ComputerWorld.in

IT Gets Ready for the Recovery

Anne Agee is living a dual life at work these days. On the one hand, she's preparing for a cut to her IT budget that could be as high as 9% for the next fiscal year. On the other, she's bracing for a boom in business.

Agee, vice provost for information technology and CIO at the University of Massachusetts Boston, is in a position that many IT managers find themselves these days -- coping with the ongoing effects of a grinding recession while simultaneously being asked to get ready for a recovery.

In the case of UMass Boston, lawmakers are still deciding how much the state will cut its contribution to higher education, but the number could be devastating, a scenario for which Agee must prepare. At the same time Agee has to ready her department for an influx in students, and related faculty hiring, as families shift from more expensive schools to in-state colleges.

Agee is using the downturn to eliminate sacred cows, like a long-standing remote-access modem pool that costs several thousand dollars a month in connection fees. That will be replaced by an existing virtual private network (VPN), which will cost less and be more secure. She's also pushing to eliminate fax machines, with the goal of putting in fax servers or related technology. And she's exploring whether she can replace individual desktop printers with centralized shared multifunction printers.

She's already renegotiating vendor contracts, to reduce the risk of having to cut staff if she does have to whack her budget. Another hedge would be to close labs on weekends and slow certain technology purchases.

Agee is not the only IT manager having to plan for growth during a downturn. We talked with several, and they offered these nuggets of wisdom (see following pages).