Understanding how to leverage an investment can help schools consolidate and stop paying massive renewals. Lean into the platforms you know and learn how to maximize them.
Critical Assessment in the Age of Higher Ed Decentralization
Still, all the platform capabilities in the world won’t matter unless you’ve evaluated what you already have. It can be difficult to assess what you have and what you need. Some large institutions say, “Show us where all of our spending for this vendor is located, and we’ll partner with you just for that.” They don’t know how much they’re spending or where they’re spending it, making an assessment nearly impossible.
This is one of the hazards of decentralization. Maybe an institution has an agreement with a vendor, but three departments are buying separately from the same vendor. Without communication across departments and disciplines, it’s difficult to understand where the investments actually are, much less how to optimize them.
Hiring the right people and enabling the right workflows can get everyone on the same page. You don’t want to talk to eight different people across multiple departments to get anything done. That’s how decentralization takes hold, because people don’t want to work through red tape. It can ultimately be wasteful to fail to invest up front in how an institution behaves.
LEARN MORE: The best higher ed IT roadmap is a flexible and inclusive one.
How Your Higher Education Budget Gets Made Matters
The way your budget is structured will inform your solutions. Some schools are heavy in capital funding; others are heavier on operational budgets. We don’t expect stakeholders to come in knowing specifics or using financial lingo like OPEX and CAPEX, but we need to understand how your budget works in order to develop the best solutions.
Let’s say a university has zero operational money. Everything is capital. We’re not going to look at solutions with yearly or monthly investments; it has to be one bulk purchase. For institutions with no capital arm, all of their investment is operational. Those institutions might fare well with leasing solutions and other flexible tools.
Your vendors understand that budgets and finance are sensitive topics. But the better the understanding your suppliers have of your budget and how it functions, the more successful your work together will be.
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