1 Year of CIT – 60 Years in the Service of Study, Research, Teaching and Administration
Even if the name is still young, the Centre for Information Technology (CIT) will be 60 years old in 2024. A long time in an industry that has always developed rapidly. What is new today is already outdated tomorrow and yet often has a formative influence on society. A look at the past decades shows this very impressively: tube and mainframe computers in the 60s, PCs in the 80s, the Internet in the 90s and 2000s, mobility, social media and cloud services in the 2010s, and now? Artificial intelligence.
Manoeuvring an institution like the CIT through these waters requires foresight and an unshakeable ability to change. Because nothing stays the same, that much is certain. All the more so if, like the CIT, you are at the cutting edge of research. Fortunately, there are still some constants: Prof. Dr Raimund Vogl is only the fourth director to join the team – the CIT has even had more names. For 17 years, the physicist in Münster has been particularly committed to the national and international networking of university IT – e.g. within the framework of ZKI, dini, DH.NRW, DFN, EUNIS – and to co-operations for the development of research services. Numerous successful projects at state level – including initiatives for high-performance computing, research environments, data storage and data versioning – speak for themselves.
When it comes to supporting study programmes, teaching and university administration, the perspective is also always future-oriented and geared towards the ongoing digital transformation. Processes and structures at the university must not only be rethought, but also reliably designed. A guiding principle here is digital sovereignty, i.e. the ability to design, control and protect digital processes, data and systems in a self-determined manner. At the same time, new solutions should be flexibly adaptable and user- and cost-orientated. An important step towards more digitalisation in teaching is, for example, the establishment of a new e-examination centre – an area in which we need to catch up.
As a key driver of technological progress, artificial intelligence (AI) will also be the focus of university IT at the University of Münster in the coming years. With its wide range of potential applications, AI promises to increase the effectiveness of administrative processes as well as the quality and attractiveness of teaching and learning programmes. The CIT aims to shape this area in an informed, responsible and confident manner through interdisciplinary collaboration. A first step is the university's own chatbot UniGPT, which is already in use. AI is both a problem and a solution for IT security, an area of work that is already under massive pressure due to the immense number of cyberattacks. In addition to efficient but also appropriate security measures, the credo from above also applies here: foresight and adaptability.