We now have a draft budget for this next year ready for the Board of Trustee approval. This has been a stressful process for everyone and I want to thank all IT staff across the campus for your input and your willingness to discuss ideas for how to best continue to serve the campus with fewer resources. The process was a little rough at times but as always seems to happen around here, it came together at the deadline.
Now lets talk about what the new budget means to technology, assuming the Board approves the draft. A couple of years ago we founded the Advancement of Technology funds. This was an annual allocation of about $78,000 that was to be used to support development and deployment of new technologies on campus. The Information Technology Collaborative Hive was responsible for recommending what projects should be funded from this source with the approval by the Vice Presidents. Unfortunately, these funds are proposed to be a part of our budget reductions and will not be available for the foreseeable future. Also, impacting the community is a reduction in the funding used each year to replace equipment as it ages and/or breaks. This will cause us to revert back to the practice of asking for and using one-time funding when a system fails. There are also other reductions and changes within C&C that will impact our ability to provide support to the faculty, students and staff across the campus.
I know the reductions proposed will impact the performance and maintenance of our current systems and our efforts to advance the use of new technologies in teaching and learning. This proposal has come about from numerous discussions and input from across campus such that I am confident that these reductions to our budget represent the best option for supporting the campus mission. My experience has been that as budget discussions give way to implementation planning, often opportunities arise that would not have been feasible in the past as the organization adjusts to the new funding levels. I would encourage everyone to think openly as we begin the process to implement the budget and to encourage everyone to participate as much as possible in meetings, workgroups and/or taskforces working on developing strategies for the coming year.
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