As a shared service organization supporting the entire University of Maine System, the US:IT annual budget is based on a chargeback model.  Accordingly, it is imperative that the IT division make every effort to contain costs and maximize investments to best serve the UMS campuses we support.  The budget encompasses costs for centralized IT support, including enterprise software and infrastructure, as well as costs to support the embedded campus IT support services teams responsible for providing direct, front-line support to each campus community.

The proposed $26,357,741 FY21 US:IT budget represents an increase of 3.3% over FY20 ($25,512,643).  As the majority of the budget is comprised of compensation and benefits (70.3%), a large portion of the increase in the FY21 budget is attributable to negotiated 3% across-the-board salary increases ($602,604) for all staff.

Non-compensation related expenses represent costs associated with hardware replacement and enterprise software licensing, along with system, application and infrastructure maintenance.  The $140,149 increase in non-compensation costs for FY21 represents a 1.5% net increase over FY20. In an effort to provide greater transparency around the nature of these costs, major enterprise software expenses were consolidated into a new budget account to better track, analyze and predict contractual software licensing increases on an annual basis.  This approach has allowed US:IT to identify opportunities to contain and offset increases through renegotiation of existing contracts, contract replacements and elimination of duplicative services. For example, the enterprise software budget includes a total of $104,461 in contractual annual increases along with $487,025 in new software expenses for a gross increase of $591,486.  This has been offset with a combination of $(400,840) in licensing reductions and service replacement/elimination.