Administrative Excellence teams recommend efficiency measures

A UW–Madison team working on the Administrative Excellence project will recommend the university select a single software supplier for campus email and calendaring systems.

The recommendation is one of several being released by the Administrative Excellence project’s Email & Calendaring, Classroom Space Utilization and Data Center Aggregation teams.

The recommendations, released today, are posted at http://adminexcellence.wisc.edu/project-areas/. The three teams will host Web chats (http://adminexcellence.wisc.edu/administrative-excellence-web-chat-set-for-june-18/) to discuss the recommendations from 11 a.m. to noon on Monday, June 18.

Team members will join the four teams focused on strategic purchasing to talk about their work at a campus forum at 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 20, in Union South.

The Email & Calendaring work team notes that the DoIT-implemented system, WiscMail and its calendar feature, have not been adopted campuswide. Many schools and colleges have chosen to implement a separate email and calendaring service, and the team identified 20 different such systems across campus, though they estimate as many as 35 to 50 could exist.

The use of multiple systems causes inefficiencies, and the team estimates the annual operating costs of redundant systems to be approximately $1.6 million, in addition to the base cost of $2.4 million annually to operate WiscMail and its calendar feature.

The team’s current recommendation is to use Microsoft Office 365 as the software supplier. However, that recommendation is also subject to obtaining the preferential terms and pricing expected for this level of institutional commitment.

The team estimates the university could save approximately $11 million over five years by selecting a single provider.

The Data Center Aggregation team is recommending that a campuswide data center service be established to eliminate duplication and provide consistent service levels across campus. The goal is to match high-efficiency hosting facilities with the wide variety of service needs, including off-campus, cloud-based solutions.

At the time the team was launched, no comprehensive data existed about the number of servers or server rooms and data centers currently in operation.

The team collected data that showed that the university’s server infrastructure includes approximately 5,000 servers and at least 97 data centers/server facilities, with operating costs exceeding $9 million a year.

The team recommends creating institutional capacity but at the same time eliminating duplicated and inefficient facilities. The goal is to provide a consistent service level across campus.

Going forward, a central service provider would manage server and data center facilities. In its data gathering process, the team identified facilities that could be utilized for high-efficiency data centers. Off-campus facilities, including public-private partnerships and cloud services, would also be considered.

The Data Center Aggregation team estimates, through incremental virtualization and co-location, the university could save $6.8 million over five years.

The Classroom Space Utilization team confirmed that classroom space is underutilized; however, the reasons are unclear. Due to the dispersed nature of space and scheduling information, comprehensive data was not readily available, and the team spent a significant amount of time gathering data. The team has been supported to continue to gather data to deepen its understanding about how instructional space is used on campus.

A few specifics about the Classroom Space Utilization team’s recommendations include establishing one comprehensive set of instructional space data, adopting an enterprise inventory and scheduling system, and instituting standard processes to review current instructional space before repurposing space and before new construction is authorized.