Purchasing-related - Introduction
Purchasing-related - Menu
Purchasing-related - Introduction
The CIC CIOs engage in a variety of purchasing-related activities where leveraging purchasing power or influence or sharing best practices makes sense. In some cases, these collaborations have led to millions of dollars of savings and new opportunities. A brief description of current purchasing-related activities are listed below.
- IT Licensing Task Force: The CIC CIOs charged an IT Licensing Task Force with responsibility for exploring and negotiating collaborative license opportunities for software products that could create cost avoidance or more favorable terms due to multi-university leverage. To date, collaborative software licenses have been negotiated for Symantec Anti-Virus and SPSS, common in data analysis. There is an RFP for endpoint security software currently being evaluated in coordination with the CIC Purchasing Consortium, for which a license is expected in June 2010.
- IT Software Licensing Principles: In September 2008, the CIC CIOs developed a set of principles to facilitate efficient licensing among software producers and consumers for higher education. As principles, these provide a philosophical basis for reaching specific contract language and sufficiency of terms.
- Web Accessibility Software Evaluation Project: The CIC CIOs have named a Web Accessibility Evaluation and Best Practices project team comprised of members from the IT Accessibility and Usability group and select IT staff with responsibilities for accessibility and/or licensing software to collect information and resources on current web accessibility evaluation practices used within CIC institutions. The goal of collecting and organizing the information is to create a uniform protocol that could be used by IT professionals to evaluate web based resources for accessibility features. The protocols can be used to help verify compliance with individual campus accessibility policies, compare the accessibility of products being considered for purchase, share accessibility information among CIC institutions and provide guidance to vendors on how to design and test their products for accessibility.
- IT Activity-Based Costing: Indiana University held a conference on Activity-Based Costing in November 2008 to which several CIOs sent staff for professional development. Since then, the attendees of this conference have been collaboratively defining services and sharing out their costs of Administrative Email and Server Storage. The short-term outcome of this collaborative activity is benchmarking and best-practice sharing, with a potential bigger, bolder goal of creating an ABC cloud (above campus/consortial) service which provides a hosted set of software, but each institution runs its own instance of it.