What kind of investments will campuses need to make?
Like networking, middleware will require considerable commitments of time and money. However, the types of costs are different. Networking has required large sums of capital (for fiber, routers, switches, etc.) and considerable operating costs (for external access, maintenance, etc.) Personnel costs have been relatively modest. For middleware, the hardware costs (servers, readers, etc.) are likely to be relatively low. Software costs are unclear now, but there are clearly considerable expenses in building bridges to legacy systems and to evolving middleware-enabled applications. Unlike networking, middleware has a second major cost component: process time. A campus must develop consensus and support for the deployment of middleware, clarify data ownership and management issues, specify relationships among individuals, groups and information technology objects, establish legal agreements, and change the way that information is managed on the campus.
