Financial Management and Budgets

Inside the minds-and budgets-of chief information officers and IT directors.

This research bulletin presents a framework for the effective, ongoing, sustainable funding of IT infrastructure in universities and colleges. The framework articulates the composition of IT infrastructure and derives a cost model for provision of infrastructure services. The model is intended to be straightforward, enabling ready adoption, while also providing flexibility so that it can be updated on a periodic basis to reflect changing technological demand and supply conditions.

In 2004, MIT and Stanford University began the Total Cost of IT project to measure, or at least estimate, the total cost of IT at those two institutions. This bulletin describes the project costing model, processes, and findings and the ways this model can be replicated on other campuses. It explains how to categorize spending, which questions to ask, how to manage and analyze results, and how to extract a meaningful picture of IT spending.

This research bulletin, which draws on research conducted by ECAR in 2004 on the state of information technology funding, examines how higher education uses chargebacks for funding IT. It is based on data from 472 chief information officers and 386 chief financial officers, as well as qualitative interviews and case studies. The bulletin focuses on the pressures that drive change in IT and where and how institutions use IT chargebacks. It also explores some emerging models that may suggest the future for technology chargebacks.

The author discusses how collaboration with other colleges and universities may be the best strategy for campuses to deal with decreasing IT budgets.

This summary is designed to illuminate a host of current financial management practices related to IT in higher education; to describe the state of the practice in this critical area; and to identify funding practices that appear to contribute to the overall effective function of the IT operation. The summary is based on five major research initiatives: a literature review, survey responses from 482 chief information officers and 386 chief business officers in higher education, qualitative telephone interviews, and three in-depth cases studies involving five institutions

This ECAR Roadmap is designed to illuminate a host of current financial management practices related to IT in higher education; to describe the state of the practice in this critical area; and to identify funding practices that appear to contribute to the overall effective function of the IT operation. The study is based on five major research initiatives: a literature review, survey responses from 482 chief information officers and 386 chief business officers in higher education, qualitative telephone interviews, and three in-depth cases studies involving five institutions.

This case study examines how Cornell University took an institutional approach to analyzing and determining how IT services, investments, and costs are shared across units of the university. It addresses questions that include, How can a complex and decentralized university make more effective use of its IT resources? How can the central IT organization influence the behavior of academic units that create, and then jealously guard, their isolated pockets of IT activity? How can an institution measure the full scope of information technology costs and benefits within departments, schools, and administrative units?