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Business of IT >> More Than Money
6/27/2005
“Accounting is a critical piece,” agrees DSU’s Webster. “We’d go to a school and negotiate a contract with a C-level officer. Afterward, it was taken out of our hands and was managed by someone over in the university’s accounting department who would send them a bill. You never knew when or if it was done, or where the money went after it was paid. Basically, you’d make a sale, but there was no way to actually link that sale back to what was going into the project. This went on for the first couple of years, and then we started to get some standard green-bar accounting reports.”
Road Hazards
Universities and colleges have some definite advantages to offer, to each other and to private industry as well. But there can be drawbacks to some of those advantages, and they should be seriously considered by any school, before moving ahead.
Student workers. “Use of student workers creates some interesting challenges,” acknowledges Bradley. “They’re right at the start of their careers, so they’re inexperienced. Furthermore, our workforce is even more volatile than it is in the high-tech sector. Students will come in for a semester and work parttime; some work out, but some don’t. We had to deal with training on a continuous basis; getting new students up to speed only to see them move on after doing some months of good work.” GSU managed to turn that challenge into an asset. “With some of our projects, work comes in bursts, and then there’s nothing. So, when an employer needs some work done, we can call up some students who want to pick up a couple of weeks of work, going right from their classes to the lab in the same building. It works out well for everybody.”
Extra staff work. At LCC, Cerny d'esn’t use students for the projects; staff members are assigned as appropriate. “There’s definitely a challenge,” he says. “You’re bringing on more work, but what is the incentive for the IT staff to do it? The outside experience obviously gives staff members a broader range of expertise, and more exposure to best practices, so our staff definitely benefits that way. But the downside is that the incentive piece hasn’t been fully developed yet. Right now, when I send a staff person out to a new place, there’s really no extra compensation; they’re just at a different location for a week. At the same time, some of their work here d'esn’t just go away while they’re out.”
‘Ninja’ IT. “There are challenges,” says Webster at Dakota State. “We found that there are things that we needed to do for the clients that the school system won’t permit because it violates some protocols,” he recalls. “They can’t open up a little door [in the infrastructure] for you to go through, because when they do that, it puts the rest of their systems at risk. In order to solve that, we moved some systems off campus where we could access them remotely from off campus, non-institutional locations. We ended up with almost a ninja-IT group, running a separate IT organization within the larger organization, that could do things not possible within the institution’s systems. In the end, however, we had to move the operation to a separate data center.”
Moving Forward…
What d'es the future hold for these campus IT outsourcers? All four schools are upbeat about prospects.
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