EDUCAUSE 2011 Wrap Up

EDUCAUSE is over for another year. You’ve got home with lots of ideas, all excited about the new tech coming to education, plus a lot of advice and training on how to implement it all! Now what? There’s always a huge “but” (no, not that kind), but a “if only I had a budget and IT team to do all of this!”

It all boils down to budgets. Something that was cut back by 10% this year. You’ve been told to start setting up one-on-one laptop initiatives in your district. You also need to make sure students can access their class lectures on their mobile devices by September 2012.

In order to focus on the future you have to figure out how to do more with what you have. Optimize and streamline existing processes, make them better, and reduce spending on everything else. As an IT leader it’s all about doing more with less.

Gartner has rounded up 10 steps that can help companies cut IT costs by 25%. Three of them can be done right now. For the rest, read about them here.

1. IT Support – which takes up 8% of total IT spend.  Automate standard support calls. Reduce calls by 60% with Reboot to Restore technologies. Look for ways to optimize resolving repeat requests that eat up most of your IT team’s time.
2. Power & Cooling – Introduce power management strategies and new design approaches results in ROI in under 1 year. These systems do more than reduce power costs, they simplify power management processes and improve your team’s productivity.
3. Enhance IT asset management – work with your Value Added Reseller (VAR) to review your licensing. Identify cost saving opportunities and programs.  As a VAR it’s one of the benefits you can provide to clients. You can also maintain IT asset repositories as they are generally the most effective tools to help assess cost reduction opportunities internally.

What can your school achieve with an extra 25% in IT Budget?