Washington State has a $2.6 Billion deficit for this year. In fact, the finance people point out that if something isn't done the WA treasury will run dry some time in September and we'll have to rely on short-term loans. As this is not good, the Legislature is attempting to come up with some way to fill the hole.
As far as WWU is concerned, we know we'll be passed some kind of cut. We don't know the size, nor do we know what other strings may be attached to the money we do get. So we're planning for various sizes of cuts.
One thing that is definitely getting bandied about is the idea of 'sweeping' unused funds at end-of-year in order to reduce the deficits. As anyone who has ever worked in a department subject to a budget knows, the idea of having your money taken away from you for being good with your money runs counter to every bureaucratic instinct. I have yet to meet the IT department that considers themselves fully funded. My old job did that; our Fiscal year ended 12/15, which meant that we bought a lot of stuff in October and November with the funds we'd otherwise have to give back (a.k.a. "Christmas in October"). Since WWU's fiscal year starts 7/1, this means that April and May will become 'use it or lose it' time.
Sweeping funds is a great way to reduce fiscal efficiency.
In the end, what this means is that the money tree is actually producing at the moment. We have a couple of crying needs that may actually get addressed this year. It's enough to completely fix our backup environment, OR do some other things. We still have to dicker over what exactly we'll fix. The backup environment needs to be made better at least somewhat, that much I know. We have a raft of servers that fall off of cheap maintenance in May (i.e. they turn 5). We have a need for storage that costs under $5/GB but is still fast enough for 'online' storage (i.e. not SATA). As always, the needs are many, and the resources few.
At least we HAVE resources at the moment. It's a bad sign when you have to commiserate with your end-users over not being able to do cool stuff, or tell researchers they can't do that particular research since we have no where to store their data. Baaaaaad. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but we can see it from where we are.
As far as WWU is concerned, we know we'll be passed some kind of cut. We don't know the size, nor do we know what other strings may be attached to the money we do get. So we're planning for various sizes of cuts.
One thing that is definitely getting bandied about is the idea of 'sweeping' unused funds at end-of-year in order to reduce the deficits. As anyone who has ever worked in a department subject to a budget knows, the idea of having your money taken away from you for being good with your money runs counter to every bureaucratic instinct. I have yet to meet the IT department that considers themselves fully funded. My old job did that; our Fiscal year ended 12/15, which meant that we bought a lot of stuff in October and November with the funds we'd otherwise have to give back (a.k.a. "Christmas in October"). Since WWU's fiscal year starts 7/1, this means that April and May will become 'use it or lose it' time.
Sweeping funds is a great way to reduce fiscal efficiency.
In the end, what this means is that the money tree is actually producing at the moment. We have a couple of crying needs that may actually get addressed this year. It's enough to completely fix our backup environment, OR do some other things. We still have to dicker over what exactly we'll fix. The backup environment needs to be made better at least somewhat, that much I know. We have a raft of servers that fall off of cheap maintenance in May (i.e. they turn 5). We have a need for storage that costs under $5/GB but is still fast enough for 'online' storage (i.e. not SATA). As always, the needs are many, and the resources few.
At least we HAVE resources at the moment. It's a bad sign when you have to commiserate with your end-users over not being able to do cool stuff, or tell researchers they can't do that particular research since we have no where to store their data. Baaaaaad. We haven't quite gotten there yet, but we can see it from where we are.