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Discovering inexpensive on-campus IT support.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Over the past few years, U.S. higher education institutions have endured severe budget cuts which have resulted in decreased spending in the area of information technology (IT). However, the demand for IT support has continued to grow and institutions and their academic departments are faced with the challenge of locating inexpensive or even free IT expertise and support for their IT projects. This paper highlights many of the existing opportunities that exist at most institutions, which can be leveraged to support IT projects.

Introduction

According to the 2003 Campus Computing Project a National Survey of Information Technology in U.S. Higher Education (Green, 2004), budget cuts in U.S. higher education institutions continued to grow impacting campus Information Technology (IT) activities and investments. Green reported two-fifths (41.3 percent) of the survey participants indicated budget cuts affecting academic computing this past year, up from 32.6 percent in 2002 and just 18 percent in 2001. Similarly, just over two-fifths of the institutions reported reduced funding for administrative computing, compared to almost one-third (31.0 percent) in 2002, and one-fifth (18.3 percent) in 2001. In addition, one-third (32.4 percent) of the 2003 survey participants reported mid-year budgets cuts up from 24.9 percent in 2002 and 8.0 percent in 2001. Despite reduced budgets, the Campus Computing Project (Green, 2004) and other studies report that interest and demand for technology-based initiatives such as wireless connectivity, web-based portals, course management systems, e-commerce and service solutions on university campuses, continue to expand. A necessary component in supporting this growth is an increase in IT personnel to implement, manage and support these technology initiatives.

In budget friendly years, many universities had sufficient funding to conduct regional or even national searches for IT candidates and budgets to offer competitive salaries and benefit packages. With decreasing budgets, university-wide hiring freezes for fulltime positions and no reprieve in the foreseeable future, universities are struggling with the challenge of acquiring IT support, expertise and personnel inexpensively especially for the many short-term IT projects originating from academic departments. Internal personnel, individuals already at the university in some capacity, represent an often overlooked and untapped IT resource to fulfill these needs. In my own institution's search to find IT support on campus for my academic department's IT projects, we discovered a plethora of existing programs which we could and did leverage to meet our IT needs for a fraction of the cost of full time personnel or in many cases, for no cost at all. This article will present and describe the problem of diminishing budgets in the context of IT initiatives, the resulting declining job market for IT professionals, and the dire need for IT majors to find work-related experiences on-campus and the many on-campus opportunities which exist for them or others with IT skills to gain this experience and meet the needs of many departments' IT projects.

Budget Cuts in Higher Education

For the 2003-2004 fiscal year, aggregate appropriations for higher education in the U.S. fell 2.1 percent to $60.3-billion, the first actual spending cut since 1992-93 when appropriations dropped to...

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