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Business of IT >> More Than Money

6/27/2005

By Mikael Blaisdell

More Than Money

There is no question that there is money to be made by appropriate use of a school’s IT resources. “We have no problem in sharing our staff expertise for an hour or so with another school in a conference call,” explains LCC’s Cerny. “But when someone needs more than that—to do an install or an implementation— that’s when we put a proposal on the table. We did $200,000 to $400,000 worth of proposals over the last year, in combinations of helping, consulting assistance, and mentoring.” At Drexel, benefits are shared between the university and the client school (either schools of the university, or other schools and institutions contracting with Drexel University). “The economics work very well for us,” says Bielec. “We’re able to leverage each other in terms of our resources. We both end up with substantially more for the same amount of money.”

Small school, big services. According to Cerny, “Everybody has financial aid, registration, tuition to be collected; benefits and payroll; workloads to be tracked. It’s a very common set of functions.” Bielec agrees. “Students and parents are looking for the same functionality regardless of institution size. The difference? Smaller schools are trying to provide it with an IT staff of seven to 10, and a dozen servers. It’s almost an impossible task.”

By partnering with a larger institution, the available budget of the smaller school can buy much more than it could on its own. “The way the economics work in computing,” notes Bielec, “two plus two d'esn’t equal just four; you get closer to eight. For example, we have demonstrated in our relationship with Cabrini College [also in Philadelphia] that a school of two thousand students can offer those students access to the exact same services that a student at Drexel—a much larger institution of 15,000 students—receives.”

Real-world business acumen benefits. But beyond the immediate gain in budget dollars or ongoing royalty income streams into a school’s foundation, there are other very important benefits to be gained from “campused” outsourcing relationships. According to Dakota State’s Webster, “As a faculty member who has done this, who now has the direct experience of doing all of the things that are required to build and run a company, I can talk to my students about the real world; tell them what a real project is. I have an MBA, and that’s certainly valuable. But when you’re getting your MBA, you don’t actually go out and manage a trademark process all the way through, yourself. You don’t handle a C-corporation formation yourself, or set up a payroll process and negotiate with a service. When you set up this kind of outsourcing business, you get an education after your education. It really adds credibility beyond your degree. Now, if I need an example for a class, I can open up a real e-mail, and ask students: ‘Can you help me with this problem?’ It lets them see that what they are studying has implications for the next level, when they go out into the world. It also demonstrates that the faculty member who’s standing in front of the class is not just talking theory; he’s actually been in the trenches doing the work himself.”