It is another of our important responsibilities to lead in developing scalable and affordable funding models to sustain the technology infrastructure we develop. The difference is that I am referring here to applications, not hardware. Many faculty members lose interest in developing an application after it almost works. Another responsibility we have is to support high quality, rock solid applications within an environment of constant innovation. We must maintain and enhance these core services within the same environment that encourages faculty members and their students to be successful in their next round of innovation.
Organizational architecture is as important as technical architecture.
Most technical people are suspicious of, if not outright hostile to, attempts to make the organization in which they work function better. They believe that technical problems are much more fun to work on than interpersonal issues. If we want our working environment to be as good as our technical environment, we must develop the culture we want with the same zeal that we bring to developing our networks. To benefit from a culture having attributes such as truth, honesty, responsibility, diversity, accountability, compassion, fairness, and respect, we have to articulate and encourage these values explicitly, not just assume they will be the norm. In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word frustration .