The Right Spend

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Technology & the Community College

The Right Spend

2/1/2008

By Matt Villano

FOR SANTA BARBARA CITY COLLEGE, purchasing a new technology rather than expanding an existing one saved money. Whereas additional staff would have to be found, hired, and trained to support the expansion, the new purchase eliminated those needs.

5) Calculate Management Costs

Before investing in a particular technology, it's important to consider unseen operational costs: Crunch some numbers and determine exactly how much the technology is going to cost to operate over time, say the pundits. With some products, this process can be as simple as calculating monthly service or maintenance fees and amortizing them over the course of a year. With other products, the equation can be more complex, and may require IT directors to factor in the cost of hiring full-time employees.

Such was the case last year at Santa Barbara City College (CA), where in September 2007, administrators were in the market for new document management software. At first, Paul Bishop, VP for information technology, looked into expanding the college's Novell implementation to include an individual folder for every student. When he did the math though, Bishop realized this approach would require him to hire at least one additional systems administrator at a salary of somewhere around $75,000 per year.

This salary, coupled with the price of the technology itself, forced Bishop to seek out more cost-effective alternatives: One of them was a customizable content management software solution from Xythos. Bishop says the solution was so easy to install and manage that he was able to have one of his existing systems administrators handle it for only an additional five hours each month. By juggling job responsibilities among other staffers, he has been able to integrate the new system without bringing on another SA- and even without paying overtime to existing staff.

"We often have money available for buying technology in any given year, but to make an ongoing commitment to find, hire, and train additional staff is a little harder to do," he explains. "This way, we were able to add a new technology without having to add more personnel. The value in that is irrefutable."