Campus/Vendor Partnering: The Ultimate Win-Win
Ah, teamwork. It’s the secret to all great sports
teams, the recipe for just about all of
humankind’s greatest accomplishments. In
the world of academia as well, teaming
and forging partnerships for success is no less crucial.
And while it’s true that some colleges and universities
have the resources and wherewithal to
innovate independently, they represent only a handful
of the 4,000-plus institutions of higher ed across the
country today. To engineer change, the majority of
US academic institutions generally have found that
they need help from others: statewide systems, consortia,
and consultants. And in the case of technology
implementation, they need help from technology
vendors and solution providers. Three institutions
profiled here—the
University of California-Santa
Barbara;
DePauw University (IN); and
Dutchess
Community College (NY)—have recently turned to
solution-provider partners for assistance with groundbreaking
IT strategies and technology rollouts. In
each case, the partnerships resulted in impressive victories
on and off the ledger sheet, and innovations that
have dramatically changed daily operations and function
on each campus.
A Parked Improvement
Parking revenues are an important source of dollars for many colleges and universities,
especially metropolitan schools, but the challenges of on-campus parking are
universal as well. The math behind the conundrum is simple: not enough spaces,
too many cars.
Until July 2003, such was the case at the University of California-Santa Barbara,
one of the largest public institutions of higher ed in the West. With nearly
25,000 students, faculty, and staff members, and only 6,000 parking spots, parking
during the weekdays at the central California school was an endeavor that could
last nearly as long as a standard lecture. Most of the 30 lots on campus were
administered by three manned kiosks at campus entrances, which meant that users
had to wait in their cars at the kiosk to buy a permit, then wait in lines in
various lots for available spots. Compounding the problem were those students
who refused to stay out of faculty lots, parking illegally and praying to the
parking gods that campus parking enforcement officials didn’t catch on.
“The situation on campus was pretty bad,” admits Tom Roberts, the school’s
director of Transportation and Parking Services. “We knew there simply had to
be a better way.”
Roberts set out to find that better way in July 2002, researching alternatives
to the kiosk system that would eliminate the long lines they caused and reduce
the school’s annual expenditure of $300,000 to staff them. He turned to the
International Parking Institute
for inspiration, and found the names of literally dozens of vendors who specialize
in helping public entities such as colleges and municipalities overcome their
parking w'es. Roberts produced scores of requests for proposals (RFPs) for systems
and technology that might help UCSB park its parking problems in the past. Finally,
after nearly a year of research, investigation, and competitive bidding, the
school turned to two vendors from Canada for a $1.4 million system that saved
the day.
By the beginning of 2003, a transformation was underway. The first phase of
the solution revolved around 50 solarpowered pay stations from Vancouver-based
Digital Payment Technologies.
DPT installed the pay stations on campus and set up wireless access points to
link them together over a campuswide wireless network. The second phase of the
project focused on expanding the convenience of electronic payment into the
hands of every parker. To accomplish this, Verrus,
another Vancouver firm, worked to merge UCSB’s physical pay station approach
with software that enables users to pay for parking remotely, from any standard
mobile device.
Today, the systems work together seamlessly. Campus drivers park their cars,
note the space numbers on their parking spaces, and settle up at a pay station
or from their phones, via a toll-free number. To pay, users simply enter their
parking space number and select the amount of time they think they’ll need to
park. At the machine, users pay by cash, credit card, or debit account through
their student ID card. Via cell phone, parking is automatically billed to a
credit card (users must first register online). When a user’s parking time is
about to expire, he can go to any pay station on campus and add more time. If
the user paid by cell phone, he will receive a text message five minutes prior
to expiration, asking him if he wants to extend the time.
Behind the scenes, all parking transaction information is stored in DPT data
bases, and is updated in real time as users come and go. Roberts says the immediacy
of this system design has paid huge dividends, particularly in the area of enforcement.
UCSB parking patrol officers are now equipped with personal digital assistants
(PDAs) that send them up-to-the-minute information on expired parking spaces
so they can head right to the offending vehicles and write tickets. The result:
Revenue from parking tickets is up 20 percent, not because parkers are more
apt to let time expire (it’s actually easier for them to prevent time expiration),
but because the parking patrol officers can proceed right to the offending vehicles,
without hunting for them. Coupled with an overall 26 percent rise in parking
revenue, and an initial savings of $250,000 (both in equipment and staffing
dollars) from closing the original kiosks, Roberts says the success of the campus/
vendor partnership has exceeded his wildest dreams.
“When I wrote the bid spec, I had no idea we could get something that actually
made parking on campus easier,” he says, adding that between savings and expenditures,
the system will have paid for itself by March 2006. “But thanks in a large part
to those two vendors from Canada, this implementation truly has been a wonderful
surprise.”
Knowledge Is Power
While the UCSB partnerships emerged out of necessity, the relationship between
DePauw University and educational software vendor DyKnow
developed in a far different environment.
It all started in the late 1990s,
when Dave Berque, a DePauw professor of computer science, set out to find a
way to get students to do more in class than simply take notes. Berque hit the
drawing board and developed prototype pen-based software designed to allow teachers
and students to solve problems collaboratively through software that works across
a host of devices including desktops, laptops, PDAs, and tablet PCs. Soon, Berque
was piloting his software in his own classes, using his students as focus groups
to tweak and test the product in order to iron out the kinks.
Originally, Berque’s software copied the content an instructor wrote on any
electronic whiteboard, and automatically transmitted it to all of the student
machines. Berque figured that students could add value to the notes by saving
them, playing them back, and learning through the process of repetition. Over
time, however, the program evolved naturally. In more recent iterations, for
instance, instructors can pose problems to the students, and students can use
their pens to sketch or detail solutions in real time. Another feature, DyKnow
Monitor, allows instructors to limit the applications students can run during
class, or even “blank out” student screens, if there is a need to do so. In
this age of Internet surfing and instant messaging, the goal is to minimize
distractions (now a critical issue) and help students focus on the subject at
hand.
“As I tried the software on my own students, I realized that interactivity
was only part of the equation,” says Berque, looking back. “In order to keep
students involved, you first need to be able to make sure they’re paying attention
to you.”
Finally, in 2002, a DePauw alum caught wind of Berque’s technology and decided
to finance the software to build a company around it. The company, Dynamic Knowledge
Transfer LLC, or DyKnow (based not far from DePauw in Indianapolis) licensed
the program from Berque and began preparing it for market, hiring technologists
to improve and expand the software here and there. Berque a consultant for DyKnow,
was charged with evolving the educational focus. The company even partnered
with DePauw to support the widespread testing of Berque’s product in other areas
of the university—in economics, for instance, to help students with graphs,
and in Japanese language classes, where stroke-by-stroke replays of Kanji characters
help students understand how to construct the symbols.
The following year, the company released a two-pronged commercial iteration
of the product known as the DyKnow Software Suite. Under the terms of the relationship,
DyKnow committed to continue to work closely with DePauw to improve the software
every year, an arrangement that benefits both entities: DyKnow gets valuable
data from its users about how the software works, and DePauw students get to
use the software in class, free of charge. Other benefits of the partnership
include constant input and feedback to the DyKnow team from DePauw students
and faculty, beta testing of future releases of DyKnow at DePauw, research projects
at DePauw that can inform DyKnow project development, internships and full-time
job opportunities at DyKnow for DePauw students, and hosting DyKnow user group
meetings at DePauw.
Other schools now take full advantage of the primary DePauw/DyKnow partnership,
developing campus/vendor partnerships of their own; and DyKnow Software Suite
deployments—some enhanced with $80 digital graphics tablets—are now found in
learning environments at elementary, secondary, graduate, and post-graduate
levels in many states. Specifically, the DyKnow system has been deployed at
college campuses of varying size, on various hardware platforms, including standard
desktop and laptop computers (sometimes augmented with graphics tablets), on
video tablets, and on tablet PCs. Today, Berque says he “can’t believe” how
far his software program has come, and hails his relationship with DyKnow as
a key accelerator for the application’s enthusiastic acceptance in the world
of academic technology.
“Although I was able to prototype precursors to the software while working
at DePauw, the current commercial system g'es far beyond what would have been
possible to develop and support without the backing of the experienced and professional
team at DyKnow,” he says. “In my opinion, research teams comprised of university
faculty and students are effective at researching new ideas and prototyping
solutions. However, the development, maintenance, and support of a commercial
product require corporate backing.”
Procurement Help
In the world of higher education institutions, growth is generally a good thing,
but it often presents unwelcome complications. Officials at Dutchess Community
College (NY) found themselves faced with such a paradox recently when, after
years of escalating enrollment, the school’s IT systems were tottering under
an aging technology infrastructure that lacked the storage capacity to handle
new applications and the large number of users needing to access them. The problem
came to a head in September 2004, when a critical server crashed and faculty
members couldn’t access their files for a week. No data was lost, but faculty
frustration with the infrastructure was at an alltime high. DCC officials knew
they had to act quickly to find a long-term solution and prevent the same kind
of debacle from occurring again.
Campus officials got to work immediately. Recognizing that the technology issues
surrounding the college’s growth would not go away, they worked with IBM
to complete an IBM Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) solution workshop to understand
inherent costs and how to prioritize relevant activities. Through this process,
DCC officials concluded they needed to replace the switches, routers, cabling,
and servers attached to the institution’s data communications network, as well
as switch the school’s aging operating system to a new one from Microsoft
Corp. In addition, school officials planned to migrate administrative functions
(including purchasing, student accounts, financial aid, and registration) to
the SunGard SCT Banner
enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suite.
“We knew exactly what we wanted to do with our infrastructure,” says Jay Simpson,
the school’s director of Telecommunication. “For us, the big problems were that
we didn’t know what specific technology we needed, and we didn’t know how to
go about getting the technology for our people to install.”
Simpson and his colleagues found an answer to those questions in CDW-G,
technology products and services provider to government and education. Representatives
from the company came to campus in May 2004 and sat down with DCC officials
to hammer out a procurement and implementation strategy for the future. Over
the next few months, the CDW-G account team worked in tandem with IBM to help
DCC select the best technology solutions to meet its needs. Together, the organizations
chose 14 IBM XSeries servers to replace DCC’s aging boxes, and opted for four
Cisco 1200 wireless access
points, as well. DCC also standardized on IBM ThinkCentre workstations, Lexmark
and HP printers, as well as
NEC data projectors, all through
CDW-G.
With CDW-G’s help, DCC was able to complete the hardware installation four
months after the project began. Today, the college is deploying the new IBM
desktops and, across campus, is migrating from its earlier systems to Microsoft.
So far, say school administrators, the new infrastructure has worked wonders,
facilitating a common storage area that allows faculty and students to save
large files centrally. In addition, the new network allows DCC to improve security
by keeping student traffic isolated from the administrative traffic on the network
through separate Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) that map workstations by
type of user. According to Simpson, the infrastructure also has ushered in hot
new high-bandwidth applications such as streaming media to improve teaching
and collaboration on campus.
“Ultimately, we’d like students to be able to go to our streaming media catalog,
click on a title, and immediately be able to stream video to their PC,” says
Simpson. “We could never even think of doing something like that without the
help of vendor partners to make it all come to life.”
Partnering for Dollars
A new online auction vendor helps schools raise money fast.
Historically, when schools needed to raise money online, they could do it independently, or by outsourcing, with the help of an auction management firm. Now, however, there’s a third option: partnering with Cambridge, MA-based cMarket (www.cmarket.com), a fledgling firm that provides the templates and Web space for a school’s online auction. The company also provides easy-to-fill-out templates for helping an institution create its own auction Web site, catalog, and e-mail blasts that it can then extend to its constituency. In general, schools are responsible for all the content on the site—catalog items, sponsorships, and more. All cMarket d'es is provide the engine for fundraising.
“We’re about putting your auction into the inbox of your constituents,” says Greg McHale, founder and executive VP of the firm.“Our whole goal is to make it easier for schools to run fundraisers on their own and establish additional streams of revenue.”
As McHale explains, this kind of campus/ vendor partnership is not hard to fund—financing is built in: cMarket takes a cut of the net profit after cost, which usually works out to be between 5 and 9 percent, depending on what a school raises. Importantly, the organization d'esn’t take any cuts from sponsorships schools collect, an aspect that makes the cMarket alternative quite a bit cheaper than managing an auction through an auction site like eBay, which takes roughly 10 percent.
The company also extends to schools the benefits of its relationships with other vendors, a feature called “cMarketplace” which provides high-ticket items at a reduced cost to nonprofits. If a subscribing school d'esn’t sell these items, the school d'esn’t have to pay for them; they’re simply returned to the vendors. Hannah Croasmun, Special Events & Donor Research coordinator for Dwight Hall at Yale University (CT), says the marketplace option simply makes the cMarket service flexible.
“We did not bring in as much money as we originally hoped, but we did raise enough to substantially help our budget,” Croasmun says. “The good vibes from those who had participated convinced us that this could be a good special fundraiser for us throughout the year.” Bake sale and car wash organizers, watch out.