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IT Funding & Finance
Balancing Dollars & Demand
9/1/2007
How do IT administrators prod their IT budgets to meet
institutional goals? Four intrepid campus tech leaders
share their concerns, woes, and triumphs. Listen in.
When it comes to building and maintaining a cutting-edge infrastructure on a limited budget, nobody knows more about the pain points, challenges, and workarounds than the IT professionals tasked with overseeing campus IT. In a recent roundtable discussion with Campus Technology contributing writer Charlene O'Hanlon, four IT administrators—James Stoner, director of scientific computing at the University of Denver (CO); Steve Engorn, CIO of Villa Julie College (MD); Ryan Laus, network manager at Central Michigan University; and Stan Gatewood, CISO of The University of Georgia—all shared their experiences and advice for peers.
The schools they represent are diverse: The University of Denver has around 5,000 students, undergrad and graduate, and nearly 1,000 staff and faculty. It has a fairly large IT network infrastructure, and a campus laptop initiative that is pivotal to maintaining a conservative IT budget (students must bring their own laptops to the university). Villa Julie College, with two campuses just outside of Baltimore, has a full-time enrollment of 2,500, with another 400 or 500 part-time, evening, and online students. The college's current focus is academic, not research. Central Michigan University lies in the heart of Michigan, in the small city of Mount Pleasant. The university boasts 20,000 students on campus at the main site, another 8,000 students at offcampus sites, and around 50 sites worldwide. The University of Georgia, with a 600-plus-acre main campus, is located in Athens, and is an undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral R1 institution, with heavy emphasis on research. There are approximately 35,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff, and the institution has a presence in all 160-plus counties in the state. There are also satellite campuses in South America, China, Italy, and various other sites in Europe.
Campus Technology: Please tell us about your institutions' core IT focuses.
James Stoner: Aside from our laptop initiative, we have other unique aspects with respect to our infrastructure. Our research infrastructure and scientific research are more important than any other aspect. We do a lot of genomics and life sciences, so there's always that instrumentation aspect, for instance. Most of our really high-end IT infrastructure has been accomplished through collaboration and building relationships with external companies. That's been our key in maintaining our budget constraints, at least in the sciences. The value-add there is exponential, where we can use our external technical support to help maintain our internal IT structure.
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