I. Solid Foundation of IT Infrastructure &
Sound Fiscal Planning

Recommendation 1: The University should build a solid foundation of IT infrastructure that will help and enable IU to achieve a position of leadership, and to assure that sound fiscal planning permits the maintenance of this infrastructure at state-of-the-art levels.

Life-cycle Funding, Modernization, and Local Support

Action 1. The University should build life-cycle replacement funding into its planning at every level of investment in information technology (including personal, departmental, and central systems, and network hardware and software); and UITS should develop a life-cycle replacement model to use where needed in conjunction with its investments in information technology. Implementation should begin immediately, with full funding of life-cycle replacement phased in over a fixed number of years.

Action 2. The University should budget a standard amount per year, per FTE to support life-cycle replacement of faculty and staff desktop computers, and to cover the cost of providing local support to that desktop.

Action 3. The University's stock of computers should be systematically modernized so that they are all capable of supporting current releases of widely-used software, Web access and other basic tasks of computation and communication.

Implementation of life-cycle replacement funding of basic desktop technology (computers, printers, and servers) was completed in 2000 for schools and academic support units on all Indiana University campuses. A large percentage of faculty and staff desktop computers were upgraded so that all 15,000 computers on the desktops of IU faculty and staff are now less than three years old. Equipment replacement accounts have been established for academic and administrative units on all campuses, with the units and UITS sharing management and supervisory responsibility. Oversight from the OVPIT Finance Office and campus budget offices ensures that funds are dedicated toward buying appropriate replacement equipment. Very substantial savings for the University have been realized through aggregating large equipment orders and negotiating volume-pricing agreements with such vendors as Dell, Gateway, Compaq, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard, making computers available at rates well below typical academic costs and resulting in savings estimated in the millions of dollars. Individual faculty, staff, and students have also benefited from these agreements, helping the University to meet the objective of Action 58, which focuses on encouraging student ownership of computers. The 2000 UITS User Survey shows that 85% of respondents at IUB and 88% of respondents at IUPUI have computers in their residences.

Agreements with major software vendors, including Microsoft, Corel, Symantec, Oracle, SPSS, and others, mean that all IU computer users have access to the most recent releases of popular desktop software. IU's Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA) with Microsoft Corporation continues to supply University-wide access to the latest versions of a range of Microsoft software. In the first two years of the ELA, some 234,000 copies of the software were distributed across the University. An additional year of the ELA, negotiated in 2000, extends the terms of the contract until at least mid-2003, deepening the significance of the life-cycle funding program. IU may well be the first University in the United States to have implemented institution-wide lifecycle funding for desktop technology.