Midwestern Higher Education Compact
A Bigger Technology Picture
Delivering Your Students the Newest Tech Tools
Starts with Collaboration

By Mary E. Feilmeyer and R. Grant Crawford

Higher education leaders clearly know that in order to keep new students knocking on the door of admissions, they must consider the best use of technology on their campus. While maximizing institutional revenue to support student learning and success is a priority for institutions, many information-technology (IT) professionals struggle to keep up with escalating demands for the newest and greatest technologies.
     
Many consider cooperative purchasing to be the ticket to saving significant amounts of money for their institutions while also cutting the cost and time spent on their own procurement processes.
     
Funding from state appropriations and tuition is usually not enough to pay for the newest technologies that students want, for campus-wide wireless networking, for the most flexible online course tools, or even the things that parents want, such as emergency notification systems.
     
“I’m a big supporter of cooperative purchasing,” explained Craig Klimczak, vice chancellor for Technology and Educational Support Services at St. Louis Community College in Missouri. “We take part in these processes to leverage our buying power and to reduce our time for procurement.”
     
A campus must prioritize the institution’s technology needs and wants and balance those with the needs and wants of the students. Cathy Horvath, director of IT Central at Minot State University in North Dakota works with a campus advisory committee for information technology that consists of administrators, faculty and students. The committee examines wish lists and prioritizes project funding. “We need to reduce operating costs and at the same time support and protect our students. Staying connected to all of our students and maintaining a collaborative environment with our distance learners can be a challenge.”
     
Since emergency preparedness is a concern shared by campus administrators, parents and students, this continues to be a hot-topic technology issue as well. Security measures such as surveillance security cameras and closed-circuit TV have an impact on administrative budgets, as do preventative and investigative tools. “However, some things trump expenditures,” said Horvath.
     
Students are looking for technologies that will provide them increased flexibility both in terms of time and space, decrease their costs, show environmental responsibility, as well as increase their social opportunities. Additionally, students are looking for increased use of technology in the classroom and for online research management tools.
     
Minot State University, for example, has had huge success with a RefWorks pilot. RefWorks is an online management tool designed to help students and researchers easily gather, manage, store, and share all types of information, as well as helping them generate citations and bibliographies. Now that a successful pilot has been completed, an opportunity to purchase through a collaborative agreement would help secure funding.
     
Innovative solutions often surface whenever higher education administrators and IT professionals address their common concerns through collaborative organizations. One such organization, the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC, www.mhec.org), has undertaken several collaborative and multi-institutional technology initiatives in order to increase productivity and reduce institutional administrative costs, including developing hardware and software initiatives that have saved MHEC member states over $61.7 million since the program’s inception.
     
Colleges and universities are continually being pushed to find ways to contain or reduce their costs while simultaneously maintaining or increasing their productivity. Charged with promoting collaboration and resource sharing among public and private higher education institutions in the Midwest, MHEC is able to reach these objectives through the creation of group aggregation programs that reduce costs and bring value-added benefits to both big and small institutions in MHEC member states. In fact, MHEC was established in 1991 by twelve Midwestern state legislators and governors in part to help institutions achieve these objectives. Since its formation, MHEC has been committed to cost-savings programs, student access and policy research and analysis.
     
MHEC President Larry Isaak said, “One of the most common concerns expressed by higher education leaders and legislators when I am visiting our member states is how MHEC can provide more collaborative services to our states that are struggling with shrinking higher education budgets.” He added, “MHEC programs are created in response to these needs.”
     
In developing its programs, MHEC encourages grassroots participation and innovation. All programs are developed, implemented and overseen by volunteer committees. The committees are made up of representative groups of individuals from across the twelve states in all sectors of higher education and state government. The individuals are nominated to serve on the committees by their peers and are considered experts in the particular field the program is addressing.
     
“MHEC’s goal is to have a small number of the best contracts where they can make the most difference,” explained Dennis Linster, chief information officer for Wayne State College in Nebraska. Linster has volunteered for MHEC as the chair of MHEC’s technologies committee (www.mhectech.org) for over a decade. He added, “We want to establish a long-term relationship with these vendors instead of just trying to score the best price. We try to understand their relationship to higher education, and we help them understand higher education’s needs regarding their product or service.”
     
The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) recently concluded a contract agreement with Oracle. “I cannot begin to estimate the time we saved having MHEC as the framework for this deal,” said Alfred Essa, associate vice chancellor and deputy chief information officer. “Where consortia agreements are likely to play more of a role is where every institution needs to have it, for example with database licenses. New technology is less likely to be adopted by everyone until it becomes more mainstream,” he added.
     
While many institutions strive to become involved in cooperative purchasing, Klimczak offered insights into why some institutions may choose not to use cooperative purchasing. He said, “In some cases it’s a benefit to the institution to go through the RFP (Request for Proposal) process themselves in order to garner participation from faculty and instructional staff. The process engages them in gathering feedback and helps obtain their buy-in or their support.” He said that while this process might be necessary on the front end for making appropriate choices for an institution, he would seek out a cooperative purchasing process on another go-around with the same vendor.
     
Klimczak also suggested that some institutions may not participate in a cooperative purchasing process simply because they may be unaware of their ability to participate. Because MHEC is a statutory entity in each of the twelve Midwestern states and is an instrumentality of each state government, institutions and state and local governments can use MHEC contracts and agreements for their purchases. “On occasion, I have had to show our legal department the documents that establish our ability to participate,” said Klimczak.
     
Even though an institution may choose to use an RFP to select the best product, MHEC’s contracts can still be used to purchase a product and thus save the time it takes to negotiate the contract. By judiciously choosing the contract an institution uses, money can still be saved.
     
Horvath offered another opinion on cooperative purchasing. “It is not a perfect process. You have state funding for your institution and you need to consider purchasing locally,” she explained. “However, the role of IT has changed so much and you don’t have time and [cooperative purchasing] simplifies the purchasing process. You have to make it worth your effort.”
     
MHEC works with vendors directly, yet encourages the use of the reseller chain with special MHEC-only pricing. This allows institutions to use local suppliers, yet still obtain large institution pricing. Win-win situations such as these are a hallmark of MHEC programs and a fundamental reason for their success.
     
Increasingly, campuses are outsourcing functions that were once considered core services. However, with more robust delivery systems such as email, external vendors are now able to provide better service at lower cost, freeing up valuable campus staff time and also providing new capabilities for a broader range of students. For example, St. Louis Community College adopted a new student email system with college-branded email. College costs are minimal and service is free to the student. The vendors benefit because they have the opportunity to advertise to the students when they become alumni.
     
“We need to have the vendors see the value in our students as future customers so they are more willing to work with us and keep their products in front of the student as much as possible,” explained Robert Anderson, director of the Wisconsin Technical College System Purchasing Consortium (WTCS-PC).
     
Anderson expressed concern that campuses can have difficulty negotiating on equal footing with national or global companies. “One of the reasons the WTCS-PC was created was to allow the sixteen Wisconsin Technical Colleges to leverage their combined purchasing power and help level the playing field. I see my support of what MHEC does as a way to extend that concept across MHEC’s twelve-state region.”
     
The volunteers of the technologies committee drive the process, issuing and evaluating RFPs, negotiating with vendors, and conducting annual assessments of MHEC vendor partnerships.
     
One of MHEC’s newest initiatives focuses on a virtualization software solution that will offer competitive price agreements from qualified vendors who will provide licenses, support services, training and related materials. This type of software can lower the cost of operations by blurring the borders around a single computer. In other words, software can now run on dozens of servers and still appear as one copy to the users.
     
With combined leverage power in purchasing technology tools, colleges in the twelve states of the Midwestern Higher Education Compact have been able to balance the needs and wants of the students with the institution’s technology needs and budget.

Mary E. Feilmeyer is Director of Communications & Marketing at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact MHEC.She can be reached at 612-626-0070, or at maryf@mhec.org.
R. Grant Crawford is Chief Information Officer at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact. He can be reached at 612-626-6383, or at grantc@mhec.org.

Craig Klimczak, Cathy Horvath, Dennis Linster, and Robert Anderson are all members of MHEC’s technologies committee. Alfred Essa is a MnSCU colleague of Ken Niemi, who is the vice chair of the MHEC software committee.