A different kind of recycling
As part of the strategic planning process, Penn State units must develop a recycling plan for a certain percentage of their budgets.
"A five-year recycling plan that describes those adjustments that would be necessary for the unit to recycle centrally up to 1.0 % of its permanent operating budget each year. Some continued central recycling will almost assuredly be necessary to balance the University’s overall budget, providing for regular and competitive salary increases, improved facilities, and limited new strategic investments."
You can find the Provost's original memo in its entirety on the ITS wiki for strategic planning on wikispaces.psu.edu .
In our ITS Senior Leadership retreats we've started the discussions about how we might do recycling, but I'm very interested in hearing what ideas others might have. How would you change something your group does to recycle (give back) some of its budget? Is there an activity or service that you think could be completely eliminated? I'd rather not constrain thinking with specific dollar values, but to get started think handfuls of thousands of dollars and beyond. And anything in ITS is fair game, you don't have to just think about your own area.
Comment here or send me an email with your ideas. We could really use the wisdom of our crowd on these kinds of challenges.
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Aw heck - not wanting to start a flame war, but...
Look - what if we just severed part of our relationship with our current Big Software Suite? I refer to Microsoft Office.
While there are arguably no perfect substitutes for all of the particular pieces that we site license as a bundle, it's also a fact (well, a guess, really) that 80% of Penn State MS Office users spend 80% of their MS screen time using that particular 20% of the MS suite their job requires (or less).
As for word processing, MS Word, which began as a fairly sprightly MS-DOS word processor that would fit on a single 360k floppy disk, has grown into a gargantuan behemoth. Its capabilities far exceed what is required for the simple capture of keystrokes. For formatting of formal documents on paper - fine, but fonts and formatting for emphasis or expression of personal style are no substitute in electronic documents for the well chosen turn of phrase.
There are other ways to capture ideas in keystrokes (wikis, or this blogging package, for example), and many of these compelling alternatives promote positive benefits such as:
* exchange of ideas among colleagues (without requiring attachments to email messages),
* collaboration and co-authorship (without embedded proprietary code),
* inherent repository building by accretion, and,
* findability / discoverability (something much more difficult with Word files scattered across fifteen or twenty thousand PSU hard disk drives).
I'm sure this suggestion is too much too soon, but just imagine....