Balancing Dollars & Demand

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IT Funding & Finance

Balancing Dollars & Demand

9/1/2007

By Charlene O’Hanlon

Stoner: Our students are responsible for purchasing their own laptops, but we have a list of specifications, and preferred vendors we work with that will do imaging and so forth.

CT: If you are not providing the laptops, then how are you handling help desk requests, for instance? Are you offering that as a service to the students since you are requiring them to bring a laptop?

Stoner: We do have a help desk function that's very well-versed at handling these things. We will provide the technology support if students have a disaster, and we also have deep-discounted student pricing for a lot of the software packages we require, so they're actually affordable.

Ryan Laus, Central Michigan University

"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."

Laus:We take the same approach both in terms of requiring students to bring their own machines, as well as having our help desk support them. They can call into the help desk for pretty much any computer needs they have. We also provide them with an antivirus package for free if they don't have one, or if they want to switch to ours, since they won't have to pay for the updates on it. We find that works really well to help keep the cost of support down. We also have a PC repair division that is a for-charge service.

CT: Has going with a wired versus a wireless network—or a hybrid of the two—had any impact on IT expenditures?

Stoner: We use wireless primarily in places where it's become either untenable or too expensive to install wired outside of the common areas. We use it as an adjunct to wired or wireless, if we need to. But the goal is always to come back to a copper port. Since we have some old buildings on campus, wireless is not tenable in some cases.

Gatewood: We're hybrid: We have wired and wireless, but wireless is pretty much ubiquitous. One of the things that we did almost immediately was to [set up] our own wireless standards. If schools and institutions and their administrative offices or units are left to put up their own wireless, invariably it's going to be screwed up, down, and unsecured, and maybe not in that order. So with our wireless standard, we have pretty much slid over to the driver's seat, and the central IT organization is handling all of the wired and wireless. The support staff can now focus and train on a given set of hardware, software, and application issues, not trying to be everything to everyone.