Technology & the Community College >> Pulling in Tandem

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Technology & the Community College

Technology & the Community College >> Pulling in Tandem

3/1/2007

By Susan D. Heid

When it comes to campus/vendor partnering, community college administrators must be especially savvy and resourceful in order to achieve that wonderful synchronicity of purpose that spells: Success!

Pulling in Tandem Part I: Hardware

Several years ago, Southwest Virginia Community College administrators signed a lease contract for 17 multifunction copy/fax/scan/print machines, including supplies and service, and deployed them across the campus. Eva Estep, telecommunications coordinator at the college, was put in charge of managing the devices, which were hooked into the school’s network. She admits now that she rues the day those contracts were signed. But why? After all, Estep calls the equipment “fantastic”—far superior to machines the school had leased before.

“We had a contract with the same company three years earlier,” she explains, pointing out that service then had been unimpressive. Yet this time around, with attractive equipment and satisfactory pricing, school administrators decided to sign up once again. “The vendor promised it would respond to every problem we had before.” But the company hasn’t, and to make matters worse, maintenance software included with the machines does not work. That means Estep can’t manage the devices from her desk, including managing fax lines and maintaining e-mail addresses and accounts. (She says the company claims she’s the only person who has ever actually tried to use the software.) So the harried coordinator has had to create program workarounds to achieve the functionality promised (guaranteed) by the vendor. Moreover, when any of several appointed key operators from the school calls the vendor directly to order copy supplies (which is how the contract was set up), the vendor representative insists that the school doesn’t exist in the company’s database of customers. When supplies finally are sent, they’re accompanied by an invoice (as though the school were a non-established account). Not surprisingly, Estep says that if the school goes with the same vendor on the next copier contract, she’ll refuse to have anything to do with it.

Does this scenario sound uncomfortably familiar to you? Maybe as a community college IT manager or director, you try to keep business relationships at arm’s length when you deal with hardware vendors. Possibly, you have little interaction with vendors, or if you do, maybe you prefer to simply bounce from vendor to vendor if service, support, or performance is disappointing. (In the minds of many IT managers, the purpose of a relationship with a hardware vendor goes no further than getting the best deal you can; it’s purely transactional.) At best, you may believe you can only depend on a contract to define how you and the vendor will work together.

Yet, is this enough? Is there a way to establish a different kind of relationship with your hardware vendors? One that’s open-ended, based on consistent one-toone interaction, and built on a base of mutual trust and respect? If there were, your school just might be able to transform itself in ways that go far beyond the purchase of equipment or technology.

SCC: Mutual Back-Scratching Is a Good Thing

Ross Davis is general manager for SCCtv, a Seattle, WA, educational and community television station, part of the Seattle Community Colleges district. Davis maintains he could not do all that he and his team must do without understanding the essence of good partnering—and that extends to vendor partnerships, as well.

From bandwidth to bonanza. In fact, five years ago, through collaborations with the city of Seattle and the University of Washington, the district ended up with a massive amount of bandwidth, says Davis. The only question, he adds, was how best to use it. That’s when Davis (then the district’s director of communications and fund development), along with three other campus administrators, instigated a scheme whereby the district could develop a service that would help not only Seattle students, but a lot of other people as well. The result was SCCtv, and the station now broadcasts educational courses 24 hours a day via two channels and the web. Those broadcasts cover the entire 50,000-student district, which includes three colleges and five learning systems. But they also provide a transport mechanism for rich video and audio streams for 77,000 K-12 public schools and 800 colleges around the world. The current mission of SCCtv, says Davis, is to deliver rich media to colleges that can’t afford, or don’t need, to build their own systems.