HOW CAN A CIO CAPABLY MANAGE THE hardware and software needs of an institution whose current enrollment is 13,000 distributed among its main campus, 17 regional education centers in seven states, 30 teaching locations, and a worldwide Center for Online Learning?
For Les Lloyd, associate vice president and CIO at Saint Leo University (Fla.), the answer involved standardizing equipment—from desktops and laptops to servers and courseware—to help meet the needs of various users. This year, Dell was chosen to supply one laptop model for the approximately 1,200 undergrad students on Saint Leo’s main campus, about half an hour from Tampa, along with one desktop model for use in offices. “We were looking in areas where we can make a difference in our support costs,” explains Lloyd. Since desktop and laptop support costs have traditionally been the biggest customer service issue, having a limited set of hardware meant his team “could swap parts and provide faster service to faculty, staff, and students.”
Lloyd has another responsibility on his task list. The institution will start using Blackboard this fall for the university’s distance education program, which reaches students in 33 countries and provides courses to students in the active military. Streamlining has helped the university’s communities stay in check technically when IT staff are not able to be on premises at the branch campuses. “Most of them don’t have technical support people on site,” says Lloyd, since the IT department for Saint Leo is based at the main campus. “They’re relying on us to supply them with what they need to keep it going.”
Technology standardization—the practice of choosing to standardize the brand and/or type of equipment—results in returns for administrators, not just in terms of financial costs and more manageable vendor contracts but also in operational efficiency.
The Arguments for Standardization
How does one determine tech standardization is not simply a sales push for a certain vendor line? Vendors are responding more to what their clients in higher education want, finds Todd Heckman, a managing director for SMART Business Advisory and Consulting who handles higher education for the firm. In return, these clients know or have a sense for what they are looking for to suit their college or university. “I think institutions see the values in going that route [in terms of] the challenges of, does that value match up with the necessities of getting there,” says Heckman.
Reasons in favor of standardization are multiple, says Carol Stillman, Cisco’s business development manager of U.S. public sector for higher education. “The total cost of ownership is lowered, support is easier, and deploying new applications can be done quicker.”
Tony Hernandez, also a SMART managing director and higher ed practice lead, cites pluses such as IT staff only having to know a single system, more efficient maintenance, and better support from contracted vendors. “If there is a problem, you have a single point of contact and a single owner of responsibility for getting the issue resolved,” says Hernandez.
John Mullen, Dell’s vice president of education, state, and local government, advises administrators to be diligent about the breadth of a potential partnering vendor’s IT capabilities. “IT decision makers should also ask a lot of questions about the solidity of key partnerships and the integrity of the vendor’s supply-chain processes.”
Heading for High Performance What could be the next direction for tech standardization? John Mullen, Dell's VP of education, state, and local government, finds a particularly strong trend toward standardizing IT in high-performance computing space (HPC). He estimates that this move is being driven by factors such as the economy and a rise in the use of shared clusters and research test beds at research universities. Standardization is now going into HPC networking, storage, interconnects, tools, and middleware. "HPC was about proprietary technology for much too long, which meant it was expensive," says Mullen. Now that's changed, as the power and speed have grown rapidly. For example, Mullen cites the University of Texas as having developed large visualization clusters with powerful workstations. Carol Stillman, Cisco's business development manager of U.S. public sector for higher education, notes that administrators' interest in HPC relates to the need to examine how data centers are built for energy efficiency, and as distance learning programs continue to grow with increased amounts of data. This need, she explains, will become significant in order to manage the service quality.
Serving Up Software Solutions
For multicampus institutions, Stillman notes that technology standardization can help administrators who may have to go between branches, by reducing the learning curve on software use and providing easier deployment and leveraging across a system.
IT administrators with the University of Colorado system, meanwhile, are in the process of implementing Oracle-based systems including Campus Solutions 9.0, CRM 9.0, the Campus Solutions Warehouse in EPM 9.0, the Enterprise Portal 9.0, and the SOA Suite to merge applications and improve IT system flexibility. Begun in October 2007, the first piece of the PeopleSoft solution will go live this summer; the entire system is set for completion by the end of the 2010 fall term. The project is being funded with initiative money, and monthly meetings are centered on campus preparation for the conversion.
