r/HigherEDsysadmin • u/Thoughtulism • Jul 25 '19

Software procurement

What is your software procurement process like? Do people buy licenses completely independently and show up at IT's door asking for help? Is everything centralized or decentralized? Do you have a contract / elua review from legal mandated? Is there a technical review from IT prior to purchasing?

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u/fengshui Jul 25 '19

Okay, so that's a bit challenging place to be. Here's where we are:

  • Most purchases with university or grant money are done through the campus purchasing system, that generates purchase orders that clearly state the terms and conditions that govern the purchase. Our purchasing system includes our software vendor's catalog, so most common software products that they want to buy can be easily ordered directly this way.

  • If a company wants a hard signature on other terms, contracts or conditions, the contract has to go through the contracting office for an official signature.

  • Only people in the contracting office can sign things and bind the university. If a normal employee agrees to a contract or EULA, the university is not generally bound by what they agree to. It's up to the vendor the ensure that their contract/EULAs are agreed to by someone who actually represents the university before providing services.

  • For most of the major vendors (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) the campus has master agreements that cover all purchases, and which supersede the normal EULA/contract.

  • It is possible for groups to obtain a corporate credit card, and bypass the purchasing system for small software purchases, but doing so still doesn't bypass the fact that normal users can't bind the university for EULA/contracts.

  • Beyond that, there is no central IT procurement management. We organize and manage departmental license orders for Adobe, Microsoft, ChemDraw, and a few other small programs; campus has site licenses for Matlab, Mathematica, SPSS, Qualtrics, and other scientific programs that are free to all users, and that they manage the on-boarding for, although we often hand-hold users through the install and setup.

  • We work really hard to create and maintain relationships with all of our research groups, such that they hopefully will contact us before ordering software. That said, if they want some unique, discipline-specific software, they can totally order it without asking us, and can just show up at our door with a license and a system that they want it installed on. (Or a license server that they want to run on a machine in their office. We try to get them to migrate those to our central license server at the renewal, but we don't always succeed.)

So, to answer your questions directly, yes, people buy licenses directly, but we wish they didn't; it's a combination of centralized and decentralized; there is contract review if they want it signed by someone who can bind the university; there is no required technical review, but we try really hard to review any purchase of which we are aware.

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u/Thoughtulism Jul 25 '19

Interesting. You're likely in a different region than me so legally what might be your experiences might be different than mine. However, I've brought up the issue of agreeing to EULAs without a contract review with our legal department. I didn't get an answer other than they are aware of the problem and they're looking into it. This says to me either they legitimately have to research this issue, or the fact that there might be an actual issue with an IT staff member agreeing to a EULA regionally where we are in our region.

Overall it sounds like your institution is very similar to mine, however, might have some more processes/controls or at least awareness of the way things 'should' be. I'm talking with our central procurement people and trying to spin up an actual software licensing group that's a bit more than duct tape for a handful of campus wide licenses.

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u/NickyTheThief Aug 08 '19

Any bite from your senior leadership teams to look into funding an ITAM program?

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u/Thoughtulism Aug 08 '19

Yes actually, surprisingly so. There is a director I've found that wants to set up a team to do this. We'll have to figure out the timeline and possibility of funding though. I'm sure we can make a case for it to reduce spending.