Device Management Is an Investment in People
The simple argument for device management is that spending a little money up front saves on soft costs — which can turn into hard costs — in the future.
The leading device management platforms, such as Jamf for Apple iOS devices and Microsoft Intune for PC devices, charge a per-device or per-user fee that renews annually. So, the initial enrollment in device management could cost a large amount, and one that must make its way into the operational budget when renewal time rolls around.
There are additional full-service asset management programs available as well, including from CDW, that can customize the Device as a Service approach to a university’s needs and can include everything from break/fix support to original equipment manufacturer warranties, imaging, deployment and more.
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No matter what route an institution chooses, the decision to pursue device management is best framed as a proactive investment in the people working in that college’s IT department rather than a shot to the bottom line. Especially in the face of continued staffing challenges in higher education, and in IT in particular, universities should be paying close attention to the work their people are doing and how they feel about it.
Every minute that highly skilled IT employees spend repairing a broken laptop, imaging a new desktop, pushing out software updates on a faculty member’s smartphone or patching a security flaw across thousands of devices is time they could be spending on other, more critical tasks. Just as important, it is time spent doing something they’re vastly overqualified for, and it represents the kind of grunt work that may be contributing to employee dissatisfaction and high turnover rates in higher education IT.
Turnover means plenty of other hard-to-quantify soft costs, too, as anyone responsible for IT hiring knows. There are job postings to write, HR departments to involve, interviews to go through, on-the-job training and more that can drain time from other tasks. And while these activities may not translate easily to the bottom line, there is a quantifiable cost in spending time on the clock doing things that could have been automated by a device management solution.
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