At SWITCH the future is already starting today
SWITCH is leaving nothing to chance in making sure that, for many years to come, it will still be able to offer the Swiss universities precisely the services they need. As part of a project examining long-term development prospects (LEP), experts are helping us analyse what technological challenges are likely to be coming our way in future.
The story so far
The question at the heart of the long-term development prospects is the role that information and communication technology is going to play for the Swiss universities in future. It is only once we have an answer to that question that we will then also be able to define what the requirements of the universities will be. In order to find this out, independent experts carried out an investigation back at the beginning of 2008 into possible trends that were likely to appear in this area in the medium-to-long term. This was followed by a conference with the title "SWITCH the future on", at which numerous SWITCH stakeholders presented the scenarios they had drawn up for the future. This conference was attended by a large number and great variety of participants, representing numerous fields of interest, and they included students, a business woman and a politician.
Next steps
The statutory bodies of the SWITCH Foundation are currently working intensively on the next phase in the LEP process. This involves establishing what strategic goals SWITCH must set for itself if it is to be fit to face up to the scenarios just mentioned. What is the background to this, you may be asking? The answer is that we want to be sure that we have the right strategy for our portfolio of university services to remain in line with their needs for a long time to come and for that portfolio to remain as technologically forward-looking as it always has been.