Cornell will never standardize all of its information technology to, say, one type of computer or laptop, said Steve Schuster, interim executive director of Cornell Information Technologies, at an open forum Nov. 10. But the university must begin to narrow down some of its many IT options, he said.

"For example, our poor IT people are supporting every single handheld device that appears on the market, regardless of provider, vendor, version," Schuster said. "But if we can concentrate on three or four [devices] ... and support them really well ... we're going to be better off. That's what this is about."

Schuster spoke about the university's initiative to streamline campus IT at an open forum in Riley-Robb Hall. The initiative is part of the Administrative Streamlining Program (ASP), formerly known as the Initiatives Coordination Office, within the Division of Planning and Budget. The event was the fourth in a series of open forums on the ASP's 10 initiatives.

The IT initiative projects are: organization redesign, end-user support, governance and decision-making, application and service development, and servers and storage.

The organization redesign project has created four service groups so far that will create consistency in IT across campus. Each has a director, who manages IT across more than one unit and college, and IT staff members, who support 30 to 50 people.

The end-user support project is perhaps the toughest in the initiative, Schuster said. "It touches everybody." The project will institute remote desktop tools and troubleshooting, an institutionwide software management system and an improved helpdesk, as well as some standardization of desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, he said.

The governance and decision-making project aims to create a process through which the university can make strategic IT decisions. The first step has been to create the Information Technology Governance Council (ITGC), which is made up of Provost Kent Fuchs; Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer Joanne DeStefano; Daniel Huttenlocher, the John P. and Rilla Neafsey Professor of Computing, Information Science and Business and dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science; and newly named Chief Information Officer Ted Dodds. Among other decisions, the ITGC or one of the subcommittees supporting them will review all IT investments greater than $25,000.

The application and service development project seeks to increase the time and money spent on buying software and applications and decrease the resources spent on creating them in-house. "Just because we can develop something doesn't mean we always should," Schuster said.

The servers and storage project is based on three recommendations: manage storage better and treat it as a institutionwide resource; upgrade technology with virtualized servers and cloud technologies to save on space and power; and standardize such services as domains and file servers.

During the question period that followed, several audience members contended that centralizing end-user support would unnecessarily dismantle the current system, in which an in-house IT staff member knows the people and their work well and excels at meeting their IT needs. "What you're describing as 'efficiency' sounds to me like we're going to interfere with a network [of relationships] that works," one audience member said. "Why would we want to buy in to this?"

"I get it," Schuster replied. "[But] this isn't about yanking IT people out of those areas." Rather, the goal is to streamline basic support tasks so IT staff members have time to work more strategically, he said. "What we have heard overwhelmingly is, 'I'm not happy with IT support.'"

The university established the ASP in December 2009 as part of a strategy to "reimagine Cornell" as a leaner, more academically excellent university. The ASP is expected to save Cornell up to $85 million annually by fiscal year 2015.