Survey

The survey consists of three parts:

  1. Background information, including general information about the organisation, e.g. respondent details, organizational details, completed degrees and credits, financial information and as well numbers of personnel and end users.
  2. Costs and FTE section, where IT personnel and IT budget is divided according to services, account groups and organisational level.
  3. Volumes section, consisting of several IT volumes, e.g. server environments, number of workstations, data networks, IT service desk volumes and Eduroam coverage.

Most of the details is collected by organizational levels:

  • Centralised IT (IT Center, central IT Services, IT Management)
  • Other centralised IT (centralised units other than central IT which provide IT services also outside the unit itself, such as central administration, central libraries etc.)
  • Decentralised IT = IT in faculties and individual institutions

 

Process

If your organisation is doing this BM-survey for the first time, it is very useful to…

  • Inform the top management of your organization and get their support for the process.
  • Find a person to be the main contact with BM project group.
  • Ensure you have ability to collect all necessary data also from the units outside the centralised IT.
  • Make a good relationship with your Finance department to access financial data and agree on which accounts in your bookkeeping your data is collected. This is also a valuable tool to check whether IT accounts are used in a proper way.
  • Inform the substance units about the process and the intended results of it. BM survey is a helpful tool to show units how their IT expenditure compares to other units within organisation.

The volume data can be collected already at the beginning of the survey to reflect the situation at the end of the survey year. The financial statements are usually ready in March-April after which it can be gathered to survey. Data collection will take some 10-12 working days all together based on feedback on previous rounds.

After you have given your preliminary data, the BM project group makes an evaluation and verification on it. This process will show if there is any data missing, if the data is out of bounds and whether there is an inconsistency within the data.

After the possible changes in the data it is transferred to the actual analysis.

The survey and all material regarding the process is stored in a working space called Eduuni hosted by CSC – IT center for science, an NREN in Finland owned by Finnish universities and Finnish Ministry of Education.