ROUNDTABLE: How To Make Every Dollar Count in Higher Ed IT

EDTECH: How do you decide when or whether to replace technologies?

HATCHETT: We evaluate everything on a six-year window, asking whether the technology is still meeting our needs. Is it still current as we have progressed further into software-based solutions and AV-over-IP solutions? Generally, anything that does not meet one of those criteria will be lifecycled out. But we also consider whether a space isn’t used very much, or if the equipment is still serviceable and we can get another year out of it.

WARAICH: Since we always have budget constraints, funding may not be there until there is a “stick” to make it happen. That could be a cyberattack or critical infrastructure, such as wireless access points, reaching end of life. We want to be proactive, but there’s so much old technology to replace that the “stick” can often be the deciding factor. What’s the biggest fire out there that we need to take care of right now? When possible, though, we pause to ask, “What’s most important for the institution? How will this investment help us move the needle a little bit more toward the future?”

EDTECH: Do budget constraints ever lead to creative problem-solving?

MAHER-MORAN: Planning for the return to campus after the pandemic definitely made us get creative, because we had only so much money to prepare all of our rooms. That made us think hard about needs, wants and what we could support. One of our solutions was to get Zoom carts that we could move around as needed. Five years later, a lot of them are still in use because faculty felt they were easy to use, and they were easy for us to take care of.

FINAN: We’ve had success with looking at our licensing schemes. For instance, we worked with one vendor to create a new type of license for a “casual user” who may use the system just twice a year. We have to audit our licenses and make sure we stay within those counts, but that’s worked out well.

KEEP READING: How legacy application modernization accelerates growth.

EDTECH: How do you communicate IT budget realities to campus leadership?

HATCHETT: We try not to sugarcoat the budget impacts. We say, “If you cut budgets by 20%, these are the outcomes and the potential unintended consequences down the line.” As long as they understand the big picture, I feel like we’ve done our job educating them. It’s their job to tell us what we have to work with, and it’s our job to be successful with that. Because we do track data, I can benchmark cost increases, our pain points and our successes. That also helps them understand how they need to allocate our funds.

WARAICH: You have to find champions at the board level who understand technology — the risks and the opportunities. Then, keep communicating to them why it’s important to invest in technology. People may need to hear it five times or even 10. Be consistent with your message and eventually, when that funding is available, you’ll get it.