Choose Your Own Budget Cut: the Univ. of AZ way

admin October 20, 2008 innovation, organizational culture 5 Comments

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The University of Arizona has announced a really clever way to cut money, generate new ideas, and promote transparency in decision making: they’re soliciting white paper proposals as part of their “Transformation Information and Communication” plan. So far, 75 teams of faculty and staff have submitted proposals. You can read them all online. In particular, their CIO submitted one on “Transforming Technology Support” and the comments alone show the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding 1) central and/or/vs decentral IT and 2) public comments generally.

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5 Responses to “Choose Your Own Budget Cut: the Univ. of AZ way”

  1. Kyle said:

    Oct 20, 08 at 6:01 pm

    Well, that was a pretty predictable set of proposals and responses. I can’t imagine a fully 100% centralized IT organization in an institution that size would ever be useful or functional.

  2. rufusb said:

    Oct 21, 08 at 11:41 am

    My institution is currently suffering under the yoke of poorly functioning central services. If you’re going to centralize, make sure the central service is BETTER than what you’re replacing. So the question stands: How do we cut costs while at the same time improving services? In the case of my department this isn’t as easy as it may seem. The tech to user ratio here is about 100 to 1 and we provide all services aside from e-mail and calendaring. How does this compare to the rest of you?

  3. admin said:

    Oct 22, 08 at 4:54 pm

    Cut costs and improve services? Get creative; stop supporting context services and focus on the core. You don’t improve all services; you improve the ones that are most important and often at the expense of the least important. Also, the issue of centralization is essentially an outsourcing question, which is essentially a delegation question. Sometimes you move a service (re-source it) not because the service will be better but because the service will be good enough and you can reallocate the resources to something more central to your core mission. Our tech to user ration is also about 100 to 1. This is not great but it’s helped here by having a fairly homogenous environment, e.g. one email system, one calendaring, just a few desktop OSs, etc.

  4. Kyle said:

    Oct 22, 08 at 5:55 pm

    You lucky bastards. We’re at 150 to 1…

  5. admin said:

    Oct 23, 08 at 4:08 pm

    Wow. It’s like Survivor ™

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