I did the math and our budget is too high. No, really.

What happened? Where did I go wrong? I’m preparing my budget presentation for next fiscal year and so I thought I’d get some comparison data from peer and “next step” school. I used Educause’s Core Data service and looked at operating budget, compensation budget, and IT budget as percent of institutional operating budget. In all cases our numbers were higher than our national peers and our regional peers, and we were almost the same as our “next step” schools (the more highly ranked and competitive schools). And as excellent as we are, I’m 100% confident we’re not that good.

In my presentation, I suggest we investigate the following issues which may contribute to our higher than typical budget:

  • a heavy reliance on proprietary software which we manage in house and which has expensive licenses and associated costs
  • a heavy reliance on many different types of proprietary software which requires a lot of custom, in-house integration work (e.g. the worst of all worlds)
  • little reliance on external service providers (no outsourcing)
  • a heavily siloed IT organization with little cross-team efficiencies or coordinated administration (e.g. we need an administrative manager and a project manager)
  • a tendency to expand old processes to meet new expectations when what we want is not linear change but exponential change
  • and ? what? where is our money going, exactly? tbd

4 Responses to “I did the math and our budget is too high. No, really.”

  1. Kyle said:

    Sep 17, 08 at 6:08 pm

    Wow. I really wish I had your problems. We’re on the other end of the scale. We’re spending significantly less per FTE than our peers and have a staff that is 8 FTEs smaller than our peers with a budget that fails to meet support needs for our network, classrooms or systems. Seriously, wanna trade?

  2. kdghty said:

    Sep 18, 08 at 11:42 am

    you need an admin mgr…?

  3. rufusb said:

    Sep 18, 08 at 1:05 pm

    You need a project manager…?

  4. admin said:

    Sep 18, 08 at 1:45 pm

    Kyle: No, thanks!
    Kdghty: Yes, please!
    Rufusb: Yes, please!


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