Breaking Scale

Timothy Chester

After 28 years in higher ed IT—and 22 as a CIO—I’ve seen our world turn over more than once. For most of my career, IT spending was capital-focused: we bought equipment, secured perpetual-use licenses, and paid predictable maintenance fees, with modest annual increases tied to inflation. But that world is gone.

Timothy Chester

Since the pandemic, we no longer run most of our core systems on-premises. We subscribe. We no longer own our licenses. We rent them. And as cloud adoption and software-as-a-service took hold, inflation and rising interest rates pushed vendors to shift their posture—from partners to profit centers. In negotiation after negotiation, the message has changed: we’re locked in, and they know it.

Timothy Chester

In today’s Dispatch, we lay out why our old playbook—scale through standardization—no longer works. And we offer a new strategy for resilience: diversification by design. Because if we don’t break scale now, the cost of staying locked in will only grow.