EDUCAUSE Releases Report on Campus IT Environments

EDUCAUSE, the association for information technology in higher education, has just released the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2005 Summary Report, which summarizes data collected early in 2006 for the past fiscal year from colleges and universities about their campus IT environments and practices. As of December 1, 2006, 959 campuses had completed the survey, an increase of 6% over last year. Responding institutions were 59% public and 41% private and included more than 60% of all EDUCAUSE member institutions.

Given the participation of so many institutions—representing all enrollment sizes, Carnegie classes, and types of governance, as well as international institutions—the Summary Report provides a broad and deep view of the current IT environment in higher education. This year’s survey for the first time integrated elements of the COSTS (Cost of Supporting Technology Services) Project, started in 1997 in association with the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges as an effort to measure the unit costs of providing IT services based on institutional characteristics. This integration resulted in new Core Data Service (CDS) questions on total campus budget and personnel, yielding new ratios and benchmarks.

While there are significant trends in higher education IT benchmarks from one year to another, many of the most interesting changes are specific to community colleges, research institutions, or other Carnegie groups. The survey had 55 questions with 282 data elements. Key findings include the following:

Organizational Structure and Leadership

• The percentage of top-level IT leaders sitting on the president’s cabinet overall has remained constant over the last year at about 46% of ALL responses, but once again a higher percentage (about 59%) of community colleges reported this to be the case.

IT Management Practices

• Looking at the total number of centralized FTE IT staff this year compared to last year, there was a significant mean increase of 1.63 FTE staff for ALL responding institutions.
• The ratio of dollars spent per FTE student for ALL respondents increased nearly 7% from 2004 to 2005.
• The percentage of institutions that reported using external suppliers to run various IT functions increased over the past year, from 53% to 57%, the second year in a row that a significant increase has been found.
• There was an increase overall in the past year in the percentage of schools that track bandwidth utilization (from about 62% to nearly 68%). In addition, there was a significant increase in bandwidth shaping of every kind, for every type of institution.

IT Security Practices

• Fewer than 1% of ALL respondents reported having no firewalls, with the most common strategy being the deployment of a firewall at the external Internet connection (88.4%), an increase from last year.
• More than 58% of ALL campuses reported that they had undertaken a formal campus security risk assessment, up from 52% last year.
• More than half of ALL respondents reported that they require end-user authentication for all network access. Another 26.2% are either in the process of implementing this requirement or are planning to do so, with an additional 12.5% considering it. Only 6% of ALL respondents had no plans for such a requirement.

Deployment of Newer Technologies

• There are significant increases in the use of both voice-over-IP and video-over-IP among ALL responding schools since last year.
• The percentage of classrooms with wireless connectivity at ALL responding institutions increased significantly.
• There was a significant leap in deployment of wireless security technologies since last year at all types of institutions, with an approximately 12% increase in deployment overall and about a 27% increase over the past two years.
• The spam plague has resulted in almost universal adoption of antispam tools, with nearly 94% of ALL respondents having deployed this technology and virtually no campuses not planning to do so.

Student and Instructional Computing

• There was a significant increase overall in student computer ownership from 2004 to 2005, with the mean increasing from 67% to over 73% and the median increasing from 80% to 85% for ALL respondents. There was a significant increase in reported student computer ownership for every Carnegie group.
• Nearly 8% of ALL respondents offer a service to provide online music and movies, double the percentage that reported offering such a service last year.
• The percentage overall of institutions that reported employing a course/learning management system (C/LMS) for all or nearly all courses increased significantly from 2004 to 2005, while the percentage overall that reported not using a C/LMS at all decreased significantly over this time period, especially among bachelor’s schools.

Information Systems Implementations

• The percentage of institutions that have completed an ERP (enterprise information system) implementation increased significantly from 2004 to 2005, from 43.9% to 48.8%. Purchasing a system and customizing it is the most common acquisition strategy, with about 75% of ALL institutions with an ERP implementation reporting this methodology.
• About 89% of ALL responding institutions have implemented a Web portal or have such an implementation in process or planned. About 95% of ALL institutions with portal implementations reported that they have integrated or plan to integrate their Web portals with campus information systems, and this high level of integration is consistent across all types of institutions.

“The problem with IT benchmarks of any kind,” said EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins, “is that input comparisons are too often used to convince decision makers to keep pace with their peers and that more is better where technology is concerned. This effort to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ is ultimately an inflationary pressure that can be dysfunctional, acting as a negative driver. Such pressure and focus on input measures is a fallacy that higher education is finally beginning to recognize. Rather than engaging in an ‘arms race,’ we need to focus on effectiveness—trying to determine which institutions seem to be doing the best job with the fewest resources, with an eye toward understanding the environment and practices that make this possible.” The EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS), now in its fourth year, was created to provide a context for just this kind of assessment in higher education.

In 2002, the task force of IT leaders from a variety of institutions that developed the CDS had to meet the challenge of designing a survey that would be meaningful and manageable for institutions ranging from community colleges through baccalaureate schools and doctoral universities. Roughly 50 questions are grouped under five categories: IT Organization, Staffing, and Planning; IT Financing and Management; Faculty and Student Computing; Network and Security; and Information Systems. This year’s survey captured data for the 2005 fiscal year.

The centerpiece of the CDS is a Web-enabled database with powerful sort and selection tools. Launched in May 2003 with 2002 data and updated annually each May, the database is accessible only to campuses that complete the survey. Before gaining access, CDS participants agree not to share any of the information retrieved from the database beyond planning teams on their individual campuses. The service allows for the creation of customized aggregations (including peer groups of like campuses), on-the-fly generation of data summaries for each question, viewing of raw data identifiable by institution, a trend analysis tool, and a set of commonly sought ratios for benchmarking.

Hundreds of participants have commented on the value of the CDS program. For example, Jonathan C. Enos, associate provost and chief information officer at Franklin and Marshall College, said, “The Core Data Service is an incredibly useful tool that has helped me advocate for realignments in various funding categories.”

The EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2005 Summary Reportis available at no charge in PDF format at http://www.educause.edu/apps/coredata/reports/2005. Print copies may be ordered for $10 each. General information about the Core Data Service may be found at http://www.educause.edu/apps/coredata.

About EDUCAUSE

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 250 corporations, with 17,000 active members. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at www.educause.edu.