I participated in a session on strategic planning and IT projects/prioritizations, which highlighted the way larger and more formal institutions are going about wrestling with prioritizing IT needs with limited budgets/resources.  There were more stories of steering committees, management committees, budget groups and formal chains of group decision making than you can even believe or want to be a part of.  The benefit that I see that Evergreen has for it is a lack of structure which would (does) enable us to create models that work outside of administrative boundaries and are for the most part voluntary.

Another grain of wisdom in this discussion is that, aside from core infra-structural needs, projects are filtered through constituent groups and prioritized by these groups.  IT does not make prioritization, it only helps constituent groups understand the scope of the request (e.g.,that project will probably take 150 development hours).  That way 2 things happen.  1, IT is not the one defining what gets done first, this should be an institutional desision.  2, Constituent groups and/or college senior staff have ownership and an understanding of IT priorities and initiatives and forces more engagement with these decisions which can have a great affect on the institution.  As an ancillary benefit, they or their staff might be less likely to go outside of the process (we’ll just buy something outside of IT) because they need to be as accountable for the process as they expect their colleagues to be accountable. We should be thinking now how we want to make sure this process is a functional one when/if resources pick up and/or we loose key individuals that will make us wish we had a decent prioritization process in place.