Follow the Money

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Opinion

Follow the Money

9/26/2003

By Kenneth C. Green

It was some three decades ago, during the Watergate era, that Deep Throat told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward he had to “follow the money” to understand the scandal. But long before Watergate, public policy professors and analysts knew that money reveals a lot about organizational behavior and institutional priorities.

Following the money that colleges and universities spend on computing and information technology has always been difficult. But years ago, the organization of computing into highly centralized academic and administrative units followed traditional, indeed rigid budget models that offered some opportunity to track core IT expenditures.

Today, however, computing and information technologies are ubiquitous across academe. Engineering and English professors exchange informed opinions about product preferences. Engineering and English departments also purchase lots of their own technology—computers, software, servers, and other stuff—often independent of the traditional “central” campus computing centers.

I’ve long maintained that we would need a small team of forensic accountants to know just how much any college really spends on computing and information technology. We might also need a team of forensic HR specialists to determine just how many people on campus are doing IT work—ranging from operations and management to systems, security, and user support.

But now we have a new resource from the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service to help us understand more about the structure and complexity of campus IT operations.

EDUCAUSE launched the Core Data Service to collect and provide benchmarking data about IT budgets, staffing, organizational structure, and related issues. The target audience was campus CIOs; indeed, since June, CIOs at institutions participating in the original survey had access to the data to create custom reports comparing their institutions to self-selected peer institutions in the Core Data Service database.

But the new EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Summary Report, out this month (www.educause.edu/coredata), presents these data to a larger audience audience—faculty, administrators, policy analysts, researchers, and others outside of campus IT offices who are interested in IT issues on their campuses and across the academic community.

Drawing on data from 561 U.S. colleges and universities and 65 universities outside the United Core Data Summary Report offers many interesting (and some will say surprising) insights into money and personnel matters affecting campus IT operations. For example, across all sectors of U.S. higher education, personnel expenditures account for about half of the budget of centralized campus IT organizations. In contrast, colleges generally spend about 80 percent of the total campus budget on personnel.

The report reveals that IT budgets vary dramatically across sectors, depending on how the budgets are measured. Research universities spend almost three times more on IT per FTE student than do community colleges. However, and somewhat surprisingly, when IT resources are measured in terms of FTE faculty expenditures, the variability is significantly less, shrinking to about 50 percent more per FTE faculty in research universities than in community colleges.