By Beth Roberts
beth@uga.edu

Campus Information Technology Partnerships is a relatively new unit within Enterprise Information Technology Services. UGA units contract with CITP for computer support. The contract might cover support for a given number of hours a week annually, or might be defined by a specific project. Columns talked with Robert Howard, the director of CITP, and Christopher Workman, the assistant director, about the pros and cons of this arrangement.

Columns: How did you get started on this approach?

Howard: This started in the College of Education. We had faculty members who had joint appointments in other units and we were providing support for their projects. Eventually the college administration asked why we were supporting other departments in the university. I decided I wanted to make this partnerships program work somewhere else—I liked the model, and my clients loved it. I met with Kirk Bertram, who was CIO at the time, and he really liked the model, so we became a unit of EITS for fiscal year 2001. At first there were just three of us, but we have grown so that there are 47 in the department now. We haven’t done much advertising, so it’s mostly been word of mouth, one client telling another.

Columns: And basically you contract with university units for computer support for a year.

Howard: There are two things that we do. At the surface level, we provide IT services—we do yearly contracts, we do project work, we do application development, and we do ad hoc consulting for security, networking and things like that.

When you dig a little deeper, we are involved in a paradigm shift of how IT services are provided within the university. That will have a longer lasting effect. The service needs will change as the technology changes, and as long as we’ve got a good customer service focus and attitude, we will be right there. However, the way the university has been deploying IT resources and money has not always been efficient. Systems have been built that might duplicate each other or overlap.

Columns: Or not work together.

Howard: Right. We allow people to say, “Here’s my budget, here are my priorities, my business is not IT but I vitally need help doing it.” You know, if an army travels on its stomach, the modern university travels on its IT systems.

So we help them. They have business needs and we have a customer support attitude and the staff to make it happen. The money helps you prioritize things, allocate your resources. We want to make sure that people have good information to make good decisions. We want to make sure the university gets the most bang for the buck.

Columns: Can you give me some sense of the cost to a unit?

Workman: It averages about $21 per hour. The average IT employee on campus makes about $19 an hour. Clients can contract for 40 hours a week, or 20 or five—whatever they need.

Columns: And you have client units of different sizes.

Howard: Yes, from large to small. What had ended up happening over the course of time—and the University of Georgia is not alone in this—was that the larger units had money that they could put toward developing IT resources. Small departments sometimes had no idea what to do. They had little budget but a very valid need for a small amount of help.

Columns: How many clients?

Workman: For our service-level agreements, our annual desktop/server support, I think we have 41, of different sizes. Terry College is one, and also we have smaller units within colleges.

Those are our annual agreements. Then our programming and application support group does Web sites, Web-enabled databases, interactive Web sites and databases that aren’t linked to the Web as well—we’ve probably got another 30 there.

Howard: We also do some that are just one-shot support projects.

Columns: The Terry College used to have an internal IT department.

Workman: They still do, but about a third of them are with us. They’re using our resources.

Howard: We’re an option. We work in collaboration—we don’t do things to people, we do them with people.

Workman: That’s one of the reasons we’ve been successful. If we’re not working with a client in a way that they like, they can drop us and get their own. That forces us to be very responsive to their needs.

Sometimes we have taken a stand-alone IT person, put them in our group, and that helped them work more efficiently. In other situations, the people stay in place and we help manage projects and manage their career.

Howard: That’s often a missing piece at UGA. If you’re the only IT person in a department, there is not really an opportunity for growth unless you leave. We can help manage that. The management structure of CITP can also be a buffer—we’re neutral, we can help solve a problem, for the department or the employee.

Columns: I understand you have presented this idea to other colleges and universities.

Workman: We spoke at Educause, at the national conference in Anaheim, and we spoke at an Educause affiliate conference, CUMREC, in Austin.

Columns: Educause is a professional organization dealing with IT at colleges and universities, right?

Workman: Yes. Now other institutions want to see how this works.

Howard: We did some on-site work with Miami University of Ohio. They’re adopting the model. We’ve been on the phone with the University of Arizona, UCLA, the University of California at Irvine, and we’ve had tons of “can you send us information” calls.

Columns: Do you get support from EITS, funding?

Howard: We’re self-supporting. Our support from EITS is a kind of moral support, business office support—we’re very much vested within EITS. As long as we stay in lockstep with what the campus needs, we’ll be successful, and two seconds after we’re out of phase with that we will not be successful.