Rebooting for Success: Improving Technology Services at a Top-Ranked University

Situation

A top ranked public university faced the challenge of providing its students and faculty with top-tier IT services while minimizing costs. The university’s IT organization had a decentralized structure, with a central IT team and additional IT employees distributed across various schools and departments of the university. Due to the decentralized approach, the IT standards across the university were inconsistent, and the existing governance structure was ineffective. The CIO’s office was well-regarded across the university for its customer service, but did not have the skills necessary to lead a modern IT organization (e.g. vendor management, project management, business analysis). The university brought Censeo onboard to assist with upgrading their IT functionality while simultaneously identifying ways to maintain—or reduce–costs.

Approach

Censeo’s approach to developing the university’s IT office while controlling costs included:

• Conducting an activity-based survey of all IT staff across the university to understand workload distributions;
• Performing a rigorous analysis of IT financials and identifying spend for service and infrastructure areas (e.g. email, ERP, network infrastructure, etc.);
• Determining the true cost-to-serve figures for all elements of the IT service portfolio and supporting technology infrastructure, and providing leadership with an understanding of the true cost associated with each service offering;
• Comparing the current costs of service with alternative service options (e.g. use of cloud capacity, staffing against accepted benchmarks, etc.) to understand if there were opportunities to provide services at lower prices.