy development, sharing of threats and alerts, and leveraged purchase of tools.Moving up the stack, higher education has contributed to a wide variety of open source developments: BSD and Linux at the operating system level; learning management systems such as Moodle and Sakai; several software clearing houses; and the federated Identity Management System, Shibboleth/InCommon. At the application level, while higher education licenses a substantial amount of commercial software, it has also engaged in what is termed "Community Sourcing" applications, with the Kuali Foundation's ERP applications being a prime example. These generally are developed under the rubric, "by education, for education."In other domains, High Performance Computing (HPC), while becoming relatively more accessible, has long had shared resource aspects. While often funded by the National Science Foundation, states, or regional consortia, organizations managing HPC generally have a shared governance management model. In the domain of content, there are many shared governance higher education library consortia at the state level, and Hathi Trust is a national collaboration that archives and shares digitized collections. A new movement in the content area Higher Education's Secret Sauce: Cooperation and CollaborationIN MY OPINIONDonald Z. Spicer
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