Balancing Dollars & Demand

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IT Funding & Finance

Balancing Dollars & Demand

9/1/2007

By Charlene O’Hanlon

CT: How is that budget faring?

Gatewood: The overall IT budget health probably needs a booster shot of B12, just like everyone else's budget. Monies are getting slimmer and slimmer, and we have to spread it thinner and thinner. There's not a whole bunch of research money out there, but there's plenty of research to be done. Most of it is state or federally funded, but we must also measure in or count in such things as the overall cost of IT—which also has skyrocketed— and the maintenance, upgrading, and rescaling of our systems. We're definitely doing more with less than we ever have before.

Stoner: We have very much the same system as Stan has over at Georgia. Our vice provost for graduate research has a budget and, in our universe, it's based on the amount of funding the university has, plus a small chunk from the university added to that. So his budget directly reflects the amount of research the university is doing, which is interesting when you think about it. Somewhere between 5 and maybe 15 percent is the funding ratio for grant applications right now—substantially less than it's been across the years. What we've been doing is taking the small one- or two-lab IT infrastructures that were out there, and migrating them back to a more central location, so that the funds get used in a more standardized way, from the support to the hardware sides of things.

Stan Gatewood, The University of Georgia

"We have a tremendous amount of buying power because of our statewide contracts; we just need to make sure that everybody knows about it, because we get even deeper discounts when everyone comes together at the same time to make major PC purchases, for instance."

CT: So you're using a cluster computing environment? An IT ‘pool' from which different research arms or different departments can access their IT power? That seems to be an excellent way for the university to save some money and allocate resources more evenly.

Stoner: That's exactly what we've done. We've built a centralized IT function for things like business functions, registrar, et cetera. That's all handled by the university technology services. My world is very, very specific in the sciences, so we're one of the distributed sides of the overall picture.

Laus: We have similar issues. One of our biggest concerns has been to make sure that we have sufficient bandwidth out to the internet so that our professors and [students] can get the research done and move the data around when they need it. So, one of our biggest initiatives has been to team up with other institutions across the state, to make sure we have the sufficient fiber, bandwidth, and redundancy we need to keep the institution running.