By Lee Weiner, Director of Product Marketing, LogMeIn

The college campus computing environment is changing. Students, faculty and staff are accessing data at all hours of the day, from different locations, using a variety of devices. This comes at a time when university IT budgets are under pressure to do more with less. The recently released 2009 IT survey from Campus Computing states that in 2009, 48% of the 500 college and university survey participants reported budget cuts. Only a lucky few (21.4%) reported increased funding.

The biggest impact, in terms of budget, was central IT services, which experienced a 48% decrease in spending over the past year. It’s a big loss for a growing problem. If anything, as higher education increasingly relies on technology, the demand on IT services is escalating … There’s been no let down in support demands on college campuses—and now, the hit on central IT services is really a double whammy.

What’s fueling that demand?

For one thing, there’s all that WiFi …

And with students and faculty now living in a WiFi-world, theres that “wherever, whenever” mentality when it comes to technology. Whether a faculty member or administrative employee is on a personal or work computer, or on a smartphone, they’re getting their work done wherever and whenever they want. There’s a vast improvement in student and faculty productivity, but it is also impacting how the campus IT helpdesk must operate.

For one, the days of walking your laptop into the campus IT helpdesk at fixed hours are dwindling. Students, faculty and staff have access anytime, anywhere and are expecting a similar approach to IT support. Ubiquitous wireless access on campus is a tremendously welcome development, but it also translates into an uptick in support calls. And those support calls can come from the remote edges of campus, from dorms, from just about anywhere. Even colleges and universities that provide limited IT help to students, who typically bring their own PC’s with them to campus, do provide support to students with connectivity problems.

Another reason why support demands are escalating is due to a greater use of technology for information management. Today, colleges and universities are deploying complex Learning Management and Student Information Systems—and it’s not all for the on-campus crowd.

More and more often, that demand is coming from outside the traditional campus, partly because of a shift in the nature of learning itself. Colleges and universities are constantly reshaping the definition of what “campus” means and facilitating the tremendous popularity of distance learning and the growth of satellite campuses

All of these factors translate into heavier demands on support, often from remote users who can’t be helped through a desk-side visit from IT. All this at a time when central IT resources are already under heavy strain.

There’s no easy answer here, but college and university central IT support groups experiencing budget pressures – and that would be most of them – need to be looking at ways to make their support technicians more productive and efficient. Remote support tools are the obvious place to look first.

For more information, visit the Campus Helpdesk Success page.