A Message from CoSN

Founded in 1992, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a national non-profit organization, is the premier voice in education technology leadership. CoSN’s mission is to serve as the national organization for K-12 technology leaders who use technology strategically to improve learning. Our audience includes key technology leaders (often called Chief Technology Officers—CTOs) in leading-edge states and districts, as well as those technology leaders who wish to accelerate their districts’ or states’ systemic technology use.

Preliminary 2008 – 2009 conference presentation schedule is available.

CoSN launched its "Taking TCO to the Classroom" project to provide school leaders with tools to help them estimate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) involved when they build a network of computers and wire their classrooms to the Internet.

"Ownership" in this context includes all of the costs associated with using and maintaining networked computers, no matter whether a school district owns or leases them.

TCO traditionally also includes calculations of costs that may not turn up in a budget, but that can still have an impact on school district operations--for example, when teachers must take time out of their day to address their own tech support problems.

VOI and TCO

Value of Investment in technology and Total Cost of Ownership for technology are related concepts and complementary, but different in focus. TCO looks at the installed (and optionally the planned) computer environment costs, while VOI looks at the anticipated costs and benefits of technology projects.

The focus of a TCO assessment is to capture and understand of all of the costs incurred for a distributed computing environment for all or a part of the school or district. A TCO assessment helps district leaders to understand all of the costs that make up the networked computer environment, including equipment and software, direct labor, and user overhead. This information can be used to plan for better efficiencies and to help determine costs for planned projects, based on historical costs.

The focus of VOI is to project the costs and related benefits of specific proposed technology projects. On the cost side, while anticipated budgeted initial and ongoing costs are very important, the anticipated project TCO is critical for determining all of the anticipated project costs over the life of the project. Benefits include any dollar savings, efficiencies or additional revenue generation, but also need to take into account qualitative benefits that relate directly to school mission, goals and mandates. See CoSN's VOI website, www.edtechvoi.org, for more information.

The project is made possible through the financial support of the corporate sponsors identified below. However, CoSN is responsible for creating all the materials associated with the TCO project and retains editorial control over them. Sponsors provide input and feedback, but the ultimate responsibility for project materials remains with CoSN.

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