Purchasing Methodology

[milesleacy]

Hi All,

This is much more logistics than tech, but I'm curious how organizations handle purchasing and budget for computers/tablets/phones.

Does equipment come out of IT's budget?
Does equipment come out of the individual business unit/department/faculty's budget?
Is there a hybrid (base model/stipend amount paid by IT, anything else charged back, or any other variation)?

When the department pays, how is ownership of the asset handled?
From experience, departments often like to hoard equipment. When an employee is terminated, what does your org do with the equipment?

I'm curious to see the range of approaches operating in the world.

Thanks!
Miles

[arandall]

While I can’t speak to our current method (IT just migrated to IBM and the details are evolving daily), I can certainly talk about how it looked for the previous decade.

End User computers came out of an Global IT CapEx budget, with each PnL (Some PnLs are one office, some are multiple offices, some are individual departments) putting in estimated numbers of machines they would need 6-12 months ahead of time.

If a PnL had a specialized need (SAN attached video editing stations, high powered machine for a VIP user, etc) that would usually come out of their own budget.

Assets were officially attached to each PnL, regardless of wether they were paid for by corporate or the PnL. Technically a machine could move between PnLs, but it actually rarely happened due to the paperwork being too much hassle.

Regarding terminations, each PnL has their own HR group which is ‘supposed’ to hand machines back to local IT when someone is terminated. But that process is hit or miss, more miss in smaller PnLs. What usually happens there is that the PnL will try and give a hoarded machine to a new hire and end up having to contact IT to actually make it work, at which point we reclaim the machine and drop into our normal new home process.

-Aaron

[Chuey]

Our organizations IT department handles 95% of the purchasing and the other 5% are other departments purchasing technology for their own reasons and that comes out of their budget. All purchasing, even if not done by the IT department, is discussed with us (typically).

When we purchase technology we decide where it goes and how it gets distributed. The tech department owns it but I'm assuming our organization as a whole entity owns it, if that makes sense. We label it with a technology asset tag for record keeping and management. Most people within our organization have laptops which they sign an agreement form incase of any damage they are held responsible for it.

If someone is terminated they must turn any technology assigned to them in, same goes if they quit or retire.

We move technology around as we see fit whether the general population agrees or not. We obviously have reasons as to why we move things or re-assign hardware to another department.

Hope that helps

[RobertHammen]

Smaller orgs I've worked for/with seem to take the approach that IT buys the computers, usually with input from the department/manager to ensure it's appropriate.

Larger orgs, the hardware comes out of the departmental budget and the computers/devices tend to stay in that department as users leave/are hired.

[davidacland]

The larger orgs I've worked with seem to have central IT do most of the purchasing so build deployment and asset management can be made more consistent and streamlined.

In most cases there's still a few areas that do their own thing, more in education where you can get disproportionate levels of fundings between schools and research groups.

[Chris_Hafner]

In our org, IT typically holds the budget for all technology related expenses. Everything from laptops and servers and internet connections and the like. We make our budgetary decisions based on heavy collaboration with our teaching and staff departments as well as our students to maintain engagement. We also handle all of our repair passthrough accounts and "pilot" budgets for upcoming technologies. Some departments maintain a small budgetary line for really off the wall tech purchases but they are all inventoried and belong to the "Academy" as a whole. Phones are a bit of an interesting debate. We would very much like to move to either a stipend or shift all iOS purchasing to DEP as there's really not much IT needs to do with these units other than basic asset and security management.

On a slightly more interesting note, we also manage all of our own repairs and sell out older units either as parts or as functional wholes to external repair facilities and resellers. This has allowed us to greatly increase overall turnover of the tech in our users hands. Right now, we run a 3-4 year cycle for all departments. Each department/user gets NEW equipment regardless of their roll. We have no second class citizens and it's MORE efficient that way.

P.S> Students are BYOD. I guess you can consider faculty/staff COPE. ;-)