Maintaining What You've Got + the Ability to Innovate = Not Easy
Whether you call it the ability to "innovate" or "flexibility,"
maintaining it is important to everyone in higher education IT. Unfortunately,
if IT budgets stall out and don't increase, there is an inevitable shrinkage
in the ability to innovate (or to be flexible)--because the maintenance function
of our jobs is constantly there and d'esn't shrink as fast as funding might.
So, we try to save money on existing programs. We try to eliminate existing
programs. (Very hard to do when others are invested in them.) We seek out grants
to gain flexibility and engage in innovation. We lobby our bosses for smaller
decreases and more increases. We tax our students with fees for IT; sometimes
they ask or demand to be taxed with fees for IT. We worry about keeping things
running and also about being "out there" in terms of institutional
prestige.
A recent report from ECAR, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, titled
"Information Technology Funding in Higher Education" has just been
published. ECAR's been doing a great job of conducting and reporting on relevant
research and I especially like the way that although they work on a subscription
model where institutions either subscribe to full reports or purchase them,
ECAR--no doubt due to the influence of Richard Katz, the EDUCAUSE vice president
responsible for ECAR--ensures that it also publishes very informative summaries,
called "Key Findings." The Key Findings are not mere inducements to
purchase--instead, they are useful documents in and of themselves. I highly
recommend that you read this latest Key
Findings document.
This ECAR report is based on a substantial literature review, a quantitative
survey of EDUCAUSE members *and* a quantitative survey of NACUBO members (National
Association of College and University Business Officers--its members are CBOs/CFOs;
chief business officers/chief financial officers), as well as qualitative interviews
with appropriate individuals and some in-depth case studies.
One interesting finding from a comparison of the CIOs and the CBOs is that
CBOs believe that their institution is actively managing all IT spending, even
if such spending d'es not come from a fully-centralized budget. CIOs think otherwise.
More importantly, it appears that CBOs--when compared to CIOs from the same
institution, as was the case above--are far more convinced than are CIOs that
"the base IT budget increases sufficiently to maintain new technology.
As the report notes, this is a difference of opinion that is significant in
real life, not just statistically interesting.
Other findings include the discovery that larger institutions, when trying
to contain costs, are more likely than are smaller ones to conflate duplicate
IT groups on campus. On the other hand, smaller institutions are more likely
to use outsourcing to contain costs.
Probably the most important finding, something that needs to be repeated and
repeated until we all have it internalized, is that before implementing any
new technologies, campuses must have accurate estimates of the ongoing costs
of maintaining those new technologies. In other words, just like the green building
people are now looking at the complete life cycle costs of designing, building,
occupying, and maintaining buildings--IT staffers need to look at full life
cycle costs of the implementation of new technologies, including training and
process reorientation costs.
So, find those dollars, cut those costs, keep things running, and be sure that
you have the funds to do something new and exciting once in a while!
