Managing ICT costs
As ICT becomes the tool that underpins all aspects of education, schools have to draw up coherent replacement plans for equipment to ensure it is up to date and complements the rest of their technology.
As ICT becomes the tool that underpins all aspects of education, schools have to draw up coherent replacement plans for equipment to ensure it is up to date and complements the rest of their technology.
School managers, now being given more responsibility for their own budgets, are having to get to grips with reforms in the way their finances need to be managed - to take into account three-year and annual ICT budget plans.
A new report from the British Educational and Communications Technology Agency (Becta), Managing ICT Costs in Schools, shows school leaders how they can benefit from these changes by getting the best from the technological resources they already have and improve their schools at the same time.
Schools managers must carry out a detailed self review of existing and planned ICT provision before they embark on implementing a sustainable ICT strategy, according to Becta.
It says knowing the full costs of ICT provision by determining the Total Cost of Ownership of ICT will support management investment decisions and then establish an ICT system which is appropriate, sustainable, reliable and affordable.
TCO is a financial calculation which helps organisations assess the costs related to the capital investment of assets, such as computer hardware and software, and then determine their value.
Becta says school leaders should use the TCO in ICT to improve forward planning and budgeting in the long-term. By making the most of the technology and staff skills they already have, they will be able to implement a workable and costeffective strategy for the future. It has developed a model for establishing TCO and determining both visible costs, such as spend on hardware and software, networks, support and training, and also hidden costs, such as non-technical staff members trying to fix problems and carrying out system administration.
The model requires information from both cost data questions and a survey of all ICT users’ skills, experience and self support resources.
Becta suggests that time and money saved through efficient purchasing can then be redirected, leading to improvements elsewhere, or re-invested in ICT.
Before a school can implement a sustainable strategy Becta says it must carry out a review of existing and planned provision.
The TCO planning process will involve working through and revisiting factors in the review below as the picture become clearer.
The factors are:
- Assessing the quality of facilities and services to support the ICT development plan
- Auditing existing infrastructure, provision and costs
- Identifying the impact of existing provision and practices on staff and pupil satisfaction, confidence and competence
- Reviewing staff training needs
- Comparing costs against relevant external benchmarks
- Reviewing procurement practice and value-for money processes
- Challenging assumptions about quality and value of technical support services and practices
- Reassessing the quality of facilities and services to support the ICT development plan, in the light of the above findings
- Planning and introducing a three-year rolling budget with a realistic proportion allocated to ICT costs, based upon the development plan.
ICT costs, based upon the development plan. The actions above need to be set within the self-review process to achieve school improvement through ICT.
Between 2002 and 2005, Becta worked with more than 40 primary and secondary schools from across the UK on research projects to help them measure the TCO of their ICT.
The aim was to find a way of identifying TCO information in a way that suited a wide range of school environments and the schools were given a tool using commercial best practice.
Often schools found it difficult to gather the information for TCO analysis and in some cases this prompted a reorganisation of the way information is collected and stored. In turn some schools reported that, revealing the gaps in information brought more management benefits in the long-term.
The project schools also found that Becta and LEA advisers were valuable in providing them with the costs for central services, such as technical support.
The research found that, for the schools taking part, the average annual TCO was £50,000 at primary level and £270,000 at secondary. A total of 58 per cent of primary school ICT expenditure and 62 per cent of secondary school ICT expenditure went on support costs. Hardware was the next highest ICT cost, followed by training, consumables, network, internet and software.
The average annual total cost of a PC in primary schools was £1,200; and in secondary schools was £1,000. The annual cost per PC varied greatly between schools. The annual average TCO per pupil was £195 in primary schools and £246 in secondary schools.
The research also found that schools valued the opportunity to compare themselves with other schools and they used the TCO assessment to improve decision making and raise governor awareness.
Hidden staffing costs for user self support was an important factor in overall support costs. Nontechnical staff, in both primary and secondary schools, spent about 30 minutes each week on installing ICT, fixing problems and carrying out admin-related tasks such as filling printers with paper, clearing disk space and backing up data.
Schools used a mix of in-house and external technical support. The diversity of situations within each environment enabled school leaders to exploit TCO findings in different ways, to:
- Improve forward planning
- Identify unexpected costs
- Carry out “what if?” analyses
- Raise awareness of costs and investment levels
- Justify existing policies (ie to governors)
- Contribute to the public presentation of the school
The MANAGING ICT COSTS report is available in the research section of the Becta website at www.becta.org.uk