The USM “E&E 2.0” Initiative:
Saving Taxpayer Dollars, Spurring Innovation, and Improving Student Outcomes
Effectiveness and Efficiency 2.0, known as “E&E 2.0,” continues the University System of Maryland’s (USM) legacy of efforts to yield savings and cost avoidance while enhancing quality.
Under the E&E 2.0 Initiative, the USM has improved such activities as streamlining outdated procurement policies and expanding the use of analytics tools to increase student success. E&E 2.0 will also examine other near-term plans for high-impact efficiency projects such as strategic sourcing.
The USM launched its original Effectiveness and Efficiency Initiative in 2003-04 to manage a number of unprecedented challenges prevalent at that time. Those challenges included declining state resources; rising costs in energy and health care; rising demands on higher education in an economy increasingly based on knowledge and information; and surging enrollment from the "baby boom echo." Fifteen years later, many of these continue as well as a new set of challenges that have arisen. State funding has stabilized but energy and health care costs continue to rise. The demographics have shifted, and some institutions now have capacity for more students than are currently enrolling. Competition via alternative educational models has arisen. There are more pressures for accountability. The USM Effectiveness and Efficiency initiative is a vehicle for understanding these challenges and framing a response.
Several guiding principles frame the initiative, including an emphasis on collaboration and inter-institutional activities and a commitment to optimal use of technology in campus and system-wide operations. A current initiative is directed towards collaborating on the standardization of business processes and supporting them by a new generation of enterprise technology.
E&E 2.0 stems from a long tradition in the USM of finding efficiencies in its operations. Over its 30-year history, the USM has consistently strengthened its stewardship role as its mission has expanded and environmental conditions have changed.
A 10th Anniversary Report to the Board of Regents in April 2013 on the first round of USM Effectiveness and Efficiency Initiatives documented $356 million in cumulative savings. As of the end of the Fiscal Year 2018, the USM has accounted for $575 million in cumulative savings between the original E&E effort and E&E2. Additionally, the initiative has started tracking a new category of savings----savings for students and families, largely attributable to new approaches to developing or acquiring educational resources.
Report of the BOR Ad Hoc Workgroup on E&E 2.0 (2015)
News Release on Passage of E&E 2.0 (2015)
PowerPoint Presentation to Board of Regents (2015)