The Operational Cost of Friction on Campus

The Operational Cost of Friction on Campus

Ask any campus card administrator what slows their program down, and the answer rarely starts with technology. It starts with people, or more precisely, with the gaps between offices. 

The card office wants to roll out mobile credentials but IT says it's not on the roadmap until next fiscal year, Housing changes the resident assignment process without looping in the card office until the week before move-in, Dining wants to add a new location and POS terminal, Procurement is still finalizing the vendor contract. None of these are dramatic conflicts, however they cause friction which leads to the slow grind of departments and administration not quite moving in sync. And on most campuses, nobody is tracking what that friction actually costs.

Friction Lives Between the Boxes on the Org Chart

Campus card programs are unusual in how many departments they touch: IT, Housing, Dining, Public Safety, Student Affairs, Finance, Procurement, Athletics and the library. A card program's success depends on all of these offices treating it as a shared priority. In practice, each one treats it as a secondary item on someone else's list.

That structural reality is where friction breeds. It's rarely about bad intent. It's about competing priorities, unclear ownership, and decision cycles that don't line up. The card office often ends up in the position of asking for cooperation it has no authority to require.

Where the Cost Actually Shows Up

Delayed projects.

A mobile credential rollout, a new access-control integration, a change to meal plan tiers, these initiatives frequently depend on coordination or technical work from a department that doesn't share the card office's timeline. Every cycle of "let's revisit next semester" pushes the program's roadmap back, and those delays compound year over year.

Duplicated and contradictory work. 

When departments use separate software systems that aren’t integrated into one source system, someone eventually has to reconcile the discrepancies by hand. That reconciliation work takes a lot of time and possibly more than one full-time staff member to do the work.

Decisions made without the card office in the room.

When Administration changes a policy such as a new building access model, a shift in how meal plans are bundled with tuition, a change to visitor management, without consulting the card program early, the card office is left retrofitting a system to match a decision it didn't get to shape. That's expensive, and it's avoidable.

Lack of the card office's influence. 

The more successful card offices have support from leadership and have developed communication processes with various departments on campus. For those who struggle with support, it can make even the simplest decision take multiple meetings, documentation and time to come to an agreement. Every time a project stalls because another department didn't prioritize it, the card office's credibility takes a small hit both with students and with leadership. Over time, this can shift the card program from being seen as a strategic partner to being seen as a back-office function that reacts to decisions rather than informing them.

Find your “Champion”. Find a key Administrator or Department that understands how important the card office is to the campus and access them to help leverage for support. Make a case for the card office any chance you get. That means speak up in meetings if there is something the card program can do to help in a situation. Try to get time with key departments so that the card office can be included in the beginning of a new project on campus other than being an “after thought”.

Staff burnout.

A surprising amount of a card office's time can go toward simply tracking down sign-offs, attending meetings to advocate for a project's priority, and following up on requests that have stalled in someone else's queue. That's time not spent on the actual work of running the program.

Taking time to attend multiple meetings, and discussions just to plead the case for a project can be very daunting and time consuming. This is just for the possibility of an approval! Then add the meetings and calls to plan out the project to include timeline, costs, and all of the pieces that need to fall into place to make the project a success. This adds time and effort to the card office staff and can make a project take much more time than needed, which also takes away from moving on to the next project.

Why This Cost Is Easy to Miss

Interdepartmental friction doesn't show up on an invoice. There's no contract renewal that forces leadership to confront it. It shows up instead as a quiet accumulation of delays, workarounds, and missed opportunities. We hear all too frequently “that’s how we have always done it” or "just how things work here," which adds up across the institution.

This is precisely why card offices benefit from naming the cost explicitly, in terms administration understands: delayed go-live dates, duplicated labor hours, support tickets generated by mismatched data, and missed revenue from features that launched late or not at all.

Reducing the Friction

A few patterns tend to separate card programs that operate with relatively low friction from those constantly fighting it:

•  A clearly designated executive sponsor or Champion who can break ties between departments when priorities conflict, rather than leaving the card office to negotiate peer-to-peer with offices that outrank it in practice.
• Standing cross-departmental governance — a recurring meeting or committee with real decision-making authority, not just an information-sharing session. Getting all of the stakeholders in one room can be a challenge but will be a benefit in the end.
• Early involvement in policy decisions that touch identity, access, or payment, so the card office is shaping requirements rather than retrofitting around them. Make a case for the card office to be seen as a critical stakeholder to be included as projects come up on campus. We all know that building door access into the conception of a building from the beginning costs far less than retro fitting once the building has been completed.
• A shared data model for student/employee eligibility and status, so departments aren't maintaining parallel, occasionally contradictory records.

None of these fixes are technological. They're organizational which is exactly why they're harder to implement and easier to neglect.

The Bottom Line for Card Programs

Campus card professionals are often evaluated on system uptime, transaction volume, or adoption rates. Rarely are they evaluated on how much friction they had to overcome with other departments to hit those numbers even though that friction is frequently the single biggest drag on program performance. Naming it, measuring it where possible, and pushing for the organizational structures that reduce it isn't a soft ask. It's one of the most direct ways a card office can improve its actual operational performance.

NACCU is working to produce a toolkit for card offices to make a case for the campus card at their Institution. Keep an eye on our website, attend webinars and talk to peers to assist in elevating your campus card program.