"We want to get our pricing models right," says Walsh. "Our goal is to get the pricing right and make our rates defendable."

UIS is attempting to accommodate the varying needs of the different schools by developing different sets of services, Walsh says. The organization will have a core group of services for which they will charge every school and a second tier of services which schools can subscribe to on a fee-for-service basis.

Development Group

OIT also housed a group of engineers and technicians known as the Development Group whose purpose was to work on complex computing and technology questions for Harvard.

"The group worked on developing special applications and services," says Scott O. Bradner, a former member of the group who is still at Harvard.

One of the group's recent projects was an investigation of e-mail standards at the University, determining which communication protocols OIT should support, Bradner says.

The group also worked on developing special-purpose Web-based applications and investigated University-wide security standards.

The development group--like the telephone over-recovery--worked to benefit the whole University without clearly articulating which school was paying for it.

Despite these projects and its status as the only University group working on research and development, the Development Group was one of the central targets of Faculty criticism and was eliminated in the reorganization.

"A big issue was that the group was established with no real funding plan on how to support their activities and projects," Walsh said in an e-mail message.

Some funding for the Development Group may have come from the telephone over-recovery, but Walsh says she cannot confirm this because OIT's budgetary structures were so complex.

Faculty members saw this development work as utilizing the schools' funding in an unsupervised manner.

"When people are using internal funds [for research or development], there has to be oversight," says Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin '53, chair of the FAS Committee on Information Technology. "We have to ask are we getting our money's worth."

The larger schools, in particular, came to feel that OIT was using their funding to benefit other schools, according to Proctor.

"It seemed that they were subsidizing one school against another, which at Harvard is a dangerous situation to be in," Proctor says.