IT needs surpass funding by millions
Innus tells FSEC he's prioritizing needs to deal with $10 million gap

By MARA McGINNIS
Reporter Assistant Editor

The university's information-technology needs for the coming year outweigh the funding available by about $10 million, Voldemar Innus, chief information officer, told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee at the group's Feb. 9 meeting.

In response to a report by the senate's Computer Services Committee (CSC), Innus told senators that he is responding to a request from Provost David Triggle and Senior Vice President Robert Wagner to put together an outline and financial assessment of what the university's IT needs will be in the coming 12 months.

"The first cut came to $14.5 million of need over the next 12 months if we wanted to address most of the curve concerns that most of the constituent groups were putting on the table," Innus said. "Obviously, we don't have that kind of money. I did a second cut and got it down to about $9.5 million."

He added that after his assessment was reviewed at the last meeting of the university's IT Steering Committee, it was clear that "we are going to have to look at some additional prioritization beyond that because we are not going to have that much money available."

Innus noted that he also is "going through a secondary process trying to identify all of the funding we will have available" for IT from such sources as the capital fund, the matching fund, one-time commitments and the technology fee.

"Best guess from my point of view at this early stage is that might come out to about $4 or $5 million at best," Innus said. "So you can see we will probably have to look at constraining what currently people are envisioning they need by about half."

Thomas Schroeder, associate professor of learning and instruction, said a graduate student in his department told him that UB's technology fee is the second highest in the country and added that such claims could be problematic if students don't think they're getting commensurate access to technology.

Innus said that while UB is "fairly aggressive" in terms of its technology fee, he said to call it "the second highest in the country" is probably inaccurate, given the different ways fees are determined and packaged. "Fees are handled in different ways on different campuses, so it is difficult to sort out," said Innus. "But if you look at all of the fees combined, we're in the middle of the pack."

Innus noted that he has had an "interesting set of discussions with the students" regarding the technology fee and said their only real concern was that the fee be used for its intended purpose.

"We have worked very hard to do that," said Innus. "Each year, we ensure that we take that fee and use it for its intended purpose." He said the fee helps pay for such things as access to unlimited printing on campus-for which other universities charge a lot of money-and free-Internet access to students who live off campus.

Wagner added that the student technology fee is a complicated issue and reminded the senators that the fee is only one piece of the sources of funding for IT efforts on campus.

"Our challenge in the next couple of years in the IT arena, I think, is going to be a challenge of prioritization," said Wagner, adding that while the needs are almost limitless, the resources are extraordinarily limited and that the university will have to determine what will be the "really critical investments."

Faculty also expressed concern about the lack of faculty involvement in the IT process, and Lorna Peterson, chair of the CSC, said that the committee's theme this year "has been to increase faculty voice, power, influence, in the process" and, to that end, has increased the number of faculty on the university's IT Steering Committee from one to three.

Those three individuals already have agreed to serve and will do "double-duty," serving on that committee as well as on the CSC, said Senate Chair Peter Nickerson.

Other CSC concerns reported by Peterson included Host On-Demand (HOD) shortcomings and challenges, accountability of administration in IT matters, evaluation of the nodes and IT planning.

The evaluation of IT is of particular concern, according to Peterson, who noted that "we've done a lot in a short time period, we need to take a step back and look at what we've done, what we've done well and what needs to be improved."

Peterson added that a point of discussion that constantly comes up with the committee is "the business of how we do IT business," including such questions as, 'How is the baseline support for faculty determined?' and 'What should a faculty member have in terms of IT?'

Innus said the IT Steering Committee is "striving to find new and different ways to increase participation," but added that he hopes to determine other vehicles to that end, such as roundtables or brown-bag lunches where faculty "have the opportunity to get the issues out there."

In response to a question about HOD, Innus said the major problems with the software stemmed from a "lack of robustness of the university community's desktop computers," many of which did not meet the minimum standard requirements to operate the latest version of HOD.

HOD is designed to allow secure, Web-based access to UB's core administrative applications. UB users experienced problems when the system failed to process login requests, preventing them from accessing crucial data from the university's mainframe.

Innus said there will be a joint review of the situation by IBM-the supplier of the system-and UB, and that he welcomes faculty participation when all of the issues are finally straightened out, which probably won't be for another several weeks.