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Students, Faculty and Staff all need increased IT services.
Internet access is needed in increasing volumes and access points.
Web-based courses, recruitment capabilities and databases are needed.
Users look for reliable and secure use of technology when they want it.
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Shrinking Endowments
Constricting Budgets
Large internal IT costs and fixed expenses
Savvy development markets
Increasingly competitive grants
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Higher Education faces diametrically-opposed forces. As Presidents, CFOs, CIOs, Provosts, Deans, and Trustees, you confront increasing demand for technology with decreasing supply of funding.
Colleges and universities also face a dizzying array of opportunities and challenges.
OPPORTUNITIES
- The opportunity to track a student, from "cradle to grave," from prospective applicant to contributing alumna, in one integrated IT application.
- Increased revenue through Web-Based marketing and recruiting.
- Increased revenue through Web-Based program delivery.
- Decreased cost of delivering Web-Based programs.
CHALLENGES
- Embedded legacy applications, both administrative and financial. These applications represent many years and many dollars of investment. Typically, these applications are supported by internal IT staff, representing current and future overhead, and continuing sustaining investment.
- Difficulty in recruiting and retaining highly-skilled technical staff. IT budgets are tight, and just funding adequate quantities of staff is difficult. As in any profession, highly-skilled technologists are relatively highly-paid. Once employed, the individual becomes limited in technical scope.limited by the range of technology within the internal data center and networks. It is difficult to sustain the training investment required to maintain internal IT staff at competent levels, as technology develops at a rapid pace outside the confines of their data center.
- Fragile LANs & WANs. Your network has been built incrementally. One step at a time, it has grown organically. You experience unplanned outages. As volumes increase, collision rates increase, and the network slows. Your "pipe" is expensive, and the volume is a concern.
- Product-Driven Technology Vendors. If a school (or schools, as collaborative computing is increasing) has the courage and optimism to attempt to go into the market to buy a new administrative, financial, or Campus Information System (CIS), the typical process involves releasing an RFP to the known companies who manufacture and sell the software products.
- These product companies respond to the RFP with their "solution," which meets the requirements of the school, which is their product and their implementation program. The product companies demo and re-demo their screen shots, and the school makes a decision, over the course of about 24 months, to engage one of the product vendors in negotiation for the contract to buy the licenses and implementation services offered by the vendor.
Then, "Implementation" starts, and sometimes - it never ends.
But the problem with the Product-Driven nature of the transaction is not just how the vendors behave, but it also lies in how we view the transaction. We are all very well-conditioned in the product purchase model. Most of our purchases, by far, have been for products. We buy products based on their features. So, when we think of buying a new system, we think of the features it will have, and what companies and brands are available. We should stop and think.
We should start, not with the features and the brands, but with ourselves. Instead of the products driving us, we can now drive the products. We can start with what our students, our prospective students, our faculty, our staff, our alumni, our community, need. We can then impose upon the IT professionals to deliver the applications we need, how we need them, when we need them.
As your IT professionals of choice, netEconomist's independent product positioning gives you the management and technical expertise to:
- Assess where you are right now, and
- Begin immediate improvement on multiple fronts
Using netEconomist, you can:
- Maximize the performance and cost-effectiveness of your old (legacy) systems.
- Assess your network infrastructure and begin immediate performance and cost improvements.
- Compliment your internal IT staff with just the right skills required.
- Move your IT environment from product-driven to services-driven.
- Begin to develop improved, customer-driven, applications.
- Create options for IT staffing.
- Create options for the hardware/software/network delivery of applications.
- Move from services-driven to customer-driven by implementing the IT infrastructure that exactly meets your requirements.
Call or CLICK to engage netEconomist to:
- Provide emergency hardware/software/network support.
- Provide a preliminary technical assessment.
- Develop applications.
- Build Web-based programs, applications, and sites.
- Consult on IT strategies.
- Work temporarily as CIOs, IT Directors, or other management and/or technical positions.
- Take control of your IT infrastructure & environment.
- Negotiate with Product Vendors.
- Develop, write, administrate, evaluate, RFPs.
- Outsource the IT function, with hosting through netExchange.
- Join a consortium for IT development and implementation.
- Begin saving money and improving IT delivery - immediately.
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