The FSP, which is organized around departments and administered by Academic Computing Services, has four basic components. The crucial first step in implementing the FSP in a department is for Academic Computing Services staff to work with the departmental computing committee to prepare an inventory of faculty computers and computing needs, and then develop a plan within the program's guidelines which identifies the type and amount of computer hardware, software and support that will best meet those needs. The Academic Computing Services staff, departmental computing committee, and Provost's Office work together to provide the necessary funding through a combination of existing departmental resources and incremental resources from the Provost's Office or the FSP budget. Computer hardware and software. One goal of the FSP is to provide new computers or upgrades, with appropriate software, for roughly a quarter of the full-time faculty each year.
Similar equipment is provided for appropriate academic support staff.
The DCCs, often graduate students working part-time, are recruited, trained and coordinated jointly by the department and Academic Computing Services. One clear benefit of the local support component is that DCCs know the faculty, their level of comfort and expertise with computers, the types of discipline-specific applications they use, and the types of information they use in teaching and research . The amount of first-tier support varies from department to department, depending upon the type of hardware and software used by the faculty and departmental decisions about how much FSP and departmental resources to allocate to this purpose. The DCCs are backed up by a second tier of support staff, who include not only technical experts at ITS but also discipline-specific staff in the Library and elsewhere who can be called upon to assist a faculty member with a particular problem, project or application. Faculty from any department might call upon the Director of Instructional Computing, the Internet Information Center, or a myriad of other resources.