Page 18 - Campus Technology, June 2017

IT TRENDS
budgeting and staffing requests. In 2016, Educause began gathering data about what campuses are spending on in-house infrastructure vs. external providers.
“We are in a data-driven decision-making culture now,” Lang said. “We are no longer in an environment where you can go on instinct. So even though most of the time this data supports your instinct, unless you have the data to support your argument, you are vulnerable in that argument.”
Jack Suess, vice president of information technology and CIO at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said
doing a lot of building, so we manage to save the campus money by doing this work in house versus going outside,” Suess said. “That is where the Core Data Service can be helpful. It allowed me to explore and ask good questions.”
But Suess emphasized that you have to know the local context to really understand the data. He noted that UMBC has historically been underfunded for its mission in the Maryland university system. “When I look at my IT budget compared to other peers around the country, there are places
“For instance, it allows me to see we are doing quite well in the areas we have decided to prioritize in cybersecurity,” Suess said. “If I had prioritized certain areas and we were not doing well, that would scare me. There are other areas, such as cybersecurity training personnel, where I know we are equal to or behind our peers and I am OK with that, because we have made deliberate decisions that we are not going to put significant investment there.”
Suess shares the benchmarking data with UMBC’s president, Freeman Hrabowski III, who wants UMBC to be seen as more of a thought leader in analytics and cybersecurity. “Looking at the data, we were able to show him that we were doing well in both those areas. We have been doing a lot of little things over last five to six years and the benchmarking shows these have paid off. Without the benchmarking, all he has is my word.”
Tracking Metrics
Florida International University is in the midst of implementing a university-wide business intelligence and analytics system. Vice President and CIO Robert Grillo said the effort grew out of a desire he shared with other campus executives for greater analytical capabilities to track metrics in finance, human resources and enrollment.
Grillo said one key to successfully making the case for such investment is not to sell it as an IT project. “I think it has been
“We are no longer in an environment where you can go on instinct. So even though most of the time this data supports your instinct, unless you have the data to support your argument, you are vulnerable in that argument.”
—Leah Lang, Educause
that he uses the Core Data Service to look at staff numbers in specific areas. “I am trying to understand if I am aligning my staff resources similarly to my peers,” he said. Here is one example: UMBC has more employees in telephony than other campuses its size because it is one of the few campuses that still handles its own internal wiring. “Digging a little deeper, because we are a relatively young campus we have been
we are a little lower funded,” he said. “But if I looked at the registrar’s office of financial services, they would look the same way. So before I run into the CFO’s office with this data, I have to understand the funding context.”
UMBC has also been taking advantage of the new Educause Benchmarking Service (launched last year) to assess the maturity of universities’ technology deployments.
18
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | June 2017