Dare To Share

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Dare To Share

Data-Driven Decision Making

Dare To Share

5/1/2007

By Linda L Briggs

ICE, which is incorporated in West Virginia under a 501(c)(3) non-profit tax designation, requires that the president of each member college serve on its board as a director. The organization (whose directors meet three times a year), employs an executive director and staff, located at the University of Charleston (where the consortium’s ERP system is physically housed); the member colleges’ CTOs and CFOs make up various advisory groups. Members agree that the benefits of the consortium have been extraordinary, and not just on the cost-saving front, although that alone has been significant.

“We have to learn to cooperate, or die,” says Steve Markwood, bluntly. Markwood is president of Alderson- Broaddus College (WV), an 800-student institution; he is a vocal advocate of the use of consortia and coalitions among small independent colleges and universities. Indeed, A-B College, as it is known, now belongs to several, including ICE, of which it was a founding member.

The newest ICE member is Nichols College, located in Dudley, MA. According to Nichols President Debra Townsley, the college’s ERP implementation has moved forward on an aggressive 18- month rollout schedule, partly because of the experience of other ICE consortium members. “We set up our [ERP] system to look similar to that of other members; plus, we had [the input of] all the consortium schools that had already done it.” The college’s payroll staff, for instance, worked with staff members from other ICE consortium schools to roll out like portions of the ERP software. Without the consortium, Townsley says, “we just wouldn’t have had access to that kind of expertise.”

Significant Cost Savings

Although Welch and Townsley declined to state exact costs, they maintain that sharing Datatel software through ICE has resulted in big savings for their schools, both in the cost of the initial software investment, and on a yearly basis. Welch reports that his university’s total cost of administrative computing last year was nearly identical to what the Datatel system alone would have cost the institution, had it not been a member of the consortium. “That means personnel were free, paper was free, upgrades were free, and hardware was free,” he says. “For me, that makes very vivid what kinds of savings are involved in having seven schools decide to cooperate.” And he observes that A-B College would have initially spent over a million dollars on Datatel without the partnership. Markwood estimates that via the consortium, his school spent less than a third of that in initial costs (see “Convincing the Board,” page 47 of our magazine).

With the ICE Consortium, we now have the data at hand. So, when we do want to query something, we have confidence that the data are in the system. — Edwin Welch, University of Charleston

As for the Nichols College implementation, without the consortium the expense probably would have been “double what we ended up paying through ICE” for the same software, says Townsley. What’s more, the school’s ongoing annual cost is significantly reduced, and “the breadth and depth of experience we get” is invaluable, she adds.