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IT Funding & Finance
Balancing Dollars & Demand
9/1/2007
Steve Engorn: For the most part, our setting in both campuses is very rural, and one is in a valley. They're about six miles apart. The newer campus in Owings Mills houses all of our residents; our older campus in Stevenson has a number of academic buildings. Our challenge is to have both campuses act as one, even though they're six miles apart.
We typically have two phone PBXs so, based upon how our network has been structured, it seems you're on one campus no matter where you are. We're running voice over IP on both of our campuses to alleviate wiring costs. And we've done a lot of construction in a very short period of time, and we're still doing more.
James Stoner, University of Denver
"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."
Ryan Laus: We have a central IT department, but also have a decentralized part of IT—different departmental techs for the colleges. Central IT handles things like the e-mail and learning systems such as Blackboard, networking, and cabling. The colleges, our distributed folks, handle some of the specialized faculty and staff needs. We are very research-attentive. We do undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral, and we're trying to make more of a name for ourselves in the research area.
Stan Gatewood: We're strong in research in agriculture, veterinary medicine, and biology. We have a fairly decentralized IT infrastructure, in that we do have a central organization that handles our backbone, our telephone systems, and our wiring to the buildings, but the schools—14 schools within our university— handle their own IT to the desktop.
CT: With the exception of Villa Julie, it sounds like many of you are dealing with heavy-duty research needs at your campuses. How does that affect your IT budget? How do you go about weighing what is needed for research against what is needed for operations for the college in general, and what your students need?
Gatewood: We have several research alliances that we're a member of, so we do get money from those alliances, plus some of our large grants, et cetera. But research is headed up by the Office of the Vice President for Research. He does have a budget as well as being a member of the Georgia Research Alliance and a few other associations. So his department gets a piece of the overall University of Georgia pie as far as budget is concerned, and it carves out the necessary funding or monies to work with its research clusters and its overall IT.
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