Here's this week's "blog-for-pay" opinion piece: The Transition from IT as Infrastructure to IT as Ecosystem

"As anyone who reads my column regularly knows, I am constantly trying to find the connection between IT and environmental sustainability. Not just the implications of upstream and downstream waste in the production of hardware and its abandonment, or the use of electrical power to operate machines, but in a larger context.

A lot of the wonderful things happening in the world of sustainability came out of both systems thinking and the application of computing power to defining and solving environmental problems. So I was delighted to read an article titled, "Managing the Digital Ecosystem." It doesnt make the kind of connection I was looking for, but it does take a big look at the evolution of our computing and networking tools into their own digital ecosystem.

The article is from Issues Online in Science and Technology and was written by Carnegie Mellon University CIO Joel M. Smith and President Jared L. Cohon. They write in the context of looking for leadership strategies that work in the increasingly complex system of higher education IT."

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