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:

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.