Price check: the COSTS Project helps institutions determine the cost of IT support services

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Feb, 2001 by Nicole Rivard

Gone are the days when IT organizations were troubled by lack of reliable benchmarks or comparative data on which to base decisions about support services. For the past four years, the COSTS Project has directed a collaborative effort among a wide range of institutions to develop models for understanding the cost of IT support service. The project is led by Karen Leach, CIO, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y., and David Smallen, Director, Information Technology Services, Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y.

Leach and Smallen described the project in detail at the EDUCAUSE conference last fall. The goal of the project is to help administrators get a handle on the cost of IT support services by obtaining consistent and reliable data, analyzing it, and developing benchmarks for IT services.

While the survey has evolved over the years, it originated as a response to an e-mail sent out by Steve Gilbert, moderator of the American Association for Higher Education's listervs back in 1996, who was experiencing a technology support crisis of his own. In a posting to the listserv, he wrote:

"As I've been suffering the effects of my own personal `support service crisis,' I've realized that there are a lot of people who want the same thing that I do. We want powerful, effective tools that are utterly reliable, available, and easy to use. We want to spend our time figuring out how to use these tools to improve teaching and learning--how to do our work more effectively and efficiently. We don't want to spend much time figuring out how to use these tools and their successors ... or how to cope with unexpected limitations or anomalies. We especially don't want to spend time trying to get our machines fixed or dealing with software packages that interfere with each other in mysterious ways. And we want the full costs associated with these capabilities and services to be highly predictable. We're willing to pay a premium for all this, but we'd like that premium to be as low as possible."

The e-mail prompted Leach and Smallen to begin discussing what it would cost to get the kind of reliability Gilbert wanted. What started off with a casual conversation led to them trying to collect information on their own institutions' services.

"We realized as we were talking about it that we didn't understand how much we were paying for particular services," Leach said. "You can outsource your training to somebody else. Well, if you don't know what you are spending today and what you are getting for that money then you don't know what you're going to spend when you hire someone else."

Leach said some of the total-cost-of-ownership surveys were lacking. For instance, one study, which collected everything related to what it costs to run a computer, came out to $13,000 a year per computer.

"That's an inaccurate number if you count all the overhead and all the things related to it," she said.

"For day-to-day management it's not a number that resonates with anybody. We wanted to find real numbers that real managers could use to compare their costs to what other people were doing."

They also wanted administrators to be able to figure out if their institutions were in a typical range compared to other schools of the same size.

Leach and Smallen took their ideas to a birds-of-a-feather session at the 1996 CAUSE Conference in San Francisco. Attendees were asked to gather preliminary data to help develop estimates of the cost of delivering excellent IT support services. Fifty conference attendees agreed to participate, and then the IT directors of the 54 schools in the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges also came aboard. (CLAC had been conducting its own survey about technology in the liberal arts since 1985.) A year later, the first results were presented at the 1997 CAUSE conference. For the 1999-2000 school year, more than 200 schools expressed an interest in the COSTS Project.

HOW IT WORKS

From the beginning, participants in the COSTS Project realized that relating unit costs to service-level expectations is a promising way to understand the differences in institutions. This also could help identify institutional approaches that deliver high levels of service at identified cost levels.

The project studies infrastructure-related services as well as support services. Infrastructure services involve all aspects of acquiring, installing, maintaining, and replacing equipment annually. Support services are largely staff-driven budget components. They relate to the support of infrastructure users, and include training, help desk, administrative information systems, curricular support, research and development, and Web development.

"Most of the services we look at are in some combination ranging from all-the-way outsourcing to totally in-house," Smallen said.

The original survey was designed to collect and analyze data one service at a time. The identification of 12 core services that every school provides in some way was the backbone of the COSTS Project. For example, a survey specifically for hardware repair services was developed. However, some people were concerned that they wouldn't know how to divide up their expenses without seeing the whole. In 1999, the coordinators of the COSTS Project made the survey more comprehensive. Another revision made the survey less time consuming.