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Digital Tweed: Shameless Self-Promotion
9/19/2005
As the technologies and accompanying IT issues have changed, so has the survey. For example, the arrival of the Web in the mid-1990s was a catalyst for a number of new questions, as was the development of course management systems. When portals emerged in the late 1990s, we began to track portal deployment and, concurrently, some two dozen features and services on campus Web sites, such as online registration, library resources, and ePortfolios. A few years ago, the emergence of P2P file sharing promoted new questions about copyright issues. And in 2005, we added a new set of items about security issues and classroom response systems (“clickers”). Yet, also important over the past 15 years is that the boundaries that separate “academic” from “administrative” computing have changed dramatically. Once separate operations (empires?) on many, if not most campuses, today the operations, if not integrated, are often “merged” into an office of Information Technology Services, under a single senior campus technology officer. And it is harder to distinguish “academic” from “administrative” services. Is online registration an academic or administrative service? Course management systems generate lots of transaction data that could be linked to other “administrative data” for institutional research an analysis.What’s the biggest challenge you confront, in your annual survey process? Without question, the biggest challenge is getting people to complete the questionnaire each year. Everyone (or it seems as if everyone) wants the data the survey provides. But often, it feels like pulling teeth to get people—CIOs and senior campus technology officers—to complete the questionnaire. We depend on the “kindness of strangers,” (college and university IT officers) for the institutional data that campuses use for benchmarking purposes. And institutions and IT officers use our data to help address some key IT issues: How are we doing compared to our peers? What are we doing well and what must we do better? Many campus officials complain about the rising costs of IT.
What have you learned about IT expenditures over the past 15 years? I’m not sure anyone really knows just how much money any one college or university really spends on IT. It’s probably like the CIA budget: You would need a team of very skilled forensic accountants to come up with an informed assessment of total campus IT spending—central and departmental expenditures, hardware, software, personnel, etc. A lot of the IT spending is decentralized in academic departments and operating units. And much of the true personnel costs often are not tagged as an IT expense (such as the graduate or work-study student who d'es IT support for an academic department or research project). That said, we do know that campus IT spending consumes lots of money, about 5 to 7 percent of total institutional spending (according to data from Campus Computing); that’s probably double the number from 15 or 20 years ago. We track some data on IT spending, but the best data available are from the annual Educause Core Data Survey Report (www.educause.edu/coredata).
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