It is fair to say that very few in Higher Ed have been fortunate to be working in an institution where priority has been given to maintaining the facilities at the level that they should have been. Sightlines, a company that provides guidance to higher ed institutions on facilities management, publishes an annual report titled “State of Facilities in Higher Education”. You can download and read the 2015 report here (note that you have to provide personal information to download and you may be contacted by Sightlines). This report is very detailed and you will notice that many of the institutions have deferred facilities maintenance by underinvesting over a long period. This underinvestment reached a new low as a result of the financial meltdown of 2008 and many haven’t caught up.

Given the scarce financial resources many institutions work with, prioritizing facilities expenditure is hard. In a widely quoted research, it has been shown that it takes roughly $4 for every $1 in deferred maintenance. Basically, postponing maintenance turns out to be far costlier than preventive maintenance, which requires commitment to spend on a regular basis. You can see how continually avoiding preventive maintenance compounds this problem several fold.

I believe that there is a lesson to learn from this when it comes to expenditures in Library and Technology. These are two important areas that connect strongly to the core mission of the higher ed institutions. We can no longer argue that technology is a “nice to have” in that it is here to stay and is integral to teaching, learning and research as well as business operations! How do we prioritize the investments in these areas so that the “deferred maintenance” problem does not catch up with us? It is an extremely difficult question to answer.

First off, the direct comparison between facilities and libraries and technologies is not a simple one. When I talk about Libraries and Technologies, there is also a facilities component there. Especially in libraries, we need to reexamine the space there and invest in ways that supports the changing needs of the students and faculty, such as the academic commons or maker spaces. With the move to the cloud, the data centers are shrinking and maintenance of those, typically a facilities issue, should go down.

The continued investments in library collections is important. These investments should recognize the changing landscape, for example, properly balancing access to ebooks and electronic journals vs physical books. Similarly, we should commit to increase investments in special collections and archives. The collections budgets have remained stagnant for several years or gone down, while the acquisition/access costs continue to rise.

In terms of technologies, the typical argument that is used for underinvestment is “the cost of hardware keeps going down”. Though cost of acquiring laptops for faculty and staff has gone down, it is never as high as one thinks based on what they see advertised online or brick and mortar stores. In order to provide reliable, well maintained enterprise wide systems that can keep up with the demands of the academic software and administrative systems, we cannot simply be purchasing the cheap hardware that one sees in the stores. The total cost of ownership of those tend to be higher. I don’t want to take up a lot of time in trying to explain this, but anyone interested can contact me for details.

Since the institutions provide computer hardware and software, many of our faculty and staff do not know what the total cost of ownership of the hardware and the software that they are used to having on their computers and how their price goes up every year. And then talk about network hardware! They are not cheap. Since we want to manage them centrally to provide the best possible experience for our users, they cannot be the run of the mill WiFi devices you can pick up in the stores.

The administrative systems such as Banner (referred to as ERPs) cost a lot of money to the institutions to run. It is not just the maintenance cost of the software that is the problem, but the number of staff who are needed to support them and the number of integrations with other systems that are essential. Whereas we have managed to handle the other technology expenditures with what we have, ERPs are like neglected buildings. They are typically 15 years or older, requiring a lot of resources and in the end, they slowly drift towards not supporting all of our new and emerging needs. The underinvestment argument has always been “Well, no student comes to our institution because we have the best ERP”. I would say that the same holds about facilities in certain institutions like ours – they are not a clincher either.

Take the word ERP out from the previous paragraph and replace it with library management systems and the same thing holds.

Administrative systems are critical for the business operation for the lifecycle of a student (starting from being an applicant to an alumna), faculty and staff. It is absolutely true that a student doesn’t look at our portal or registration system to come to the College. But, if admissions staff don’t have the right tools to be able to attract the students to apply, or that resources staff do not have the right analytics to help them with fundraising, we can be in big trouble. So, the direct impact on students is not the only criteria that we should go by in valuation of technologies.

Therefore, we should seriously rethink how to manage investments in both the libraries and technology. Creation of a rainy day fund that accumulates monies for a major refresh of systems when appropriate, be it network hardware or administrative systems is a possibility. Leveling the expenditures through leasing, so that the refreshes are not a big impact on the budget, but annual, predictable expenditures assure us reasonable rate of refresh of the technologies. In terms of library collections, it could be raising enough in endowment to fund the collections budget so that we take the reliance on operating budgets entirely out of the picture.

We don’t want to find ourselves at a point where we hear that a particular major software is no longer supported and then we are scrambling to find funding to implement a new one. It is like waiting for a roof to collapse before looking for funding to replace it or repair it.

The current systems have grown inefficient over time and create way too much work to accomplish even some of the mundane tasks. Reporting is the lifeline of several departments. As one of our staff from finance puts it, she needs to go to 20 different reports to get to what she really wants to. Business Intelligence systems are solving this in some fashion, but integrating them with older systems are far more pain than necessary.

The parallel to deferred maintenance is the sheer number of software we have inherited over time that are chugging along without much care in certain departments. Institutional risk in both of these cases is huge. Unfortunately, in a resource constrained environment, the approach is “Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But what’s the definition of “broke” and who should decide what’s currently “broke” or worse, is about to break?

Let us think about creative ways to avoid repeating the deferred maintenance mistakes again!