Lindsay France/University Photography

Chief Information Officer Ted Dodds outlines key areas for IT budget savings at a forum April 22 on IT administrative streamlining.

Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) is on track to save $2 million in expenditures in the current fiscal year, reported Ted Dodds, Cornell's new chief information officer, at a forum April 22 in Malott Hall. While the savings falls short of this year's $5 million target, he cautioned that saving money is not just about making cuts. "We must balance savings with what we need to do to be more effective and to improve IT services," he said.

Reductions in IT expenditures in this fiscal year from CIT's $56 million annual budget currently amount to about $2 million out of the target of $5 million, and the remainder has been added to the planned savings for fiscal year 2012, for a goal of $5 million to $6 million, he said.

The forum on the Information Technologies Initiative of the Administrative Streamlining Program was one of a series, each event devoted to a particular area of the university, growing out of the "Reimagining Cornell" initiative, which aims to save the university up to $85 million annually by 2015. Dodds spoke to an audience of about 100, many of them IT managers from across campus.

Dodds, who came to Cornell in January from the University of British Columbia, noted that Cornell IT is currently a "high-risk environment," with many new systems being introduced, both in Ithaca and at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Apart from cutting expenditures, he promised to work to reduce network outages and to speed completion of the Network Connectivity Program to extend fiber-optic connections everywhere on campus. "There is no single more important part of the research infrastructure than the network," he said.

The key areas for savings:

• Infrastructure, including "virtualization" of servers, moving many independently operated servers onto centrally located hardware -- a "community cloud." This will reduce the cost of server infrastructure, reduce the number of people needed to support it, and save on backup costs, Dodds said. He also plans to complete the Network Connectivity Program in fewer years at a total cost of $16 million to $18 million, versus the originally projected $35 million.
• End-user support, saving $2.5 million to $3.5 million by meeting industry standards for the number of desktops helped by each support person, along with standardization and better management of applications. Dodds proposes to follow the guidelines of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a widely accepted set of best practices originally compiled by the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency of the United Kingdom and now in use by thousands of organizations worldwide.
• Restructuring CIT to eliminate duplication and to better coordinate with other IT service groups across campus.

Dodds has invited "four of the best minds in the field" to campus in June to conduct an external review of Cornell IT services.

"What we're going to do is not just think about cutting costs, but think about how we're going to do things differently so we can reduce costs," Dodds concluded.

The presentation is available on CornellCast at http://www.cornell.edu/video/?VideoID=1178.