Systems and getting things coordinated

This is a time when I am going to talk of the frustrations of running something efficiently. One software package I keep a watching eye on in SAS. Now let me be honest I do not use SAS, but I do give some sort of support and more importantly I do look after the distribution of license codes at this university. As far as the University is concerned SAS is a bit of an awkward package. It is expensive (it costs us about twice what SPSS does) and it is used by very few people here (I make it around the 30 mark, given that we have hundreds for SPSS that is a very small population, we probably have a larger Stata one and they buy it themselves), however those users are scattered across many departments! The result is that if we buy a license it is about a third the cost it would cost the University if each group bought their own license.

However for this size group it is not worth doing a technically complicated system in place. So we have an email list and I subscribe people that ask for the SAS license to it each year, removing people who had it the previous year after I have sent the email that says the new codes are in. In my absence the helpdesk can do this.

You'd think give that there are so few of them they would be on a single version but no we have people on 9.1.3, 9.2 and 9.3 (some of them are running two versions). Then when I do this I have to keep everyone in the department who needs to be in the loop.

I am not aware when codes should come, I used to be but SAS kept changing the date; so this year I was not aware we were running out until I started getting emails. Then I have to ask for the codes from the person in charge of licensing and finally I need to contact everyone to say the new codes are in.

Then people of course start asking for codes which we did not get first off so I have to go through the loop again. Then there are a couple of weeks when people get around to asking for the codes. So it takes time.