Unless you’ve been on a very, very long vacation (or are one of the lucky few), you are currently facing budget cuts at your institution.
I know I wrote a lot about this lately, but I’m trying to find ways to help you weather that storm.
In a few days, my next University Business column to be published in the Februay issue will even provide you with some very practical tips to do more with less. And, you probably know by now that you can also register for Saving Big Webinars scheduled on February 4 & 5 to listen to 2 of your colleagues, Joe Hice from the University of Florida and Rachel Reuben from SUNY New Paltz, to find out about creative ways to save your institution big money while getting great results.
In the meantime, I’d like to share with you some of the notes I took while reading a very interesting and timely white paper written by Philip J. Goldstein and published as a 10-page PDF file by Educause this week:
Managing the Funding Gap:
How Today’s Economic Downturn Is Impacting IT Leaders and Their Organizations
This paper summarizes the discusssions that took place in December 2008 at an ECAR workshop for IT leaders.
What tactics have been implemented by IT leaders to cut costs?
Most approaches started with freezing open positions, cutting budgets for travel, discontinuing plans to expand services, and the cancellation of discretionary projects. As the budget situation has worsened, other tactics are also being implemented:
- Deployment of software to turn off desktop computers to reduce power consumption
- Accelerated plans to implement server virtualization, accompanied by increased server consolidation
- Retirement of underutilized technologies where viable alternatives exist (such as modem pools or legacy applications with small groups of users)
- Elimination of less-strategic or less widely used services
- Expanding use of videoconferencing as an alternative to travel
Is it all that bad? Aren’t there any opportunities out there?
However, some participants saw opportunity in the degree of challenge institutions face today. Perhaps never before have institutions and institutional leaders had more reason and need to try to work differently. Things that even a few months ago might have seemed politically impossible to accomplish now seem possible.
Winning strategies include:
- Rebalancing Services: rationalize services by centralizing IT services for bigger institutions.
- Sourcing Externally: explore open-source services, the cloud and collaboration with other institutions
- Targeted Operational Efficiency: focus on smallest projects that improve a particular business process to save money or increase productivity across the institution.
These participants believed that institutions would become more willing than they were in the past to make the changes required to benefit from technology.
[…]
Some IT leaders have been reticent to engage in collaborations or be early adopters of new technologies like cloud computing because their institutions had little tolerance for risk and provided little reward for innovation. Perhaps institutions, IT organizations, and IT leaders will now be more receptive to these risks.
So, there’s definitely an opportunity for Web professionals to push for more cost-effective solutions (aren’t all Web solutions more cost-effective by nature?) in institutions looking for ways to do more with less.
Have you managed to get approval lately on a project that you tried to push for months or years?
Tell us by posting a comment!
