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

EDTECH: Which cost-saving strategies have you found to be effective?

FINAN: I negotiate everything that comes across my desk, including intangibles. If my goal is a 10% reduction in cost, and my vendor can only give 7%, what else could we get? Often, vendors have an annual conference and can provide free admission for a couple of Clemson staffers over the life of the contract. Most suppliers will give that in a heartbeat because it’s not a hard cost to them. But for me, that’s a couple thousand dollars’ worth of training every year where my team can learn new things we can do with the tools we already have.

HATCHETT: A constant technology platform review is one of our key drivers. We’ve tried to become more nimble since the chip and supply chain shortages during the pandemic. We took that as an opportunity to re-evaluate our platforms and adopt software-based solutions and standards-based protocols that allowed us to branch out into different manufacturers. We’ve reduced classroom costs by $12,000 to $15,000 per room, just by looking at our platforms and negotiating with suppliers. Our procurement departments are excellent at leveraging contracts and relationships, so we’ve achieved savings by having our suppliers sharpen their pencils and be a little more competitive with each other.

WARAICH: Every year, we review software to identify anything we haven’t been using and look for overlap between tools. For example, we used a phishing simulation tool for a few years. When it came time to renew, we looked at a similar tool from Microsoft that we already have as part of our licensing. Microsoft’s tool has become much more mature since we last reviewed it, so now we’re using that instead. Sometimes the savings are small, but it’s the mindset that matters. We take time to ask, “Where can I save, so that I can use that money somewhere else, strategically?”

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EDTECH: How do you determine which IT initiatives to prioritize?

WARAICH: It all starts with your strategic goals. If you haven’t defined those, you’re always in a reactionary mode, so the new, shiny object comes in and you start running after it. Having strategic goals for IT gives me clear criteria for where we need to invest.

MAHER-MORAN: We’re still prioritizing the ability to record lectures and support remote learning in all of our classrooms. We want to make sure that we can, at minimum, fulfill the needs and maintain a similar user experience from room to room. We try to find a happy medium, where we provide what’s needed, make it easy for our team to maintain and ensure uptime for our faculty and instructors. 

HATCHETT: For our annual upgrade cycle, we follow policies and procedures that give us decision-making guideposts, especially when it comes to centralized funding versus departmental funding. Then, we do a deep dive on metrics. What is our use rate? What are our areas of greatest impact? What areas are no longer meeting faculty’s pedagogical needs? That helps us determine our highest priorities, and then we can determine what resources we can commit to lower- or medium-priority spaces.

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.

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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. 

EDTECH: How do you balance long-term planning with uncertainty about future needs?

MAHER-MORAN: I tend to go into it with cautious optimism. We can make plans, but we have to be willing to adjust. I try to be flexible so that if we need to make changes, the systems can accommodate that and evolve. Or, if we need to pare down, we can do that without losing integral systems.

HATCHETT: Don’t make knee-jerk reactions. It’s OK to wait a beat and understand the situation. One of our pandemic lessons was to make sure that any investment we make is going to work for the long term. Is this going to be sustainable for five years, or will it create a problem in year two, and we’ll have to take time and resources to fix it? 

FINAN: We try to understand what our customers’ needs are today and what they may be five years from now. Today, a solution may need 50 users, but in five years, I may need 5,000 users. We negotiate contract terms that give us flexibility down the road while building in cost management strategies.

WARAICH: There will never be a time when everything is certain and you’re flush with money. A framework I use is “SCARE to CARES.” SCARE stands for stress, chaos, anxiety, resistance and ego. This describes a lot of the factors that drive uncertainty around IT. We try to shift that to CARES: communicate, adapt, relationships, empower and stay calm. The speed of change we’re seeing now is the slowest we’ll ever see. As a leader, you create that culture of staying calm so that your team can thrive.