When ‘Strategic’ Means ‘Hard to Sell’

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When ‘Strategic’ Means ‘Hard to Sell’

6/26/2006

By John Moore

Having trouble getting dollars for those all-important ‘top-of-the-stack’ projects? These tips just may grease the wheels.

YUP, THAT WEB PORTAL seems like a worthy project, and so d'es the distance learning application, and the customer relationship management (CRM) system. In fact, such initiatives routinely land on many a wish list in higher education, but although they promise to harness information technology as a tool for competitive advantage, they also cost considerable sums of money. So, how can IT directors justify purchases that could help a school compete for students with its peer schools? How d'es one go about building that all-important business case?

Richard Katz has a few ideas on those topics. Katz is VP of Educause, a Boulder, CO-based nonprofit association that promotes IT use in higher education. He joined the organization in 1996 after spending 14 years in management and executive positions at the University of California. According to Katz, the IT investment breaks down into layers, with the remediation of legacy infrastructure lying at the bottom of the stack.

From the Bottom Up

At-risk systems that require fixing, or an application that a vendor has stopped supporting, fall into the category of legacy infrastructure remediation, Katz notes. At this bottom- most layer, “you have to make the business case from a risk-management point of view,” he advises. That is, in this scenario, the business case simply boils down to positing that a given system or piece of infrastructure will break without fresh investment. Katz says forward-thinking schools may have a “sinking” fund (or other kind of reserve), in which an organization sets aside money over time to deal with maintenance investments of this sort. In other cases, he adds, IT managers frequently redeploy funding priorities within an existing budget.

So g'es the task of mending the trailing edge of technology. Then there’s the top of the stack, the innovation layer, which Katz says is “associated with investments that may be viewed as strategic or contributing in a positive way to competitive advantage.” He characterizes investments in this space as “opportunistic.”

The Top of the Stack: Fueling Innovation

Katz points out that “Newer initiatives such as CRM, portals, or eLearning— and most institutions still don’t even have an enterprise course management system—get funded, for the most part, through ‘new’ money.” Yet typically, he says, university CIOs haven’t been successful in unlocking new money to support tech investments aimed at the management of brand identity.