Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
Business of IT >> More Than Money
6/27/2005
“Accounting is a critical piece,” agrees DSU’s Webster. “We’d go to a school and negotiate a contract with a C-level officer. Afterward, it was taken out of our hands and was managed by someone over in the university’s accounting department who would send them a bill. You never knew when or if it was done, or where the money went after it was paid. Basically, you’d make a sale, but there was no way to actually link that sale back to what was going into the project. This went on for the first couple of years, and then we started to get some standard green-bar accounting reports.”
Road Hazards
Universities and colleges have some definite advantages to offer, to each other and to private industry as well. But there can be drawbacks to some of those advantages, and they should be seriously considered by any school, before moving ahead.
Student workers. “Use of student workers creates some interesting challenges,” acknowledges Bradley. “They’re right at the start of their careers, so they’re inexperienced. Furthermore, our workforce is even more volatile than it is in the high-tech sector. Students will come in for a semester and work parttime; some work out, but some don’t. We had to deal with training on a continuous basis; getting new students up to speed only to see them move on after doing some months of good work.” GSU managed to turn that challenge into an asset. “With some of our projects, work comes in bursts, and then there’s nothing. So, when an employer needs some work done, we can call up some students who want to pick up a couple of weeks of work, going right from their classes to the lab in the same building. It works out well for everybody.”
Extra staff work. At LCC, Cerny d'esn’t use students for the projects; staff members are assigned as appropriate. “There’s definitely a challenge,” he says. “You’re bringing on more work, but what is the incentive for the IT staff to do it? The outside experience obviously gives staff members a broader range of expertise, and more exposure to best practices, so our staff definitely benefits that way. But the downside is that the incentive piece hasn’t been fully developed yet. Right now, when I send a staff person out to a new place, there’s really no extra compensation; they’re just at a different location for a week. At the same time, some of their work here d'esn’t just go away while they’re out.”
‘Ninja’ IT. “There are challenges,” says Webster at Dakota State. “We found that there are things that we needed to do for the clients that the school system won’t permit because it violates some protocols,” he recalls. “They can’t open up a little door [in the infrastructure] for you to go through, because when they do that, it puts the rest of their systems at risk. In order to solve that, we moved some systems off campus where we could access them remotely from off campus, non-institutional locations. We ended up with almost a ninja-IT group, running a separate IT organization within the larger organization, that could do things not possible within the institution’s systems. In the end, however, we had to move the operation to a separate data center.”
Moving Forward…
What d'es the future hold for these campus IT outsourcers? All four schools are upbeat about prospects.
Recommended Reading
- Tiffin U's New Online College to Use Pearson's eCollege for Course Management
Beginning this fall, students in Tiffin University's newest online program, Ivy Bridge College, will use eCollege, a course management system from Pearson, for all of their online courses. The 2,350-student Tiffin U is located in Tiffin, OH and offers both on-campus and online classes. Since 2005, those online courses have been managed through Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution.
- California Community Colleges Adopt SunGard Banner Software
California's Rio Hondo College and Sierra College have selected software from the Banner Unified Digital Campus and other solutions from SunGard Higher Education to help address their growing enrollments and to help improve student retention and services.
- Luidia Releases eBeam Interact 2.1 for Interactive Whiteboards
Luidia has released a new version its eBeam software for use with classroom-based interactive projection environments. eBeam Interact 2.1 offers both new and upgraded features, including enhanced screen recording and a comprehensive online image gallery, as well as the company's Scrapbook Image Writer feature.
- McGill U Library Scanning Rare Books with Kirtas
McGill University Library in Montreal will be using a Kirtas Technologies APT BookScan 2400RA to digitize its collections. The company says that the 2400RA is capable of acquiring page images at the rate of 2,400 pages per hour. The library will be working with Ristech, a Canadian reseller, to implement the digitization solution.
- Ball State U Web Sites Now Managed with Sitecore
Ball State University in Muncie, IN has gone public regarding its deployment of a Web site content management system from Sitecore. Ball State chose Sitecore's software to revamp its 220-plus sites, integrating common new media applications and garnering a next-generation user experience that has won several awards from education and new media marketing organizations. Now, Ball State maintains uniformity across all university Web sites and said it has enhanced its recruiting efforts through the site's new look and interface.
- Bio-Key Launches Emergency Alert Platforms for Schools
Bio-Key International has announced the release of two new emergency alert and management solutions for the education market. MobileSRO is designed specifically for the K-12 environment, while MobileCampus caters to higher education and other campus-based organizations.
