What is the cost of ?

Lately, I suppose caused by the current economic climate, I've been asked this question often.  The ? is always replaced by one of our services, like email, or ANGEL, or the intercampus backbone.  The question isn't referring to a service rate but rather the cost for us to provide this as a service to the University.

The honest answer is usually, "I don't know".  ITS has a good track of how we spend money  but it's typically been accounted for at a unit level, not at a service level.  We have many services that cut across unit lines and all our services involve a labor component that hasn't been tracked in this manner.

That's now starting to change.  A cost of services approach is underway that will better align cost and services.  Doing this isn't easy and will require a lot of work but the end result will be worth the time invested.

We'll be able to better answer senior management questions.  We'll be able to better compare our costs to other CIC institutional service costs; if they can provide a service less expensively than we can then we may be able to learn ways from them to reduce our costs.  We'll be able to have more informed discussions with colleges and campuses who run services similar to ours.

The current economic climate provides us an opportunity to set priorities on where we spend funds and the cost of services project will help provide more accurate assessment of those costs.   If you have an opportunity to help with this, please do.