Action Item 4.01
The University should build life-cycle replacement funding into its planning at every level of investment in information technology, including both hardware and software for personal, departmental, and central systems. ITS should develop a life-cycle replacement model to use, both for its own resources, and for the broader campus IT resource environment. A funding plan should be developed in support of this model and should implemented immediately.
At present, the quality of desktops and laptops are dependent upon the user’s ability to secure funding through a grant or upon the department’s ability to cover the cost of replacement. This has created an environment in which faculty and staff must compete for scarce resources. Productivity often suffers because of incompatibilities with modern technology and equipment failures. Without a funded strategic plan to meet the long-term needs of a growing infrastructure, LSU faculty, staff, and students will not have the levels of capability and consistency needed to fully utilize the network in pursuit of their research, operational, and learning goals.
Action Item 4.02
The University should budget a standard amount per year, per FTE to cover costs for information technology infrastructure and service. These costs should include such components as life-cycle replacement of faculty and staff desktop computers, data and voice communication network provision, pervasive-use software licensing, and local IT support.
The costs of providing IT infrastructure and service are not well understood at LSU. Beyond the central budget provided to ITS and specific funding sources like the Student Technology Fee, LSU lacks a significant focus on an all-encompassing IT funding plan. The very real costs associated with the use of information technology by members of the University community should be considered as a cost of having an employee (much the way the institution is required to set aside funding to cover benefits, retirement, and the like). It has been proven that this type of IT funding strategy can be far more cost-effective than ad hoc spending and uncoordinated investment. For example, if desktop computers are replaced every three years, and their common software components are provided by site-license, the quality of the environment actually improves such that less support is required to productively use that machine. There are no costs for maintenance or repair, as those are covered in the new machine warranty, and costs of support are reduced because it is far easier to provide assistance for users of a common software stack. The unseen costs of IT provision in the ad hoc model employed at LSU today are likely much greater than costs involved in a strategic, long-term IT funding model.
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Action Item 4.03
Cost-savings should be sought through the leveraging of resources, including the creation of campus-wide agreements for standard equipment and software.
While the campus community wants the flexibility to use a variety of tools, campus-wide agreements for heavily used technologies should be facilitated where possible. For example, desktops used for basic administrative functions could be readily purchased through a single vendor in large quantities to ensure modernization of machines and to meet user needs in a cost-effective manner.
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Action Item 4.04
Funding for high performance computing resources—cycles, storage, visualization, and instruments—in support of research enablement should be more holistically coordinated, and expanded over time. New avenues featuring ITS-sought funding via grants and programs should be encouraged. The University should ultimately provide a guaranteed central funding strategy for the provision of these resources, possibly out of University indirect budgets.
Developing and leveraging partnerships as described in Action Item 6.02 should be viewed as simply a start of the process to secure a reliable source of funding for high performance computing resources at LSU. ITS should, itself, establish and expand its pursuit of hardware grants that can bring additional funding sources to bear on providing broadly available resources to the campus. And, ultimately, as both partnership and ITS-centric efforts advance, the University should closely examine its ability to establish a guaranteed source of funding, from research indirect costs, to further increase the financial support for this critical area of resource that enables research. A portion of indirect costs could be directed to advances in the areas of network capability, infrastructure, and high performance computing. An increase in the federal indirect rate would still keep LSU researchers competitive and the funds would ensure that the network and infrastructure could support the future demands of researchers.
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Action Item 4.05
Where possible given program policies and procedures of the specific funding agency, researchers must include support and life-cycle upgrade costs into grant proposals for equipment.
Too often the real costs of equipment are not taken into account. The initial purchase of hardware is relatively cheap when compared to the longer term costs of maintaining, supporting, and upgrading expensive machines. An initial investment that does not take into account the real life of the machine (which may be less than the length of the grant), is one doomed to fail at perhaps its most critical juncture.
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Action Item 4.06
When resources are allocated for new equipment, resources for their support should be included in the costs. Grants should include the support costs (personnel) and not just the physical IT components.
While the initial investment of capital for technology is often seen as relatively easy to acquire, funds for the support and maintenance of equipment are not readily available. Without support, new technology cannot be fully utilized. Investments in full-time support people must be made in order to reap the benefits of capital investments.
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Action Item 4.07
Additional options for student-fee based funding—such as an increase of the existing student technology fee or a new student software fees—should be explored with Student Government.
Long-term recurring expenses for student IT enablement like the licensed software available on TigerWare and the licenses used for the student labs may be covered by a separate software fee, thereby freeing tech fee funds for larger scale improvements to student IT infrastructure, support, and classroom technologies. A second source of IT funds, or an increase in the existing fee, would continue to encourage innovation and maintain the tech fee’s flexibility to fund even greater arrays of IT infrastructure and service.
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Action Item 4.08
The policy for funding full-time appointed positions from the student technology fee, currently not allowed, should be reviewed and considered for positions within ITS that are categorically devoted solely to support of student use of technology funded by that fee, and possible scenarios for funding and accountability processes of such appointed support positions should be explored with student government.
While realizing the original decision to not use student technology fee to fund appointed support positions was made in a time of scarcity of physical resources, in the current environment and into the future, such a limitation may actually be hindering the quality of the overall IT environment experienced by students. ITS should be encouraged to work with the appropriate entity (Student Technology Fee Oversight Committee) to explore possible models where the efficacy and integrity of such appointments might be proven of value, especially in view of Recommendations 2 and 3 of the Flagship IT Strategy.
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Action Item 4.09
Creative funding mechanisms for personnel involved in overcoming the extreme backlog of information systems development projects should be explored and put into in place.
Centrally with regard to information systems development, there exists a tremendous backlog of demanded work that could be met over a relatively short period of time (3-4 years) with a temporary “build-up” of staff resources. Other institutions have successfully deployed strategies of short-term appointments (2 years or less) to bring staff in to deal with a very large assignment, and then easily release them (and their funding commitment) when the backlog is completed and maintenance and upgrade becomes the order of business. These strategies require creative approaches to both budgetary funding and HR hiring processes, and LSU should investigate innovative approaches to solving these personnel-related resource challenges.
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Action Item 4.10
Creative funding approaches to establish and develop IT support personnel in colleges and departments, in line with a leveraged support model suggested in action item 3.01 should be explored and deployed in pilot efforts to prove the effectiveness of the concept and gain acceptance for long term funding consideration.
Regarding providing for resources in departments to serve baseline local support needs, many institutions have found that a program to “seed” and grow local support helps demonstrate the value to local constituencies, and thus makes it more feasible for administration to reallocate resources over the long-term to highly valued local services. Growing a leveraged support environment at LSU could be in part financed through cost sharing with individual units on campus, augmented with short-term funding assistance from a centralized source to allow the units to assume the costs in parallel with achieving the benefits of that local investment.
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