This is the fifth year that EDUCAUSE has tracked the influence of major trends on the IT strategy of colleges and universities. Some trends, such as the growing complexity of security threats and artificial intelligence (AI), are technology trends. But we also track environmental trends — such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and lifelong learning — that can influence institutional priorities and, in turn, influence technology strategy. We assessed the trends presented in this report via an EDUCAUSE survey in the summer of 2018. The influence of the trends that we studied ranged widely (see figure 1), with some affecting as many as 4 in 5 institutions and others as few as 1 in 14. To help readers focus their attention, we divide the trends into four groupings, according to the impact they are having across institutions: most influential, taking hold, worth understanding, and limited impact.

Five trends are influential at 61% or more of colleges and universities (listed below from highest to lowest level of influence):

• Growing complexity of security threats
• Student success focus/imperatives
• Data-driven decision-making
• Increasing complexity of technology, architecture, data
• Contributions of IT to institutional operational excellence

Seventeen trends are influential at 41–60% of institutions (listed below from highest to lowest level of influence):

• Compliance environment
• Institution-wide data management and integrations
• IT as an agent of institutional transformation and innovation
• Changing enterprise system architectures, integrations, and workflows
• Business process redesign
• Incorporating risk-management approaches into IT strategy and service delivery
• Online degree or certificate programs
• Campus safety
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Managing mobility (people, data, institutional resources)
• Digital transformation
• Evaluation of technology-based instructional innovations
• Changing demographics’ influence on enrollments
• Shared services
• Service management (ITSM, ITIL)
• Higher education’s reputation and relevance
• Moving from transactional to strategic vendor–institution relationships

The influence of 14 trends is limited to no more than 40% of institutions (listed below from highest to lowest level of influence):

• Financial uncertainty for the institution
• Blending of roles and blurring of boundaries between IT and academic/administrative areas
• Agile approaches to change
• User-centered design
• Solution providers bypassing IT to work directly with business-area leaders
• Cross-institutional partnerships and consortia
• Concerns about institutional sustainability or even survival
• Lifelong learning
• New business models for higher education
• Changing faculty roles (focus on advising and student success, growth in adjuncts, etc.)
• Incorporating open standards into enterprise IT architecture
• Digitization of scholarly and research data (data management, visualization, discipline-specific tools, etc.)
• DevOps movement to bring development and operations staff together to better manage an end-to-end view of an application or IT service
• Reduced reliance on service desk as the primary model for support (includes shift to self-help, automated BYO-support, etc.)

• Cross-institutional and international scholarly and research collaborations
• Ubiquitous digital sources and streams (social media, IoT, systems and applications, OERs, etc.)
• Freedom of speech
• Bimodal IT (managing two separate IT delivery modes, one focused on stability and the other on agility)
• Adaptive learning
• Internet of Things
• Alternative credentialing models
• National and global political uncertainty
• Declining international enrollments
• Use of algorithms to influence institutional and individual choices
• Climate change
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Deregulation of higher education