2015 Top 10 IT Issues Resources
The items below have been selected to provide further information on the 2015 top 10 IT issues. These resources may include articles, conference presentation materials, blogs, feeds, webinar archives, and podcasts that you can access by browsing and searching particular issues and topics in the EDUCAUSE Library.
- Hiring and retaining qualified staff, and updating the knowledge and skills of existing technology staff
- Optimizing the use of technology in teaching and learning in collaboration with academic leadership, including understanding the appropriate level of technology to use
- Developing IT funding models that sustain core service, support innovation, and facilitate growth
- Improving student outcomes through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology
- Demonstrating the business value of IT and how IT can help the institution achieve its goals
- Increasing the IT organization's capacity for managing change, despite differing community needs, priorities, and abilities
- Providing user support in the new normal—mobile, online education, cloud, and BYOD environment
- Developing security policies for mobile, cloud, and digital resources that work for most of the institutional community
- Developing an enterprise IT architecture that can respond to changing conditions and new opportunities
- Balancing agility, openness, and security
1. Hiring and retaining qualified staff, and updating the knowledge and skills of existing technology staff
- Retaining Your IT Staff: Insights from the ECAR Workforce Study for Higher Education CIOs and IT Managers, August 14, 2014. This research bulletin uses data from ECAR’s study on the higher education IT workforce to provide CIOs and managers with an understanding of the demographic makeup of today’s higher education IT staff; the professional activities and skills staff consider important to their success; factors that underlie staff retention; and recommendations for creating a better work environment, increasing staff motivation, and facilitating staff retention.
- Today’s Higher Education IT Workforce, January 2014. This ECAR research incorporates results from a comprehensive survey on more than 2,000 IT professionals as well as focus groups to provide a description of the current state of today’s IT workforce, how it has changed in the past three years, and what changes may need to be implemented to retain and strengthen IT staff.
- The 4Rs of Metric System Design, EDUCAUSE Review, September 2013. The four rights (4Rs) approach focuses on measuring the right things in the right way and taking the right actions at the right time.
- 2013 CDS Executive Summary Report, February 2014. These annual reports summarize results from the annual EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) survey, which provide a detailed look at the most pertinent and interesting IT financial and staffing findings, with a high-level summary of the state of IT services.
- IT Career Development of the Future, EDUCAUSE Review, May/June 2013. As colleges and universities move away from directly supporting services to outsourcing services, and as legacy technology skills fade, the author asks, what new opportunities will emerge? How do we build staff members' skills to make that transition and encourage self-development?
- 7 Things You Should Know About ITIL, EDUCAUSE 7 Things brief, October 2010. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework for guiding the design and delivery of IT services.
2. Optimizing the use of technology in teaching and learning in collaboration with academic leadership, including understanding the appropriate level of technology to use
- ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2014, October 2014. Technology is embedded into students' lives, and students are generally inclined to use and to have favorable attitudes toward technology. However, technology has only a moderate influence on students' active involvement in particular courses or as a connector with other students and faculty.
- Study of Faculty and Information Technology, 2014, August 2014. ECAR subscription required. The findings of this research into the faculty community reinforce the promise of technology for the academic community. The faculty see technology as a valuable tool in traditional classroom settings, in research labs, and across digital environments, reshaping delivery systems, instructional models, and expectations. They are motivated to use technology more effectively—most say they are open to professional development to improve their knowledge about available technologies and, more importantly, about how to better integrate technology into their professional roles.
- Layered Approaches to Educational Technology, EDUCAUSE Review online, September 2014. This case study provides a glimpse of the layered approaches to university-wide educational technology training and course development (including online and blended course development) instituted at Western Washington University.
- Designing the Wheel: Built-in Instructional Technology, EDUCAUSE Review, September 2013. Many universities struggle to provide faculty with the support they need to incorporate sound use of instructional technologies in their courses, the Purdue University IMPACT program seeks to strengthen faculty knowledge in this area.
- Engaging Faculty as Catalysts for Change: A Roadmap for Transforming Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review, February 2013. The Faculty Fellowship Program at the University of Minnesota aims to implement effectively the thoughtful and innovative application of educational technologies.
3. Developing IT funding models that sustain core service, support innovation, and facilitate growth
- The NACUBO/EDUCAUSE Working Group on Administrative Services and Systems, February 2014. This working group final report identified a broad set of proposals that EDUCAUSE and NACUBO might pursue to drive greater administrative cost-effectiveness across higher education.
- Assessing Your Fiscal Bandwidth: Current Practices for Measuring IT Costs in Higher Education, ECAR Research Report, May 2013. The results of this ECAR survey provide insight into the current practices for IT cost measurement, the challenges around effectively measuring IT costs, and the gaps in information and systems to report those costs.
- Business Model Innovation: A Blueprint for Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review, November 2012. To compete in a world where the shelf life of business models is shortening, higher education leaders need the tools, skills, and experience to envision, test, and implement new business models.
- Five Guidelines for Instituting IT Value Measurement, ECAR Research Bulletin, November 2012. This bulletin outlines five recommendations to help advise IT leaders and others when implementing their own IT value measurement initiatives.
- Technology and the Broken Higher Education Cost Model: Insights from the Delta Cost Project, September 5, 2012. The Delta Cost Project has drawn attention to the need for a new focus on institutional spending and has provided a number of useful metrics for thinking about how different types of institutions spend money, about the relationships between costs and revenues, and about the declining public subsidies in public higher education.
4. Improving student outcomes through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology
- Managing Data Risk in Student Success Systems: EDUCAUSE IPAS Summit Report, EDUCAUSE Paper, February 2014
- What Leaders Need to Know About Managing Data Risk in Student Success Systems, EDUCAUSE Executive Briefing, April 2014
- 7 Things You Should Know About IPAS, EDUCAUSE, November 5, 2014
- IPAS Implementation Handbook, October 13, 2014
- 2014 Student and Faculty Technology Research Studies October 30, 2014
- 2012 ECAR Study of Analytics in Higher Education, June 2012. The objectives of this research were to assess the current state of analytics in higher education, outline the challenges and barriers to using analytics, and develop a maturity index to provide a common means of assessing progress in analytics.
- Using Analytics at UMBC: Encouraging Student Responsibility and Identifying Effective Course Designs, ECAR Research Bulletin, April 2013.
- Degree Compass: A Course Recommendation System, EDUCAUSE Review, September 4, 2013
- Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Edition. Produced by ELI and NMC each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years
5.Demonstrating the business value of IT and how IT can help the institution achieve its goals
- BI Reporting, Data Warehouse Systems, and Beyond, ECAR Bulletin, April 23, 2014.
- Resources for Presidents and Senior Executives: Administrative Systems and Services September 15, 2014
- EDUCAUSE Higher Education IT Assessment and Benchmarking Projects
- The NACUBO/EDUCAUSE Working Group on Administrative Services and Systems, February 2014. This working group final report identified a broad set of proposals that EDUCAUSE and NACUBO might pursue to drive greater administrative cost-effectiveness across higher education.
- Good BI Governance is Just Good Business, EDUCAUSE Review, December 2013. Business intelligence success is contingent on three key concepts: the nature and drivers of BI, the quality of the BI governance model, and the operating culture in higher education.
- Five IT Questions Presidents Should Ask Their CIOs, EDUCAUSE Review, December 2013. To provide a framework that presidents and CIOs can use to discuss technology, we queried a number of presidents, CIOs, and other institutional leaders and identified the following five basic IT questions that presidents should ask their CIOs.
- Substantive Collaboration: Are We Ready to Lead?, EDUCAUSE Review, December 2013. Can campus IT leaders drive a collaboration transformation both within our individual institutions and collectively with peers?
- The 4Rs of Metric System Design, EDUCAUSE Review, September 2013. When annual service satisfaction survey scores for students, faculty, and employees is less than 50 percent and descending, significant change and process improvement are required. This was the challenge facing the Yale University CIO, and the impetus for a new metric design and service improvement plan. This case study shares one of the initiatives implemented to address this challenge.
- Developing an Information Strategy, EDUCAUSE Review, November/December 2011. In the modern university, information management is, or should be, at the heart of both strategic and operational management. So how can we best ensure that information management, broadly defined, will both influence and facilitate institutional strategy?
6.Increasing the IT organization's capacity for managing change, despite differing community needs, priorities, and abilities
- The New Leadership Challenge, EDUCAUSE Review Online, December 2014. Today's IT leaders need a different set of skills than their predecessors to thrive in an era of commoditized and democratized technology. Collaboration, innovation, and strategic alignment with institutional goals are essential to their own success — and that of their institutions — particularly in a time of profound budgetary challenges.
- The Unified IT Service Catalog: Your One-Stop Shop, EDUCAUSE Review Online, August 11, 2014. As IT becomes more pervasive in all aspects of higher education, IT's customers need a user-friendly way of learning about and requesting IT services.
7.Providing user support in the new normal--mobile, online education, cloud, and BYOD environment
- Institutional Practices and Faculty Perspectives on Research Computing in Higher Education , ECAR December 1, 2014. This report uses data on institutional practices that support research computing, as well as data about the experiences of faculty as the consumers of these resources, to better understand the contemporary landscape of research computing practices while giving faculty a voice to influence IT service design around research computing.
- 2014 Student and Faculty Technology Research Studies, ECAR, October 30, 2014. 73 percent of faculty still look to the help desk for technical support.
- Why You Should Champion Your Service Desk, EDUCAUSE Review Online, August 11, 2014. The need to take an all-round view of service desk maturity helps place the service desk at the heart of the IT operation and identify it as a key component in the overall student experience.
- The IT Service Organization for a Post-Enterprise World, EDUCAUSE Review, July 14, 2014. The technology-service marketplace is increasingly focused either below the enterprise (on the consumer) or above the enterprise (on the cloud). In the space between the consumer and the cloud, the post-enterprise IT organization can make key contributions, channeling technical possibilities in service to the institutional mission.
- BYOD and Consumerization of IT in Higher Education Research, ECAR Research Report, March 2013. This report identifies and addresses the most important BYOE (bring your own everything) IT issues affecting higher education and includes recommendations for exemplary practices to manage BYOE IT issues.
- Developing a Campus Mobile Strategy: Guidelines, Tools, and Best Practices, EDUCAUSE ACTI Mobile Web Frameworks Working Group, January 2013.
8. Developing security policies for mobile, cloud and digital resources that work for most of the institutional community
- Cloud Strategy for Higher Education: Building a Common Solution, ECAR Bulletin, November 2014. This document presents a “cloud first” strategy for higher education IT that moves from a traditional data center model to one centered on the public cloud and cloud-based services.
- Navigating the Clouds with an Enterprise IT Strategy, EDUCAUSE Review Online, December 6, 2013. Furman University, which is pursuing an aggressive move to cloud services, shares models of cloud services as well as the risks, opportunities, and ways other campuses can benefit from and plan for using cloud services successfully.
- 7 Things You Should Know About Mobile Security, March 2011, An EDUCAUSE summary of the ways in which mobile computing amplifies some existing security concerns and introduces new ones, including issues surrounding user privacy.
9. Developing an enterprise IT architecture that can respond to changing conditions and new opportunities
- IT Infrastructure Projects: A Framework for Analysis, ECAR bulletin, July 2014. This research bulletin develops a framework that can be used by IT management to assess the need for IT infrastructure projects, to analyze the issues and risks in implementing and maintaining IT infrastructure, and to engage other university officials in better understanding the impact of IT infrastructure projects.
- The NACUBO/EDUCAUSE Working Group on Administrative Services and Systems, February 20, 2014. NACUBO and EDUCAUSE convened a joint working group to explore how best to maximize the cost-effectiveness of administrative services and systems. Over the course of the group’s work from September to December 2013, members determined that the value of administrative services and systems making. derives from the degree to which they improve operations (e.g., quality, speed, cost), legal and regulatory compliance, and decision.
- Higher Education's Top-Ten Strategic Technologies in 2014, February 2014. The EDUCAUSE definition of a strategic technology is based on the time, active attention, and priority a technology has at a given time. Mature, fully deployed technologies may be among the most mission-critical technologies, but they are more likely to be receiving operational than strategic attention.
- The Future of Administrative IT, EDUCAUSE Brief. December 2013. This executive briefing summarizes a panel’s findings and recommendations on the prospect of schools having to replace multimillion-dollar enterprise systems.
- Enterprise Application Projects in Higher Education, ECAR Research Study, August 2013. This ECAR study represents an initiative by EDUCAUSE to begin addressing some of those gaps in our knowledge. What emerges is a blend of incremental change in some areas and rapid shifts in others, with some common lessons across all, and perhaps the first systematic collection of cost data across system areas and institutional classifications.
- Is Our Software Designed for Change? Successes and Challenges in Using Service Oriented Architecture, ECAR Research Bulletin, March 2013. In 2012, to find out how institutions are using SOA to prepare for changing software needs, members of the EDUCAUSE Enterprise, Business, and Technical Architects (ITANA) constituent group conducted a survey, receiving responses from 27 institutions. This research bulletin discusses the survey results and implications for higher education, for institutions, and for IT organizations.
- Building a Modern Computing Infrastructure at Princeton University, EDUCAUSE Review, May 2013. Over the past 10 years Princeton University developed and implemented an institutional strategy to support research and administrative computing.
10. Balancing agility, openness, and security
- Questions of Data Ownership on Campus, EDUCAUSE Review, August 25, 2014. Valid arguments exist for students to control data about themselves, and similarly plausible arguments suggest that the institution can claim ownership. This article explores both perspectives. To avoid win-lose solutions, institutions acting as "information fiduciaries" can reap the benefits of analyzing student data while respecting student rights.
- IT Governance, Risk, and Compliance in Higher Education, ECAR Research Study, June 2014. This study benchmarks how higher education institutions are approaching IT GRC practices.
- Just in Time Research: Data Breaches in Higher Education, ECAR, May 20, 2014. This “Just in Time” research is in response to recent discussions on the EDUCAUSE Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC) discussion list about data breaches in higher education. Using data from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, this research analyzes data breaches attributed to higher education.
- Developing a Comprehensive Privacy Program: A Step-by-Step Guide, Daniel Solove, NACUA. December 2013
- Leveraging Enterprise Risk Management: Opportunity for Greater Relevance, EDUCAUSE Review, December 6, 2013. Even though enterprise risk management (ERM) engages the entire higher education institution, IT organizations have an opportunity to use ERM to move beyond a services function toward providing strategic value to the institution.
- Risk Management Library page