So there is one question that every OneCard office asks itself at some point: do we do it ourselves or involve another department? With either choice, the goal should always be to empower departments, grow the program and increase the level of convenience and service to students and staff and if required, increase possible income streams.
This two part post will help lay out some of the pros and cons of each of these models and provide you some answers on how to approach growing your program.
The first concept we’ll look at is doing it yourself, or “self op;” having the ability to choose your own adventure when it comes to your program. An obvious reason to go this route is that working independently allows for increased services to cardholders due to the lack of layers required to go through to implement change.
While it is true that internalizing all aspects of the system allows you to be able to take full advantage of new technologies as they arise, it comes with its own faults, primarily the dreaded departmental bloat, possible program growth limitations, and work overlap with other departments. On the same note, having all aspects of support within the same department has many advantages as well. When you self-operate everything there is no need for organizational agreements, eliminating external contracts and the associated time delays. Having a full IT team dedicated to your program enables faster turnaround in troubleshooting, and program expansion due to the dedicated nature; in short they are committed to your end goal, and not necessarily pulled away for other work.
Seems great, doesn’t it? Grow your program, less red tape, increase response time, why would anyone hand off portions of their system to other groups to manage? The quick answer is that problems tend to be a more indirect influence and are not usually noticed in the early days of any program. As the system grows with a self-operation model, you will find the departmental requirements grow with the expansion of the program. It starts with an end point technician, and ends up including a server admin team, a software support team, various specializations in endpoints such as access control, and food services. It doesn’t take long to realize that while responsive, you have to weigh the added workload and knowledge required to manage all aspects yourself against growth which can limit your long term program. While it is true that some of these staff are needed even with a partnering model, especially on how deeply you partner, there is no question that you will require a larger support staff using a self-operating model.
The next aspect we will touch on is something that comes up with every new card program: revenue generation, cost recovery, and and offsetting program fees.
The Ancillary / Auxiliary model is often responsible for implementing a card program these days. They are often looking for ways to recoup money while increasing services offered which makes for a great tie in with any campus card program. Even within facilities and operations, the ability to offset costs is becoming more relevant as buildings become smarter and systems are more interoperable, requiring additional staff and support contracts. Both ancillaries and facilities are turning more towards data analysis to see where money can best be spent, looking at things like how busy is a facility and what time do people visit a retail location are great for developing operational cost saving measures, like decreased HVAC use in down times or less staff managing a location. Allowing any institution to measure student engagement, traffic patterns, and activities aids in increased business intelligence while often opening the possibility of generating revenue for the department.
The downside of this is that as an Ancillary / Auxiliary department, you have the added stress and responsibility to actually make money and not just cost recover with a program that is primarily a service to the cardholder population. This means that you have to weigh the advantages of system improvements with the ability to recover money required to implement them. Whether this is through fees, chargebacks or funding through a student experience business case, it is important to prioritize the ability to recover funds to keep your program properly funded and staffed. These issues can be compiled as you approach other departments to expand the program as although interest may be there, they may not have the funds to pay for support or fear of losing responsibility or jobs; both of which directly impacts your ability to expand.
Our final topic for today on is on the main benefit that people raise for doing everything internally: being able to provide a single source for services, both for the cardholders as well as the institution.
When you are responsible for all aspects of the card program along with all of the systems and services provided by it, then you can streamline all the processes and provide a single one stop office that is able to resolve any and all issues surrounding the campus card. It doesn’t matter if there are access control problems, financial issues, or lost card replacements, they all are able to be handled in one place. This streamlined approach to service helps to ensure that your cardholder population has a single place to resolve all their issues which is a fantastic service to the campus, at a cost.
As a self-operated department all increases in services offered, will correlate to increased staffing, expanded roles, and a requirement for greater scope of knowledge for everyone. Not only is cross training incredibly important due to vacations and sick days, you will need to have appropriate staff available to fully support the system through these staffing shortages.
Although it is often a boost in convenience and customer service level to take responsibility for all services within your OneCard department, that convenience comes at a cost. Depending on your institutional policies you may be able to cost recover internally and build a program to bring in external money, but these funds are all typically driven into growing and expanding the system.
In part two of this series, we’ll look outside the OneCard office and discuss some of the pros and cons of the partnering model which involves allowing other departments to do their own thing through integrations or extended system functionality.
If you would like to discuss the benefits of self-op, or how you can take advantage of your current resources to expand using the self-op model, give me a call or use the form below to send me a message and I’ll reach out to you.