Technology Replacement Planning: How Refreshing!

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Technology Replacement Planning: How Refreshing!

6/27/2006

By Matt Villano

At the end of the two years, a student can purchase the laptop permanently, if desired, for $50, or remain in the program and get a new laptop to use over the next two years. Coppin also purchases threeyear warranties on its laptops, so that if a student in the program chooses to refresh after two years and keep the new laptop after graduation, the computer will still be covered under warranty for another full year. El-Haggan says the refresh program empowers students and makes them feel as if they have options.

“Coppin also is able to help address the digital divide,” he says, “as students can take their laptops home for their studies, and to share with their families.”

Still, with all of the program’s benefits, the university has faced challenges. Some students simply are unable to support even the reduced costs involved in the ownership program. To address this issue, the institution developed a loaner program of used computers from those students who have chosen to refresh. El-Haggan says this program still allows financially strapped students the opportunity to have access to laptops on campus. He adds that faculty members also benefit from the loaner program if they do not own a laptop or if they require one for travel.

Tech Refresh Q & A

TECHNOLOGY REFRESH is nothing new at Creighton University (NE), where Brian Young, VP of IT, oversees an annual program through which the institution refreshes hundreds of Lenovo laptops and tablet PCs.We recently caught up with Young to chat about the effort.

How would you describe your school’s approach to refresh?
Many campuses look at refresh as a deferred maintenance program. Typically, these schools have been left to fend for themselves instead of aggressively figuring out a university-wide solution. But it d'esn’t have to be like that. Here we have built in cycles for a four-year refresh program and priced the technologies aggressively so that students don’t go out and buy their own things. We’re now hearing that individuals would like to refresh their equipment every two years, so we need to be flexible.

What do you do if students want to refresh more frequently?
At Creighton, students can refresh sooner than four years, but it’s at a cost to them. If they’d like to sell their computer to a particular individual, they can, and then they can buy a new one from us. Still, there really is no need to refresh any more frequently than every four years here.We’ve built our machines to accommodate all sorts of new hardware; they’re flexible enough to accept added memory, disk drives, and other options. Truthfully, only the high-end users want to refresh regularly.

How do you handle it if something g'es wrong with a machine?
Maintenance is included in the cost of the laptops, and generally runs about $1,500 apiece.We also have accident protection built into the purchase program, which means that students can come to us with a computer in pieces and we make sure they have a loaner. That’s all at no additional charge. Very few places will provide four years of on-site warranty, but we do. In the long run, we feel that kind of service is worthwhile, to keep students happy with the program we offer.

How will the release of Microsoft’s Vista impact the refresh cycle?
Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 are due out in January of next year.We’ll probably roll them out in March, and then include them on machines that we buy as part of our refresh later that fall. We’ll be flexible for other options, though.We’ve seen some campuses work out a refresh program where schools can buy back computers to distribute something new. That could be a possibility for us as well, provided the demand is there.

Another big problem for Coppin has been usage. In recent years, IT officials noticed that some students in the ownership program were not bringing their laptops to campus. Program administrators spoke to students and faculty to find out why this was the case, and discovered that many students found it cumbersome to carry around both laptops and textbooks/ class materials. To make it easier for students to lug around equipment and materials, the university began offering a specially designed backpack with one compartment for a laptop and another for books. Today, 65 percent of the more than 400 students in the laptop ownership program use the backpack.

“We’ve received great response [to the backpack program],” says El-Haggan, who notes that the total cost per year for laptop and backpack equipment is about $130,000, including costs covered by grants to the institution. Overall, he adds, “the laptop [refresh] program has changed everything about computing on campus.”