Cost of inefficiency

How efficient are you throughout the day? Yeah, I know we all think we operate at 100% but that can't be the case. Certainly isn't for me. There is time spent reading about non-work items, talking with people about non-work subjects, letting brain idle or drift among a variety of topics with no particular focus. Sure, that's not all bad, but it does show that work efficiency is less than 100%.

So what? Well, think about the Penn State budget. At roughly $3.2B, it's big. If you strip out the sponsored research funds and Commonwealth funds, it's still in the $2B range, and that money comes mostly from student tuition.

So what if, as a whole, we operate at 90% efficiency? We're wasting $200M every year. That's $2400 per student, or nearly 21% of tuition.

Working more efficiently means looking for ways to work smarter, not harder. What are we doing that we can automate - making processess more accurate and allowing more time to devote to other activities. It means finding ways to work more collaboratively. ITS won't have all the good ideas and we can't develop or manage every service but collectively we can make the Univ. more efficient. It means spending time with students, faculty, researchers and administrative staff to understand their goals and how we can better aid in reaching them.

In short, it means taking the 4 themes for making ITS a better place and applying them persistently and consistently. Not sure of the 4 themes? Look here,
https://staff.its.psu.edu/themes.html