Miami University plans to take on its budgeting priorities using new methods with the help of several progressive tools and committees. Two of the most prominent groups addressing the task of financial management and organization are the Institutional Analytics project and the Responsibility Center Management (RCM).
The Institutional Analytics project, a data collection and interpretation initiative run by Miami's Farmer School of Business and IT department, is focused on the implementation of new software that has the capability of not only collecting and organizing large amounts of information, but also predicting possible outcomes of various academic scenarios using the collected data.
According to Cathy McVey, senior director of strategic communication and planning, Miami is on a short list of institutions of higher education that have begun use of the new data collection and interpretation software.
"This is something that the corporate world has been using for a long time so it's a tried and true technology, but it hasn't reached higher education until the last three to five years," McVey said.
The program was purchased from a third party corporation and can help identify needs like which courses the university should offer at which times based on transactional data, as well as determine whether or not offering the course would be financially beneficial to the university, according to McVey.
Students can rest assured, however, that the classes required for different majors won't disappear simply because the university makes less money due to a class's existence.
"The end decision of whether or not to offer a class won't come down solely to whether or not we're making money," McVey said.
The program has already been in use over the past two summers and its spread across campus will ultimately be dictated by need, McVey said.
Another program suggested by the Strategic Priorities Task Force is the Responsibility Center Management program. According to Raymond Gorman, associate provost for the university, the program is still in its infancy, its adoption as a priority having come only last month. Gorman said the purpose of the program is to act as a new budgeting model for the university, not only serving to cut costs and increase the efficiency of university processes, but also to seek out new sources of revenue.
The program is currently being worked on by the Budget Planning Committee and its scope across campus has yet to be determined.
"It's supposed to provide more incentives to the academic division to both raise revenue and operate more efficiently," Gorman said. "It's not so much cost cutting, but based more in efficiency. You may find a new source of revenue."
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An initiative like this isn't unique to Miami, Gorman said. Other colleges in the area, including several Big Ten schools, are considering similar options as well.
Miami students seem to be on board with the university's plans and methods for cost savings.
"It's really amazing that there's software that can accomplish something like class priority management, and it makes sense that the university would use something like that moving forward," sophomore Joe Occhionero said.
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