After spending the last three Meetup events talking about artificial intelligence, the Higher Ed Tech Pros organizational committee decided to focus on another familiar topic: how to run an IT department with reduced staff or budget.
IT leaders at smaller institutions must maintain services, innovate on the status quo, and plan for the future—all the while juggling limited staff and resources.
Key takeaways:
- Collaboration: Shared services and leadership drive major savings.
- Lean infrastructure: Right-sizing hardware and spaces for actual use.
- Grant leveraging & reuse: Increasing value by aligning external funding with internal efficiency.
- Cost-savings: Creative use of student labor, open-source technology, and outsourced resources.
James Stoffel, CIO at Showa Women’s Institute acted as moderator, with Frank Hughes, CIO at Cape Cod Community College, and Ray Lefebvre, CIO of New England College of Optometry, as panelists to lead the discussion.
You can find a recording of the discussion below:
The following are some of the resources that were mentioned during the conversation:
- DHS Cyber Hygiene Program: Free external vulnerability scanning, regular reports, and remediation guidance.
- Cybertrust Massachusetts: State-subsidized cybersecurity assessments and managed detection/response, often grant-covered for the first year.
- DTEN Zoom Boards: These or similar all-in-one collaborative displays offer comparable functionality for much lower price and support overhead.
- Refurbished Equipment: Refurbished laptops extend refresh cycles and maintain student loaner inventories affordably.
- Staff Redeployment: Redirecting open positions or retirements towards new roles can help make up for smaller headcounts.
- Joint Purchasing: Multi-college licensing or purchasing groups yield deep discounts for cybersecurity tools and management software.
- Campus GenAI Portal: An open-source multi-LLM AI environment that other universities can adopt as a managed service or self-host.
- Unity HPC Service: A shared, fee-for-service high-performance computing platform offering smaller institutions access to large-scale computing power without local investment.
- Interns & Student Workers: These individuals effectively support cybersecurity, helpdesk, and classroom technology, delivering substantial savings while providing hands-on experience.
- Grants & Subsidies: Panelists mentioned taking advantage of local and federal grants and subsidies to help pay for high priority projects.
- Technology Review & Rationalization: Ray Lefebvre advocated for reviewing your institution’s technology inventory to root out redundancy and technical debt.
- Open Source & Outsourced Resources: Frank Hughes mentioned using open source software and outsourcing specific roles where appropriate. James Stoffel specifically recommended ManageEngine.
- Ticketing Systems: The group recommended keeping specific types of tickets separated from a user perspective. Freshworks was mentioned by a few attendees.
- Printing as a Service: Offboarding printing services to an external vendor like WEPA (We Print Anywhere) was brought up as a cost saving solution.
We would like to especially thank James, Frank, and Ray for helping put together this event. We wouldn’t be able to run our virtual Meetups without the help and support from our wonderful team of volunteers.
If you’d like to join our next virtual event, consider visiting our Meetup page to learn more. It could be a fantastic networking and learning opportunity to meet other technology professionals at colleges and universities and share your expertise. We are also looking for feedback on the next event’s topic, so please feel free to reach out to us if you’re interested in a specific topic.
Learn more about the other Higher Ed Tech Professionals Meetups on our blog.
