Proposal #17
Proposal Title: Several
Anticipated Savings/Revenue: $100k-$500k a year
Units affected: DoIT and other IT organizations on campus
Impacted Degrees/Courses: none
Brief Description of Proposal:
#1. IT is traditionally a spending organization in any company. Our IT is crying out for consolidation of human resources, hardware, and software licencing. We could save a lot of money just by consolidating labs on campus into one data center , re-alligning our reporting infrastructure, and removing duplication of IT support throughout the whole campus!!!. I am hoping someone can perfom a return on investment (ROI) analisys, I can offer some help. People are afraid they'll loose their jobs - not true, we can do so much more than we do today, and improve our services to campus community WHILE SAVING ON purchasing new equipment, and software, and not hiring anymore people or contractors. We need to standardize on everything, and re-allign our IT organizations campus wide. PLEASE HELP!!. There's a money waste of huge proportions going on, it should be stopped. I've done several of these consolidations in my previous companies, it's not easy because people (especially here, spoiled by perks of working for the State organization) are very relactant to a change. However, the change MUST COME!! (And hopefully soon)
#2. We can begin outsourcing for other campuses and private companies. Why do they need to outsourse their helpdesk and other services to India or China? We have a campus full of students and staff that would gladly take a job like that with a little training. People in India, for instance, are singing a 12-month employment contract and 2 (!!) of those 12 month they learn English! They are paid $15/hour there. Right now, in this economy, that might sound very good to students and even some of the staff. And we can teach English, if needed. Can we offer web courses to overseas companies?
#3. Speaking of training. A little training and re-qualification of our current resources will go a long way. Instead of hiring costly consultants ($10k/mo is just what I could observe), give training to internal people and have them do their job! Instead of saying - we can blaim it on contractors/consultants/vendor if something doesn't work - hold our internal people accountable and responsible for the job if they do not do it well! Taking responsibility for ones work seems to be lacking. Give managers a power to discipline non-performers, managers should not be scared of a union if they try to make people simply do their job well.
#4. A typical manager in a private organization manages 5-15 employees. We have senior managers with less then 3 direct reports. Does that make sense? From my experience (and I've been a manager before), there is no such thing as "hands-on" manager. Either you manage contracts, people, vendors, budget, procedures, communication, etc.. OR you do your work - "as assigned by your manager". We should stop operating like a startup shop. It doesn't do anybody any good, except planting a false sense of job security for some people. The campus has enough resources to re-allign reporting structure in an enterprise way.
#5. Automation! Some processes are so manual labor intensive that they need to be automated immediately. There are even free tools out there to help us. Here's some examples:
- creation of helpdesk tickets (majority of these must be done on-line, not over the phone). A weak attempt is being made in that field, but that is not enough.
- services status - should be done via a web site, not via e-mail
- network access control - in the university environment you cannot control who accesses resources, but you can know who those people are by automating their registration with an automated background/e-mail check
- property tags placement - use ITIL (it's a database)
Those are just a few..I am sure there's more, just listen to what people "at the bottom of the reporting pyramide" have to say :-)
#6. Quality assurance - don't go with a contractor JUST because their prices are so low. A cheap man pays twice! The quality of work from some contracted vendors is pretty low, well, we get what we pay for..
#7. Use FREE tools. There are companies trying to make it in today's economy looking for a test field. Some of the tools are offered for FREE, we must be taking advantage of any such offer.
Please pass this onto someone who can make changes happen and who is REALLY INTERESTED in changes for the better. Pay cut seems like an easy, yet temporary solution. That doesn't require any innovative thinking or enforcing of unpopular changes that are good for the company overall.
I can share my experiences from past employments where changes above had been implemented. People are relactact to change by nature, but they will get on with a program if that continues to give them employment satisfaction once they realize that it's better this way.
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without
editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
