kaiyen: pepper

Tag Archive: outsourcing

if I were president…

For a university, that is, looking to cut costs in a world where we spend more and more each year to meet basic expectations.

Far too long ago, I hypothesized a scenario where a university might choose to outsource strategic decision-making on technology.  Let me clarify exactly what it is to which I am referring – right now, just about every university has a person or group that looks at different trends out there, considers what current needs exist, and try to balance all of that within a general framework of “being innovative.”  I challenge anyone to point to a university that doesn’t want to be innovative and therefore consider my last stipulation a reasonable one.

Provided that there is some semblance of logic to this process, what we’re talking about is strategic decision-making, not just outsourcing in general.  A method through which an over-arching theme emerges that guides when to say yes and when to say no.  When to invest in that $250,000 ERP system that must replace the aging system in place and therefore sacrifice the time-saving management system for staff.  Or how high student productivity ranks on the list of priorities.

Rather than having people in charge of this, why not just outsource it all?  That is the question that I put forth.

If I were a university president, this would be a tantalizing option for cost-savings.  Everything about running a university involves rising costs, but some things just cannot be sacrificed.  If you need top-notch faculty and they collectively lead to a cost of $X, then you must spend $X.  If you decide that a new Welcome Center will help put a pretty face for visitors and you must invest $Y over the next 3 years, then you allocate and spend $Y.  Plain and simple.

Right now, staff salaries are rising faster than most other operations (insert appropriate citation here – I’m pretty sure it’s in DIY EDU somewhere).  And a lot of staff are needed to manage, maintain, install, learn, use, train, and just be around technology.  And deciding how much to spend on what and then implementing those decisions involves a lot of people, too.  Overall, the number of staff that surround the need to be “innovative” technologically is increasing.  So what do we do?

Get rid of all of them, right?

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August 17, 2010 Higher Education IT, Work-related 0 Read more >

outsourcing ourselves

here’s a thought:  why not outsource IT strategy?

I’m not talking about IT infrastructure or tools.  I don’t mean using Amazon EC2 for computing power or S3 for storage, much less Google Apps for Education.  I’m not talking about outsourcing specific services.

I mean outsourcing the actual decision-making process that drives our services and overall strategy.  I am talking about outsourcing IT and Academic Computing leadership.  In my case, I am talking about outsourcing myself.

What’s to stop a university from hiring a consulting firm to watch for technology trends, identify threats and opportunities (SWOT, anyone?), and make recommendations on what should be done.  The university then picks things that it can afford and that fit together (again, by recommendation from the consultants), and just does them using the appropriate resources.

Perhaps the IT department still has system administrators, and perhaps outsourcing leadership has nothing to do with outsourcing services.  Maybe the consultants recommend keeping e-mail in house due to an analysis of how the school’s General Counsel likes to interpret “exposure” (trying not to use FERPA as a shield here – it’s about exposure due to regulations such as FERPA.  Not FERPA unto itself).  So using consultants to identify trends and basically make strategic decisions doesn’t mean outsourcing everything.

But it could mean the elimination of the very type of job I have.  My next post, which I hope to have together in the next day or so, will follow through on how this might look to a university president.  Then we have to ask ourselves about how we can add enough value that no one ever actually does what I suggest in this post…

August 5, 2010 Higher Education IT, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, Work-related, , , , 0 Read more >

the limits of outsourcing

In my last post, about approaching outsourcing in higher education from a strategic view that goes beyond simple cost savings or privacy concerns, I talked about how outsourcing should either lower costs, increase value, or do both in order to help an organization develop and maintain a competitive advantage.

Defining competitive advantage in higher education or specifically IT therein is not easy.  It’s more than simply how a university or college does in rankings or how well it attracts students.  It might be measurable in terms of how it does compared to its direct competitors – how many times a student that applies to both schools chooses a particular one is somewhat indicative of a competitive advantage.

But let’s just presume that there are a great many factors that lead to something akin to an advantage that is useful when in competition for the best and brightest students with other schools.  The quantity of factors makes it all the harder to quantify the benefit of specific strategic planning decisions, but overall there is at least room for reasonable conjecture.

So the question remains – what should be outsourced?  What activities do technology departments in higher education engage in that are not directly beneficial in terms of competitive advantage?  What activities could be best outsourced such that cost goes down, value goes up, or both, leading to more students choosing one school over another?

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July 2, 2010 Higher Education IT, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, Work-related, , , , , , , 0 Read more >

the sanctity of our electronic data…

NB and caveat:  I say “we” a lot in this post.  I do not mean the “we” that is my organization and/or the university at which I work.  I mean academia in general.

There has been a lot of debate – everywhere, but especially in academia – about outsourcing.  Lately, this has been e-mail.  The most notable and commonly used has been Google mail for Education. Their suite of products offers quite a few features but, by a mile, the major feature used is mail.  Integration with existing user accounts, maintaining domain name, etc – Google has done a good job (though I have mentioned before about how I don’t think they’ve done a good job developing their products beyond an initial stage).  Microsoft has entered the fray with their live@edu product, which is obviously aimed at schools.  It integrates well with Active Directory from what I’ve heard, so it’s ready for what many schools are already using for directory management.

However, that’s mostly been just e-mail.  And even then, there is a lot of debate about whether it’s “safe” to have one’s e-mail data off-campus.  There is this opinion that one’s e-mail is apparently too important to outsource.  Now, presuming that FERPA security and privacy rules have been met, it doesn’t make any sense to me.  First, if an accounting or law firm can outsource, then so should a school.

But, fundamentally, what makes our e-mail so special?  What makes our data in general so special?  What’s wrong with outsourcing?  At the very least, we are looking at a less expensive option, with sufficient security (again, presuming that a school’s counsel is comfortable with FERPA compliance), and a whole lot more engineers and system administrators running and maintaining the system.

I have been putting forth an effort to provide substantial network-based, enterprise-level storage for the faculty and staff at the law school.  Of course, I want to work within the university infrastructure first.  But we still run into the same issue – fewer system administrators, fewer people managing the servers.  We have some great staff at the university that are dedicated to their jobs, but you can’t compare the admin to system ratio and economies of scale (in both human and monetary capital) that a big outsourcing company can provide.

This proposal means putting all of one’s data on someone else’s storage solution, off-campus, and in the “cloud.”  In some cases our data might be across the country.

But what’s so wrong with that? Why is our data so important that we can’t accept this as a possibility?

February 27, 2010 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, Work-related, , , , 0 Read more >