Higher Education IT Assessment and Benchmarking Projects
Overview
EDUCAUSE is pursuing three projects to improve the value and efficiency of IT’s contribution to higher education by (1) helping institutions understand the relative efficiency and productivity of their IT services with the goal of reducing costs and enhancing productivity and (2) helping non-IT higher education leaders better understand the value and relevance of IT to their areas.
Three projects will create and deploy:
- An IT assessment report service to help institutions understand the relative efficiency and productivity of their IT services, drawing on EDUCAUSE benchmarking and research data.
- A comprehensive set of maturity and deployment indices to permit institutions to understand where they are and where they aspire to be in specific IT domains compared to peers and to an objective standard. Deployment indices enable institutions to benchmark stages of deployment for particular technologies and services. Maturity indices examine the additional necessary nontechnical dimensions of progress. Read more about EDUCAUSE analytics services below.
- A new series of executive briefs to help institutional leaders optimize the impact of IT in higher education. These Key Questions briefs can guide strategic planning and risk management on administrative systems and services, information security, online learning, and personalized pathways.
"Efficiency, effectiveness, and value are what all higher education institutions are striving for. However, these are hard to attain without measures of efficiency, productivity, and maturity. The grant from Lumina will help us accelerate the development of reports, indices, and executive communication tools that will benefit our community. We believe the impact of this work will advance all of higher education." — Diana Oblinger, former president and CEO, EDUCAUSE
EDUCAUSE Analytics Services
The Core Data Service is used by colleges and universities to inform their IT strategic planning and management. Institutions use the Core Data Service to make the case for additional resources, to evaluate organizational structure and governance, or to calibrate or justify performance. Core Data Service benchmarks focus on three pillars of IT: financing, staffing, and services.
The EDUCAUSE Benchmarking Service, built on the Core Data Service, helps IT leaders and their campus colleagues assess and benchmark organizational maturity and technology deployment for strategic initiatives. The service provides capability reports comprised of maturity and deployment indexes for analytics, culture of innovation, e-learning, IT governance, IT risk management, information security, research computing, and student success technologies. In 2016, ECAR subscribers, ELI members, and additional community groups are beta testing the service to inform development of support services to accompany the capability reports.