EduTech Steering Committee December 13, 2002 RIT Inn and Conference Center 8:30 – 12:00 Members Present: Members Not Present: Rich Boyes, Marion Mike Glover, GV BOCES
Joe Backer, Letchworth Bob Leiby, Manchester-Shortsville
Gary Hammond, GV BOCES Joe Marinelli, WFL BOCES
Tom Manko, York Tim McElheran, Victor
Jack McCabe, WFL BOCES
Bob Smith, Elba
Camille Sorenson, EduTech
Guests: Chris Saxby, EduTech
Jeff Ginsberg, EduTech
Financial 03-04 EduTech Budget Two years ago the budget was flat, last year it was up 3.9%, and this year there is an increase of 2.27% with the majority of the increase in retirement, health care and equipment.
In prior years the process has been to put a budget together, given expenditures do a cost study, match expenses against revenue, estimate where sources of revenue come from, adjust where prices are at a deficit and then analyze impact to districts.
Today we still pretty much do this process, but we are at a point where we look at cost centers, where we charge, where revenue points have changed, revenues have been flat, and opportunities to adjust charges. At our last meeting you asked us to present options.
Our objective when looking at prices was to have a healthy functional budget that includes a safety component. Need a budget that allows us to support infrastructure of EduTech, provide district services and the staff necessary to provide the services, flexible balance in the changing environment, the ability to move when opportunities for new services develop, and be able to react when districts have requests.
With that in mind we feel we should move forward with lowering expenditures where there are no services or revenue, (i.e. overhead areas management, warehouse, help desk). These areas provide a valuable service and the dollars add up, but there is no direct revenue associated with them.
Opportunities for new services exist in a number of areas and we need to look at these opportunities in schools while maintaining the existing install base.
Want to have a direct charge for services currently embedded in other areas; example e-rate processing, STEP.
Need to spend more time building relationships with our districts. We are currently conducting surveys. Business managers and technical coordinators have done a web based survey. Two of our EduTech managers are conducting on-site surveys with all 47 superintendents. The common theme so far is that we don’t get the information out to the schools, they don’t understand what we provide.
Gary Hammond requested that information regarding the pricing parallel the format that GV BOCES uses.
Concern that we would not be able to meet this request and still be able to change the pricing. Will look at changing the format to help GV and WFL districts, as the year goes along so that we don’t lose another year. Discussion followed on improving the process for next year.
Project Coordinators need to understand this process. Any SAA that gets signed should have to fill out separate worksheet.
We may need to re-conforming our service level, given budgetary issues. Maybe the time has come to adjust service level benchmark. We worked hard to reduce from 4 month delivery to two month delivery. Is the 62 days delivery because of staff, if we decreased staff would an increase in time of delivering service be acceptable? Four-month delivery used to be an area of concern.
Bob Smith expressed that you not reduce service at help desk compared to how long it takes to get something new. Don’t mind waiting month s for a major install, but not when it is one computer. Camille mentioned that we are developing a web based express SAA process.
New Services:
Real Time Website using Accelerate U services
Assessment Processing, Analysis, Remediation (NCLB, State)
Maintain existing Installed Base
Workstations, Student and Finance Software, Shared Services, Medicaid
Direct Charge for services currently embedded
- erate
- step
- network design
Erate three types of filing
LAKENet
Schools
Fiber, cabling
Looking at charging filing fee and possibly additional charging with LAKENet
Don’t have the numbers today because we have to look at the big picture. Need to look at what services are currently a base and what will be a growth area over the next few years.
Running the numbers:
Increase test scoring, charge for STEP
Increase Medicaid
Adjust Finance and Student Pricing
Cover all expenses in shared staff service
Charge for erate filing; erate-lakenet
Review install, workstation, project coordination fees
Consensus was that the committee would meet again January 8th at 9:00 a.m. to discuss.
LAKENet - Jeff Ginsberg Research and Development, Reporting
What has changed:
·
How we get to the outside world
·
originally didn’t have any redundancy (added seconded T-3 connection)
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as of January 2003 lines will roll over so that we won’t have any outages if one goes down
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One T-3 back bone all the way to Newark
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added lines
How have we met demand:
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6,000 computers when we started and now 20,000 computers
·
Updated our network core
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Added servers to meet email demand
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Internet – increased proxy
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Servers
Other Services
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Improved redundancy – second internet connection, multiple paths for traffic
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Improved reliability – clustering of services, multiple points of access
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We have scaled all other services similarly to keep up with demand on systems, access, and personnel.
Research & Development
New Services
·
BorderManager, GroupWise, Web Caching, VPN
Re-Evaluation of existing services
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Replacing dial up access, Netscape Mail replacement
Incremental Improvements
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better e-mail access, SPAM filtration, Enhancements to the content filter
Reporting: Bandwidth Utilization
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daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, average utilization of connection to BOCES
Backbone Service
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Internet uptime, internet utilization, filter utilization, e-mail uptime, other services
In District Services
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BOCES Connection uptime, GroupWise uptime, BorderManager uptime, other services
Jeff shared with committee members how their individual districts are running and their volume
Jeff shared with the committee the top sites for hits and blocks.