Does IT investment really pay?

This is a really interesting article in the NY Times about how IT investments do not always pay.

"Here is why that looks unsettling. For the last two decades at least, the biggest additions to the asset base of corporations have been in information technology — computer hardware and software. By the early 1990s, technology spending had risen to half of all private business investment, and that pace has kept up since. (Also, the asset measure understates the total technology investment, because it does not include spending on services.)"

Disturbing stuff.

I work in education where IT is seen as a cost even though modern curriculum recommend integration of IT in every suitable aspect of education. IT is the fastest/best/cheapest way to find, change, store and present information which is key to education. Still many schools concentrate on paper and finding paper, losing paper, discarding paper, and shipping paper is a much larger cost than IT and paper gets a lot less done in the same period of time.

There are some key features of IT in education that are lacking:

• there is not enough - schools cannot afford to buy and support thick clients and yet few embrace thin clients which would give them twice as many seats for the same cost
• servers are not used properly - they should run databases and search engines and not just file storage and printing
• money is wasted on software licences when FLOSS costs little

Schools need to organize their data so they can accumulate it, find it and use it. That does not mean storing files with cryptic names in hierarchic file systems. It means they need full-text indexing, databases and search engines so they can find any document or media file in an instant with no delay.. They cannot do that with their usual stuff from M$. They need GNU/Linux which comes with Beagle on the desktop and swish-e and MySQL and server-side scripts to match. If schools accumulated a gigabyte annually of text and thousands of images annually, they could eventually eliminate the need for books and paper to a large degree, establish an institutional knowledge base that would survive turnover and give everyone on the educational team some benchmarks. Everyone, students, teachers, parents and administrators can do a better job in less time with appropriate use of IT and it can be done for much less than is spent now on thick clients and file-servers.

In courses where IT is reasonably well supplied, everything can be done much faster. In a computer lab a course management system can be used to allow a single teacher to teach dozens of courses simultaneously. While paper-pushing teachers are lugging bags of documents home each day to mark, a well-equipped school can have such things automated to a large degree without piling any paper. This gives teachers more time to plan and to reflect on execution rather than labouring over papers. Motivated students can easily rack up extra credit or extend their studies in depth.

Classrooms that are not labs can still benefit from a cluster of seats for accessing IT. Many schools are close to supplying notebooks to all students to make the logistics reasonable for a 1:1 ratio. Wireless thin clients, tablets and wired thin clients can all work given the right preparation. Servers and gigabit/s or better backbones tie everything together into a high-performing and manageable package.

Moore's Law, FLOSS and thin clients have really brought the cost of IT down to levels any school should be able to afford. There is no reason education should not make better use of IT. All they have to do is change how they use IT.