All in the Family: Utilizing Shared Resources Across Campuses

摘要

Utilizing available resources in a University environment is a challenging venture. Technology support professionals are constantly faced with too little time and money and too much demand for those resources. This paper will describe how the campuses of Louisiana State University (LSU) and Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC) came together to share resources in order to efficiently meet demand from the customers they served as well as support and train their own technology analysts. The shared resources accomplished by this collaboration were: 1. Licensing: (1) With master licensing contracts negotiated by Louisiana State University, the Pennington Campus was able to save time and money. (2) Support managers are able to compare vendors and benchmark costs. 2. Students: (1) Support managers share procedures for hiring, promoting, and terminating new students as well as evaluation and motivational tactics. (2) Student resumes are shared based on job description and position availability. 3. Training: (1) Managers from the satellite campus attend training at LSU's main campus to observe and gather materials to use for training at PBRC's campus. (2) PBRC's campus is without a training facility; therefore, the student workers are trained through the START program on LSU's campus. 4. Applications: (1) Researching new technology such as NetMeeting, VMWare, Wireless devices. (2) Troubleshooting existing technology shared between the two campuses. Support managers from the two institutions meet once a mouth for a round table discussion to communicate issues that may be of burden or concern. From these monthly meetings, the managers gain ideas and solutions. In the process, these shared resources save time and money.