Pulling savings out of our RASS

Last year, the BoR and the TAMU System created nine shared services teams to look for ways to

To review current services or activities and determine if there are efficiencies and any associated cost saving by sharing these services without sacrificing quality.

In January, Chancellor McKinney summarized (pdf) the progress on shared services. Notably absent from the list of possible savings was anything from the Research Administration Shared Services (RASS) team. It seems the RASS team didn't find very much to cut.

Yesterday, VP for Research Seeman updated the CPI on what happened after the RASS failed to find much to save from sharing services. It seems the Regents didn't like that answer and sent the team to redo the analysis. The RASS still didn't find things where sharing would cost less. Not willing to accept that answer, the BoR is now looking to pay an outside consultant to look for savings.

Places where shared services can save significant amounts without sacrificing quality were also elusive in 2007, when the Integrated Research Administration Project committee went looking for them. But Vision 1920 is confident that if we just keep looking, there will be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Vision 1920 is also proud of our BoR's patriotism. Research administration is part of the indirect costs applied to extramural funding, so we're sure that when those savings are found, the BoR will return an appropriate share of the found money to its rightful owners in funding agencies of the federal government.