Computer service rates and user support

Abstract

The meteoric decline in hardware costs now in progress will result in computing becoming a personnel-intensive enterprise. Most of this personnel will be devoted to software development and support of computing users. The financing and budgeting in most university computing centers is centered on hardware and computing cycles. How, then, can university computing best adapt to the changing economic structure of the information processing industry?Who should provide user support services? The central computing service center? Individual departments and/or colleges? Are there significant economies of scale in user support? If there are, do they outweigh the responsiveness that can be provided by a decentralized network of user support services?Who should pay for user support services? The users? The university? If the university pays, should centralized or decentralized arrangements be made for the services?Who should determine the level of expenditure on user support services? The market? The departments and colleges? The central administration? The computing center management?What will be the policy implications of the alternate answers to the questions above? Will they enhance or retard the decentralization of computing services? Will they encourage users to depend on internal or external facilities? Will they lead to a growth or decline of user support activity within the computing center?All of the above questions are now and have been debated strenuously regarding the provision of computing cycles. There is every reason to believe that the same debate will take place regarding support services. Strong user support services will be the sine qua non of high quality university computing in the future, and it will not be available unless we deal promptly with the issues of pricing, budgeting, and organization outlined above.