Investing and Funding Information Technology Strategically
Information technology is a strategic asset necessary for the institution to advance and stay competitive and productive in the future. As such, the funding of information technology infrastructure and services should be done holistically for agility, efficiency and effectiveness. We seek the best approach to strategically invest for today and tomorrow to create the infrastructures needed to support teaching, learning, research and innovations in information technology.
Success Stories
UTech developed a multi-year capital plan for network infrastructure, enterprise applications, research computing and academic technologies/learning spaces. This plan provides insight into long-range capital requirements and enables better decision-making.
In collaboration with Procurement, UTech negotiated strategic partnership agreements with various vendors. Intentionally fostering such relationships takes a lot of time and effort, but truly benefits the university through preferred terms and pricing resulting in time- and cost-savings.
Examples:
Based on the university’s spend, Logicalis—the university’s primary source of enterprise Cisco network equipment and related professional services—seeded investments in network IT devices and solutions supporting new technologies.
UTech’s multi-year strategic agreement to host the university’s PeopleSoft applications developed into a strategic vendor relationship with IBM. As a result, IBM provided additional services and resources supporting various university initiatives at no extra cost.
- Identified financial resources for professional development in support of training staff that are managing strategic initiatives to ensure its successful implementation
- Established a funding model for transitioning capital investments to operating expenses
- Participated in a division-wide costing model to help budget for IT hardware
- Inventoried all financial resources used for IT hardware and software to better identify what is needed to meet and exceed the university’s technology needs
- Committed to and developed a budget-neutral funding methodology for the first phase of UTech Centralization with the Budgets and Planning office