Ideas to Cut Information Technology Cost and Improve Capabilities

1. Ideas to Cut Information Technology Cost and Improve Capabilities Improving the Efficiency & Effectiveness of your Business

2. Manage programs and projects Improve operations via improved processes Plan IT Security Coordinate outsourcing and management of vendor Create a plan for Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery Create or update Business Plans

3. Savings can be found without slashing everything

4. What Not to Cut Staffing Security Bandwidth Training for IT staff Staffing During times of financial uncertainty IT staff need to focus on mission-critical services, especially classroom support. At the same time, it would be nice to improve services where possible. At Furman, technology staff are continuing to focus on ITILprocesses and best practices, especially change-management processes, and service-level agreements. Because Furman has also instituted a hiring freeze and a review process for any position that becomes vacant, the need to retain and retrain existing staff has become urgent. Our fall 2009 enrollment numbers have taken on even more significance, as they will affect our future staffing strategies. Security Yes, you need firewalls. No, it’s not a good idea to keep credit-card information on university servers. Yes, it is a pain to have to follow certain regulations, but the alternative of exposing institutional resources to security risk is unacceptable. Information security and risk management are still critical for the success of the university’s mission. The many recent stories in the popular press about information security have helped our campus community understand the importance of strong security measures. It also helps to have an IT staff that continues to evangelize the importance of information security. While we do scan our servers for vulnerabilities, one element of our strategic plan that had been unfunded was an in-depth review of the security of our administrative offices’ business processes (Is protected information kept on an individual’s computer? When are laptops encrypted? How is information shared?). As Furman’s Information Technology Advisory Council reviewed the various information service strategies in our strategic plan, I was pleased to see them recognize the importance of such a review. We were able to take some of the savings from deferring other initiatives to fund this important security strategy for the coming academic year. Bandwidth Internet bandwidth is a big enabler for many of our cost-cutting efforts. Also, Furman students, faculty, and staff clearly understand the importance of Internet bandwidth and network reliability to the success of the institution’s mission. We expect that the increased bandwidth and improved network reliability provided will help our survey numbers when we re-run the TechQual survey in the fall 2009 semester. Training for IT Staff Furman annually budgets $2,000 per IT staff member for training and travel and asks staff to stretch that budget as far as possible. IT staff consider training part of their compensation, and the nature of this business means that if people aren’t learning, they’re falling behind. We are considering using more video conferencing as an alternative to travel, to stretch funds further. We’re also encouraging staff to attend EDUCAUSE conferences; the regional conferences are an especially good value. Way back in 2002, Joan Gettman and Nikki Reynolds wrote an interesting article for EDUCAUSE Quarterly about getting the most from attending a conference.4 Their strategies are effective not only for focusing your efforts while at a conference but also for sharing what you learned with your colleagues when you return. While we now have options for attending conferences virtually as well as in person, you’ll still get the most value from your conference and training dollars with preparation, reflection, and sharing. Staffing During times of financial uncertainty IT staff need to focus on mission-critical services, especially classroom support. At the same time, it would be nice to improve services where possible. At Furman, technology staff are continuing to focus on ITILprocesses and best practices, especially change-management processes, and service-level agreements. Because Furman has also instituted a hiring freeze and a review process for any position that becomes vacant, the need to retain and retrain existing staff has become urgent. Our fall 2009 enrollment numbers have taken on even more significance, as they will affect our future staffing strategies. Security Yes, you need firewalls. No, it’s not a good idea to keep credit-card information on university servers. Yes, it is a pain to have to follow certain regulations, but the alternative of exposing institutional resources to security risk is unacceptable. Information security and risk management are still critical for the success of the university’s mission. The many recent stories in the popular press about information security have helped our campus community understand the importance of strong security measures. It also helps to have an IT staff that continues to evangelize the importance of information security. While we do scan our servers for vulnerabilities, one element of our strategic plan that had been unfunded was an in-depth review of the security of our administrative offices’ business processes (Is protected information kept on an individual’s computer? When are laptops encrypted? How is information shared?). As Furman’s Information Technology Advisory Council reviewed the various information service strategies in our strategic plan, I was pleased to see them recognize the importance of such a review. We were able to take some of the savings from deferring other initiatives to fund this important security strategy for the coming academic year. Bandwidth Internet bandwidth is a big enabler for many of our cost-cutting efforts. Also, Furman students, faculty, and staff clearly understand the importance of Internet bandwidth and network reliability to the success of the institution’s mission. We expect that the increased bandwidth and improved network reliability provided will help our survey numbers when we re-run the TechQual survey in the fall 2009 semester. Training for IT Staff Furman annually budgets $2,000 per IT staff member for training and travel and asks staff to stretch that budget as far as possible. IT staff consider training part of their compensation, and the nature of this business means that if people aren’t learning, they’re falling behind. We are considering using more video conferencing as an alternative to travel, to stretch funds further. We’re also encouraging staff to attend EDUCAUSE conferences; the regional conferences are an especially good value. Way back in 2002, Joan Gettman and Nikki Reynolds wrote an interesting article for EDUCAUSE Quarterly about getting the most from attending a conference.4 Their strategies are effective not only for focusing your efforts while at a conference but also for sharing what you learned with your colleagues when you return. While we now have options for attending conferences virtually as well as in person, you’ll still get the most value from your conference and training dollars with preparation, reflection, and sharing.

5. Easier Choices Management and people: Accelerate centralized and shared services to cut staff in business units. Control unmanaged costs that can be measured and cut. Power consumption and printing costs. Enterprise software: Verify invoices. Kill unused software and the modules that come with them. “Apply more sophisticated negotiations.” Introduce competition for existing products. Infrastructure: Use telecom expense management services. Cut reliability by one location by “one 9.” In other words, not every location needs near 100 percent uptime. Going from 99.99% to 99.9% availability could save you 30 percent of wide area networking (WAN) expenses. Deploy VoIP, which saves 50 percent to 80 percent on maintenance. Hardware and IT operations: Defer Windows upgrades and replacements . Use data de-duplication to cut storage costs. Consolidate and virtualize servers.

6. Say Goodbye to Frills Discretionary spending One example of what could be considered low-hanging fruit is an annual desk calendar distributed to employees. Perhaps you no longer offer unlimited free computer printing. While many companies have had print management systems in place for some time, Look at print quotas.

7. Renegotiate, Renegotiate, Renegotiate Take a long, hard look at each existing information service contract that comes up for renewal. Look into switching Internet Service Provider. Look for opportunities to collaborate with other companies to help with negotiations. Michigan encourages manufacturing/ tool and die consortiums. Such consortia may provide future cost savings. Savings from Renegotiations Switch to satellite cable TV provider Changing Internet Service Provider

8. Look at Changing Use Patterns With employees using cell phones almost exclusively, do we need so many lines for telephone switch? Perform a trunk analysis. Maybe save ?? percent by reducing the number of local lines. This leads to considering a number of other questions related to telephone use including: Do we need to rethink the telephone switch? Should we consider a VoIP solution sooner rather than later?

9. Maintenance Contract? What Maintenance Contract? Look closely at hardware and software maintenance contracts. Is it better to keep a spare, or two, on hand? What key components need to be on a maintenance contract? Maybe change vendors, and see some savings related to changing terms of the contracts. Decide when to have a maintenance contract and what to put on a time and materials basis. Staff can handle much of the telephone switch maintenance in-house, Savings on Maintenance Contracts and Licensing Anti-virus contract savings Help desk software maintenance reduction Log management and other maintenance charges

10. You Need a Cell Phone? How About We Just Pay You? Change the policy for company-provided cell phones. Instead of the buying cell phones and paying monthly service charges, Provide a monthly subsidy to employees who routinely use their own cell phones for business.

11. Software as a Service (SaaS) "software on demand," is software that is deployed over the internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers either as a service on demand, through a subscription, in a "pay-as-you-go" model, or (increasingly) at no charge when there is opportunity to generate revenue from streams other than the user, such as from advertisement or user list sales.

12. Advantages of SaaS Accessible from anywhere with an internet connection No local server installation Pay per use or subscription based payment methods Rapid scalability System maintenance (backup, updates, security, etc) often included in service Possible security improvements, although users with high security requirements (e.g., large corporations) may find SaaS a security concern Reliability

13. Find Savings from Reaching Across Silos Does your company have budget “silos” that could be made more efficient with some centralization? computer hardware software purchasing. Administrative systems. Single event-scheduling system rather than several? Credit-card transactions

14. You Want a New Computer? Maybe Next Year Increasing the replacement cycle on desktop and laptop computers. Go from two-year cycle to three

15. Cloud Computing Shared servers provide resources, software, and data to computers and other devices on demand, as with the electricity grid.

16. Can Open Source and Cloud Computing Save Money? Investigate open-source solutions (blogs, wikis, videoconferencing, and e-portfolios, skype), Consider cloud computing solutions. Test both Microsoft’s and Google’s offerings for e-mail and calendaring. While open source and cloud computing are worth investigating, they aren’t always the best solution. Cloud computing and open source are very big terms for very broad concepts. Finding the proper balance between costs and service is something you will need to determine for yourself.

17. Virtual Servers Start working with virtual servers. Convert nearly all stand-alone servers to virtual servers. This move will help reduce cooling and power requirements by up to 80 percent. The move to virtual servers will also enable more efficient use of the server replacement budget and save $$ per year in hardware costs.

18. Governance Is Good Determining which cost-saving measures to investigate and implement this should be a shared endeavor. A number of governance groups help decide how best to meet the university’s mission and strategic goals with IT: The Systems Advisory Committee A Preparedness Committee Board

19. Summary There are many ways to be creative about stretching budgets during tight times. Don’t come up with all of the ideas yourselves. Listen to others in your field, and especially from comments on online forums such as Linkedin, CIOForum, etc

20. Franklin CIO Services, LLC Spencer Silk Ssilk@franklincio.com Improving the Efficiency & Effectiveness of your Business