From the issue dated October 4, 2002
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10 Ways Colleges Can Cut IT Costs
ALSO SEE: Colloquy: Join an online discussion on whether colleges should try to cut their spending on information technology. 1. Create Limits or Rules for Students' Printouts
And free printing wastes more than paper: At institutions like Dartmouth College, where students send more than six million pages a year to public printers, it can be a financial drain. Before it changed its printing system this spring, Dartmouth was spending $250,000 annually to maintain its printers and supply them with paper and toner. Even at institutions with smaller printing costs, the money adds up. The University of Arizona saw support costs for its public printers rise from $20,000 to $50,000 over a five-year period. "That's a full-time staff person," says Barbara Hoffman, associate director of the university's Center for Computing and Information Technology. In an effort to cut paper usage and expenses, Dartmouth has replaced its two main printing stations -- to which students working from their rooms often sent the same jobs simultaneously -- with a set of printer clusters placed in busy locations across campus. To print at the new clusters, students send documents to a centralized queue on the campus computer network. When they arrive at a cluster, they type in identification numbers and passwords to complete printing. If they never make it to a cluster, their documents are not printed and the files are eventually eliminated from the queue. Under the new program, wasted paper is down to about 5 percent from more than 30 percent of the overall output, says S. Bradley Noblet, technical director of Dartmouth's computer services. Dartmouth intends to keep public printing free, but a number of larger institutions -- including Arizona -- are requiring students to pay small per-page fees by swiping identification cards at printing stations. Ms. Hoffman says that Arizona's fee of 10 cents per page subsidizes its paper costs -- and encourages students to think before they hit the "Print" button. -- Brock Read 2. Cap the Bandwidth Available in Dormitories
Kenneth R. Orgill, associate provost for information technology at West Virginia University, would love to be able to ban students' recreational use of bandwidth. "I was just online doing some research today," he says. The university's Internet connection, he says, is "terribly slow -- worse than it was last year." But Mr. Orgill doesn't think he can. He doesn't know of any way to distinguish illegitimate or illegal file sharing from academic work. He fears that investigating the content of traffic on the network could expose him to legal liabilities. West Virginia University faces the same bandwidth headaches as many other universities. Mr. Orgill bets that much of the university's Internet traffic, especially that going to and coming from the dormitories, is not scholarly research but song-swapping and video downloads -- and that is money down the drain, as far as he is concerned. During the day, the residential networks suck up no more than 40 percent of the university's total bandwidth, thanks to a cap imposed on the traffic by the university. But in the evening and at night, when that cap is removed, residential traffic swells to consume almost all of the available bandwidth, for which the university pays about $136,000 a year. That is golden treatment for those in the dorms. Of the 30,000 students at the university, only 4,000 live on the campus, but between their daytime and nighttime usage, they are devouring a hugely disproportionate share of the institution's bandwidth. Among students, the daytime restrictions on traffic are unpopular. Candidates for student government frequently promise to get the caps removed, although none have succeeded so far. For now, Mr. Orgill has invited companies to bid on a new Internet-service contract with the university. He hopes to increase the institution's online capacity and perhaps pay a little less. "The bandwidth comes down to pure dollars and cents," he says. "If I knew that there was a finite amount that would keep the students happy, I could probably fund that. But I could keep loading bandwidth on, and it would never be enough." -- Scott Carlson 3. End Free Dial-Up Modem Service
University modem pools used to be the easiest -- and the cheapest -- way for students and professors to get online. With private companies offering high-speed Internet access in many areas, however, the need for university dial-up networks is severely diminished. But because some users still depend on them, many institutions continue to provide the service, even though they could save money by closing the modems down. The university would not reveal how much it spends on a contract with Qwest to provide the modem service. The institution does spend about $20,000 a year for staff members to maintain the 2,016 modem lines for off-campus students, says John Miller, associate director for networking and telecom services. Shih-Pau Yen, deputy chief information officer of academic computing and network services at the University of Minnesota, says students wouldn't be pleased if the service were taken away. But he doesn't recommend that any institution begin providing free modem use now. "Use the outside Internet providers instead," he says. "They're cheaper." But the modem pool is popular. Although students could pay a private company for high-speed Internet access, they can't beat the deal that the Twin Cities campus offers, even though it is slow, 56K service. "Nobody turns down free stuff," Mr. Yen says. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities isn't alone. According to the Campus Computing Project, 61.3 percent of public universities offer off-campus dial-up service for no fee. Universities shouldn't be in the business of being their students' Internet service providers, says Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project. But at those institutions that already are, trying to cancel the service is likely to prompt a chorus of complaints, he says. "They've offered it for years, and some would say it's an entitlement," Mr. Green says. "For campuses, it's a losing proposition." -- Dan Carnevale 4. Stop Investing in Phone Systems Students Won't Use
It wasn't welcome news for the university, which is located in Salisbury, Md., and is part of Maryland's state-university system. In June 2000, the university spent $850,000 to upgrade a telephone switch called a private branch exchange, anticipating that the new switch would be the most efficient way to provide long-distance service to 1,800 students and 800 staff and faculty members. The PBX operates like a computer, running software that routes telephone traffic to different lines, tracking how long individuals spend on the phone, and billing students for telephone usage. It is a costly process, however. The system's annual personnel costs will total $110,000 for the 2003 fiscal year, says Jerome Waldron, Salisbury's chief information officer. The university expected to generate revenue from students' long-distance calls that could be used to offset the cost of installing and maintaining the PBX. But it didn't anticipate how commonplace it would be for students to place long-distance calls using cellphones. Mr. Waldron says the university's revenue from long-distance calls dropped 42 percent from the 2001 fiscal year to the 2002 fiscal year. Many other colleges that installed PBX's within the last few years are facing a similar problem. "This probably will be our last switch," says Mr. Waldron, "So when it ages, we will not replace it." What will come next? Internet-protocol telephony, a system for routing telephone traffic over the Internet, he says. -- Andrea L. Foster 5. Work With Other Colleges to Sign Joint Licenses for Software
To afford the rising costs of developing and managing Web-based courses, Kent State University officials agreed to create a joint online-learning center with the University of Akron, a competing institution located 17 miles away. Joining forces on the learning center permits Akron's two campuses, with a total of 24,000 students, and Kent State's eight campuses, with 30,000, to share a single license for WebCT Vista, the new version of WebCT's course-management software, says Thomas Gaylord, chief information officer at the University of Akron's main campus. Instead of spending a total of about $519,000 for two separate WebCT Vista licenses, the institutions together saved 52 percent by buying one license for a combined student population of just under 60,000 students -- for about $249,000. The universities split the cost of two Sun Microsystems servers, a $72,000 expense. They also divided the cost of a $76,000 Oracle database license and a portion of the salaries for an Oracle database administrator and a system administrator. The institutions split a monthly network expense of $2,600 for a gigabit-Ethernet connection between their campuses. And each contributed six Web-course developers to the service center, which creates online course materials that both institutions can use. Through the service center, both universities can provide Web-based courses for less than $4 per student per year for the next five years. Separately, the courses would have cost them $10 per student per year, Mr. Gaylord says. He and Don Tolliver, vice president for information services at Kent State, say they expect the service center to help them absorb the rising costs of technology without sacrificing their academic ambitions. Says Mr. Gaylord: "We're not doing anything but trying to preempt what would have been much higher costs to get into the next generation of academic courseware." -- Florence Olsen 6. Use Students to Handle Help-Desk Questions at Night
Many colleges are hiring additional staff members and paying outside vendors to keep their help desks open later and later. Some even offer 24/7 support. But St. Norbert officials say the demand for overnight computer help on their campus is small, with an average of five messages per night. That doesn't justify the cost of an all-night help desk. To help the late-night crammers, St. Norbert employs students to answer computer questions from 4:30 p.m. to about 1 a.m. The students troubleshoot simple problems and record the more serious issues for the professional staff members to tackle the next morning. Staff members answer most of the held-over questions within a day. For many colleges, limiting the hours of the computer help desk not only could save money, but also could adequately cover all but a handful of students' help requests, some campus-computing experts say. "Twenty-four/seven, just in terms of the cost, may be extreme," says Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project. Despite the popular image of a college student sipping coffee at night in the dark and staring at a flickering computer monitor to finish a term paper, most students actually get a lot of work done between classes during the day. Campus-computing officials say fewer students need high-powered computing help at night than during regular office hours. "We help more people during those hours," says John Beck, director of computer services at St. Norbert. "Plus, I have staff that's awake." A few institutions, such as the University of Maryland University College, provide 24-hour computer help -- often for distance-education students who must fit in their studying whenever they can. And some companies, such as IntelliMark, offer to outsource such services for colleges. Mr. Beck wouldn't estimate how much it would cost to offer St. Norbert students all-day, all-night computer support, but the Wisconsin college would probably have to triple the size of its staff to answer questions into the wee hours of the night. The night shift, he said, would be underworked compared with its daytime counterpart. And once a college offers all-night service, it would never be able to cancel it without angering students, he says. As it stands, he says, "they know what our hours are, and they know when to call us," Mr. Beck says. And what do they do at other times? "An awful lot of the assistance comes from roommates," Mr. Beck says. But that's not necessarily a good thing, says Chris Brown, a microcomputer support specialist at the college. "Sometimes some bad advice gets spread around." -- Dan Carnevale 7. Remember That the Dot-Com Boom in IT Salaries Is Over
So when a college has an opening for an information-technology specialist, it can be flooded with dozens of qualified applicants. Only three years ago, it would have been lucky to get half a dozen applicants. What's more, applicants also have lower expectations for salaries. Still, some colleges are paying information-technology specialists as if the dot-com bust never happened. Before making offers to potential employees, one former administrator says, colleges should review the salaries of information-technology experts in and outside of academe to be sure the offers aren't higher than they need to be. "I would surmise that if they were hiring on a clean slate they could recruit many of those people on staff for lower pay," says Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, who was provost of the university from January 1994 to December 2001. Few universities would consider cutting salaries of current employees. But some colleges' information-technology departments have decided not to alter pay scales. David R. Hoyt, chief information-systems officer for Collin County Community College District, which is just outside Dallas, says he has seen a sevenfold increase in the number of applicants for information-technology positions during the last year even though the district has not adjusted its pay scale in two years. When the district advertised in May for a Web programmer/analyst, it received 42 applicants, half of whom were qualified. One of the applicants was hired in August at a salary of $42,000. Only two years ago, Mr. Hoyt says, he would have had difficulty finding a qualified candidate to accept that pay. But he says he will reevaluate information-technology salaries to see if he needs to raise the pay scale next year. "It's short-sighted to think any institution's long-term staffing strategy will work by shortchanging individuals when you hire them, and hoping they will stay when the economy turns around," Mr. Hoyt says. -- Andrea L. Foster 8. Join Purchasing Pools for Hardware and Other IT Expenses
Budget deficits expected for the next two to three years have made avoiding unnecessary spending a preoccupation of all 16 institutions in the UNC system. "With budget constraints and having more students coming to school," Mr. Warner says, colleges must generate new money out of cost savings. One way to save money is through "collaborative opportunities." All 16 UNC colleges are part of the system's IT procurement group, but each college can belong to various buying consortia as well, and some do. Colleges spend less time negotiating and get better deals if they enlist a cooperative purchasing group to do it for them, says Karin Steinbrenner, chief information officer at UNC's Charlotte campus. Often cooperative purchasing requires colleges to make a few changes in their licensing schedules, for example, to align themselves with the group. But the money they save is well worth it, Ms. Steinbrenner says. Through cooperative purchasing, eight colleges in the UNC system saved $400,000 on annual subscription fees for Symantec's Norton AntiVirus software. Last year, when the colleges each bought their own subscriptions, they spent a total of about $900,000 for the software. But this year, as a group, they paid only about $500,000. Mr. Warner, whose salary is paid by the system, has negotiated many similar deals in the past two and a half years, and he says he has saved UNC colleges more than $5.2-million on hardware, software licenses, and support services. Mr. Warner, a former IBM salesman, says colleges must become as good at closing deals as the companies that seek their business. Because companies have financial targets to meet, often timing is everything. "If it's not at the end of a quarter, or at the end of a fiscal year, you're going to have a very difficult time closing a deal." And above all, people have to get in the habit of collaborating. -- Florence Olsen 9. Use 'Life Cycle' Planning to Centralize Desktop Purchases
Decentralized computer-buying leaves a campus with a hodgepodge of machines whose software and servicing needs are difficult and costly to reconcile, says Laurie Antolovic, financial officer to Indiana's vice president of information technology. In 2000, Indiana initiated a program that is rare among large public institutions -- a "life cycle" purchasing system that ensures that all desktop computers are replaced every three years. Under the plan, the university's information-technology office oversees only a few large computer purchases every year. Most of the funds for the roughly $6-million-a-year program still come from department budgets, but the information-technology office subsidizes one-quarter of the expenses. That is affordable, says Ms. Antolovic, because by buying machines in quantities of up to 3,000, the university cuts 35 to 40 percent of its hardware costs -- an estimated $10-million for each three-year cycle. But the real savings come from software and support costs. "Now we have a more or less uniform hardware environment," says Ms. Antolovic. "Supporting the same build of computer is a whole lot easier than supporting 30 different flavors." By limiting the number of software choices, the university can more easily enter licensing agreements in which software companies provide unlimited use of titles for flat fees. Indiana expects to lower software costs by $70-million over its first three-year cycle. Only a fraction of that figure translates into actual savings for the university: Many of the savings benefit students who can freely use licensed software they would otherwise have to purchase. For a centralized purchasing plan to work, technology officers must establish close ties with deans and department chairmen, warns Ms. Antolovic. "There was initially some amount of nonbelievers and a lot of mistrust," Ms. Antolovic says, "but we structured this so the schools don't feel like they've lost control." -- Brock Read 10. Use a 'Preferred Provider' for Technology Purchases
To achieve those savings, Case Western signed a four-year contract with a single vendor, Dell Computer. The company then created an electronic-commerce Web site where students and staff members of the university -- and 103 other nonprofit organizations in Cleveland -- can go to buy desktop PC's, notebooks, and computer-related equipment. The university used to buy its Windows PC's from at least four different vendors at what officials call "spot market" prices. (A spot-market price is the lowest bid that a university receives on an order on any given day.) Officials at Case Western say that a long-term contract with a single vendor can save a college a substantial amount of money. "We're realizing an additional 10- to 12-percent discount over anything on the spot market," says Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information services at Case Western. The contract was agreed upon only after "a lot of going back and forth," says Mr. Gonick. "We would like to have announced this at the beginning of the summer so that students coming in could have all taken advantage of it." Even so, in the first three weeks of classes, freshmen and returning students have bought more than 800 desktop and notebook PC's through the new Dell Web site. Enrollment at the university is about 9,600 students. For $1,208, a Case Western student can buy a Dell desktop computer with a 1.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, an 80-gigabyte hard disk, a DVD player, a CDR-W drive, a 17-inch monitor, a 1-gigabit fiber Ethernet card, and a three-year warranty for parts and labor. Dell normally charges about $2,000 for a computer with those features. Mr. Gonick says that university officials will meet with Dell officials each quarter to review the specific configurations offered under the contract and adjust the contract's base prices to reflect changes in the market. But the percentage discount that the university negotiated will not change. The contract has some unusual features, including on-site technical support from Dell, according to Mr. Gonick. A persistent downturn in technology spending overall has made computer companies more willing to negotiate favorable terms for colleges. "It speaks to the times that we're in," Mr. Gonick says. Colleges that take steps to avoid what they deem are wasteful spending habits should also not forget "the qualitative things," says David L. Smallen, vice president for information technology at Hamilton College. Colleges need to be both "terribly efficient" and "highly effective," he says. "It's a balancing act." -- Florence Olsen http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 6, Page A39
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education