2019 Top 10 IT Issues Recommended Resources

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The items below have been selected to provide further information on the 2019 Top 10 IT Issues. These resources may include articles, blogs, community groups, conference presentation materials, feeds, and webinar archives that you can access by browsing and searching particular issues and topics in the EDUCAUSE Library.

Information Security Strategy
Student Success
Privacy
Student-Centered Institution
Digital Integrations
Data-Enabled Institution
Sustainable Funding
Data Management and Governance
Integrative CIO
Higher Education Affordability

1. Information Security Strategy: Developing a risk-based security strategy that effectively detects, responds to, and prevents security threats and challenges

Information Security Program Assessment Tool. Updated September 2017. This self-assessment tool was created to evaluate the maturity of higher education information security programs using as a framework the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27002:2013, "Information Technology Security Techniques. Code of Practice for Information Security Management."
Higher Education Cloud Vendor Assessment Tool (HECVAT). Updated November 2018. This tool was created to evaluate the security of third-party vendor and cloud solutions. It helps higher education institutions ensure that cloud services are appropriately assessed for security and privacy needs, including some that are unique to higher education.
IT Risk Register. This register was created to help institutional IT departments get their strategic IT risk management programs off the ground.
The Cybersecurity Program works to improve information security, data protection, and privacy programs across the higher education sector through its volunteers and focused partnerships with government, industry and other academic organizations.
Toolkit for New CISOs, a resource developed by members of the Higher Education Information Security Council.
Security Community Group This group provides a forum to identify problems and share strategies or solutions as colleges and universities continue to improve information security governance, compliance, data protection, and privacy programs.
Security Matters. This EDUCAUSE Review column covers everything related to information security, privacy, and risk in higher education.
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2. Student Success: Serving as a trusted partner with other campus units to drive and achieve student success initiatives

Culture Change First, Then Student Success. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Leading student success is less about adding initiatives and more about changing culture.
Institutions' Use of Data and Analytics for Student Success. ECAR, 2018. This collaborative report describes a variety of challenges and opportunities regarding institutions' readiness to expand their use of data across functions.
Leadership, Change Management, and the Nontraditional Student. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Institutions of higher education need to offer nontraditional students additional ways to enroll in, progress through, and complete a college education.
Making the Case for Student Success Technology. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Supported by EDUCAUSE since 2015, pioneering colleges and universities that are using student success technologies to improve their students' rates of retention and completion are producing concrete positive results.
Numbers that Count: Measuring the ROI of Student Success Initiatives. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. A new toolkit helps colleges and universities evaluate the return on investment of initiatives to increase student success.
Using Information to Drive Meaningful Change. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. A report from the EDUCAUSE/NACUBO/AIR 2018 Enterprise IT Summit.
2018 NMC Horizon Report. 2018. The NMC Horizon project identifies and describes the higher education trends, challenges, and developments in educational technology likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry.
iPASS: Lessons From the Field, 2018. This report distills guidance from iPASS grantees on how to move forward with a transformative technology-based planning and advising project, with a specific focus on advising transformation, faculty engagement, and predictive analytics.
Planning for Rollout and Adoption: A Guide for iPASS Institutions, 2017. This series of interconnected guides describes each component of a rollout and adoption plan, providing best practices and tools to help you and your team be successful as you implement iPASS at your institution.
The Predictive Learning Analytics Revolution: Leveraging Learning Data for Student Success. October 6, 2015. This paper aims to enable institutional leaders and practitioners to educate themselves about the emerging field of predictive learning analytics and understand how it will impact the higher education landscape.
Student Success Analytics Community Group. This group provides a forum for people from educational institutions, organizations, and providers serving them who are actively planning or implementing analytics initiative aimed at improving student success.
Transforming Higher Ed. EDUCAUSE Review blog focusing on student success.
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3. Privacy: Safeguarding institutional constituents' privacy rights and maintaining accountability for protecting all types of restricted data

The Higher Education CPO Primer, Part 1. A welcome kit for chief privacy officers in higher education
The Higher Education Chief Privacy Officer Primer, Part 2. A roadmap for chief privacy officers in higher education
Take Charge of Your Online Reputation. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Advice for students entering the job market is equally applicable to those in other career stages looking to successfully manage their online reputations.
7 Things You Should Know About GDPR. 2018. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) confers numerous rights upon data subjects who are located in the EU, including the "right to be forgotten."
Privacy Community Group. This group provides a forum on privacy issues and challenges in higher education. Discussion topics include the intersection of IT and privacy, as well as privacy issues related to security, surveillance, analytics/big data, compliance, policies, Internet of Things, etc.
Policy Spotlight. EDUCAUSE Review blog focusing on IT policy issues affecting higher education.
Security Matters, EDUCAUSE Review column on everything related to information security, privacy, and risk in higher education.
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4. Student-Centered Institution: Understanding and advancing technology's role in optimizing the student experience (from applicants to alumni)

Online Student Services: What, Where, Who, When, How, and Most Importantly, Why. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Implementing student services for online students involves answering the basic, but nonetheless complex, questions of what, where, who, when, how, and why.
2018 Students and Technology Research Study. 2018. This ECAR research explores technology ownership, use patterns, and expectations as they relate to the student experience.
Digital Transformation : What Is It? EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. As in other industries, four elements are driving digital transformation in education: customer experience, competitiveness, profitability, and agility.
Gameful Design: A Potential Game Changer. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Gameful design embraces incremental implementations of proven intrinsic motivators while it acknowledges, accentuates, and builds on the work that good instructors do as second nature.
Unbundling and Rebundling Higher Education in an Age of Inequality. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Unbundling and rebundling are happening in different parts of college and university education, through new forms of teaching and learning provision and in different parts of the degree path, in every dimension and aspect—creating a complicated environment in an educational sector that is already in a state of disequilibrium.
Using Process Mapping to Redesign the Student Experience. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. This low-cost, low-tech tool brings people together to improve discrete processes and cumulatively create broader change.
Using Telepresence Robots to Support Students Facing Adversity. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Telepresence robotics allows students who are temporarily unable to attend their classes to continue participating remotely.
The Predictive Learning Analytics Revolution: Leveraging Learning Data for Student Success. October 6, 2015. This paper aims to enable institutional leaders and practitioners to educate themselves about the emerging field of predictive learning analytics and understand how it will impact the higher education landscape.
CIO Community Group. This group engages in discussions of issues and challenges that affect chief information officers in higher education
Student Success Analytics Community Group. This group provides a forum for people from educational institutions, organizations, and providers serving them who are actively planning or implementing analytics initiative aimed at improving student success.
Dx : Digital Transformation of Higher Education. This EDUCAUSE initiative seeks to help IT leaders play a critical role in helping their institutions understand the urgency and potential of digital transformation and designing the architecture and infrastructure that will enable it.
Topic Pages
- Student Experience
- Student Technology Use

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5. Digital Integrations: Ensuring system interoperability, scalability, and extensibility, as well as data integrity, security, standards, and governance, across multiple applications and platforms

Addressing New Challenges of Data Ingestion. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Institutions that hope to use analytics to make better decisions must develop the architecture and processes to work efficiently with data from disparate sources.
Using Analytics to Answer Important Institutional Questions. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. IT leaders face numerous challenges in helping their organizations make increasingly information-based decisions.
Integrating Data and Systems, 2018. Next-generation enterprise IT efforts aim for agility, scalability, cost effectiveness, and effective analytics. Integration of data across multiple systems is a key element of the work.
Supporting Analytics through Data Integration and Governance. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. IT leaders describe how their institutions have used governance best practices to support institutional analytics initiatives.
The 2016 Enterprise Application Market in Higher Education. 2017. The 2016 Enterprise Application Market reports from the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research use data from the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) to better understand how higher education institutions approach various information systems.
Enterprise Architecture Practices: A Holistic Approach for Planning Next Generation Services. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Next Generation Digital Learning Environments and Next Generation Enterprise IT platforms have many common features and capabilities and, most importantly, need many of the same technical environment underpinnings.
Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2016. 2017. Using data from EDUCAUSE Core Data Service maturity and deployment indices, the Digital Capabilities in Higher Education reports are designed to provide a view into the current status of digital capabilities within higher education.
The Predictive Learning Analytics Revolution: Leveraging Learning Data for Student Success. October 6, 2015. This paper aims to enable institutional leaders and practitioners to educate themselves about the emerging field of predictive learning analytics and understand how it will impact the higher education landscape.
A Shift in Focus: Preparing for a Service-Centric Future. A report from the EDUCAUSE/NACUBO 2016 Enterprise IT Summit.
EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program
Data Governance and Chief Data Officers Community Group. This group is a venue for data governance managers—and open to those seeking to initiate data governance programs.
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6. Data-Enabled Institution: Taking a service-based approach to data and analytics to reskill, retool, and reshape a culture to be adept at data-enabled decision-making

Data-Driven IT Strategic Planning: A Framework for Analysis. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. A new framework offers a system for defining, collecting, analyzing, and organizing data for IT strategic planning.
Integrating Data and Systems, 2018. Next-generation enterprise IT efforts aim for agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and effective analytics. Integration of data across multiple systems is a key element of the work.
Using Information to Drive Meaningful Change. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Report from the EDUCAUSE/NACUBO/AIR 2018 Enterprise IT Summit.
Using Analytics to Answer Important Institutional Questions. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. IT leaders face numerous challenges in helping their organizations make increasingly information-based decisions.
Supporting Analytics through Data Integration and Governance. Data governance, cross-enterprise partnerships, and data integration are key ingredients in supporting higher education's growing need for reliable information.
Data Governance and Chief Data Officers Community Group. This group is a venue for data governance managers—and open to those seeking to initiate data governance programs.
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7. Sustainable Funding: Developing funding models that can maintain quality and accommodate both new needs and the growing use of IT services in an era of increasing budget constraints

Complexity: A Leader's Framework for Understanding and Managing Change in Higher Education. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Complex adaptive systems offer higher education leaders a framework for understanding dramatic systemic change as well as approaches to engaging, managing, and driving change.
Costs and Value of Enterprise IT. A collection of resources from the Enterprise IT Program.
Using System Migrations to Communicate Enterprise IT Value. A collection of resources from the Enterprise IT Program.
2017 EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) Benchmarking Report. 2018. The 2017 Core Data Service (CDS) Benchmarking Report summarizes key findings from the CDS 2017 survey, providing a glimpse into the breadth of CDS data.
The Power of a Higher Education Consortium. EDUCAUSE Review, 2017. The future requires having a keen eye for truly differentiated needs and opportunities and the ability to move with agility in and out of those spaces. It means knowing that evolving digital workflows might require changes in governance, processes, or pedagogy, and the value of extensions to infrastructure.
In Enterprise Technology Operations, Sometimes It's Not What We Buy but How We Buy It. EDUCAUSE Review, 2017. Given the changes in today's educational marketplace, to succeed institutions need to collaborate and look deeper into not only where technology dollars are spent but also how they are spent.
Aligning IT Funding Models to the Pace of Technology Change: Enabling Financial Flexibility for Core, Flexible, and Transformative Services. 2015. ECAR brought together a group of high-level IT and finance leaders from a wide range of institutions to work together to understand how to better align IT funding models to the pace of technology change. The results of this collaboration between technology and business officers provide guidance and suggestions to help institution.
Advancing without New Resources. EDUCAUSE Review, 2014. How can the IT organization address the increasing demands without new resources? By making a list of the top 10 things it wants to accomplish and a list of the top 10 ways it might find resources to accomplish those things.
The Value of Administrative IT: Getting It Right. EDUCAUSE Review, 2014. Recommendations for colleges and universities to consider how best to maximize the value of administrative systems and services.
CIO Community Group. This group engages in discussions of issues and challenges that affect chief information officers in higher education
Topic Pages
- Budgets
- IT Funding

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8. Data Management and Governance: Implementing effective institutional data-governance practices and organizational structures

Complexity: A Leader's Framework for Understanding and Managing Change in Higher Education. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Complex adaptive systems offer higher education leaders a framework for understanding dramatic systemic change as well as approaches to engaging, managing, and driving change.
The Importance of Data Management to Demonstrate the Value of Analytics. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Following a simple but structured plan to understand and manage data can help colleges and universities make the most of the data they collect.
Supporting Analytics through Data Integration and Governance. Data governance, cross-enterprise partnerships, and data integration are key ingredients in supporting higher education's growing need for reliable information.
Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2016: Analytics. ECAR, September 2017. Analytics, which we define as the use of data, statistical analysis, and explanatory and predictive models to gain insight into and act on complex issues, is an issue of relevance and enduring strategic importance to higher education. This report examines the status of analytics maturity and deployment in higher education.
Setting the Table: Responsible Use of Student Data in Higher Education. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. The higher education community must set the table and invite others to help us define ethical practice and responsible use of student data in the rapidly changing digital world of the academic enterprise.
IT Leadership in Higher Education, 2016: The Chief Data Officer. 2017. As part of its series of studies of the IT workforce in higher education, ECAR conducted a survey of chief data officers. This study sought to identify the characteristics and functions of CDOs.
The Compelling Case for Data Governance. ECAR, 2015. This paper is intended to serve as a conversation starter among stakeholders and executives about the importance of having well-planned data governance.
Establishing Data Stewardship Models. ECAR, 2015. This paper provides guidance on establishing a data stewardship program for administrative data. It clarifies the different types of data stewards and managers and their roles and responsibilities, where they reside in an organization, how they work with colleagues to ensure that the data are maintained, and what special skills or training are needed to meet both university responsibilities and best practices.
CIO Community Group. This group engages in discussions of issues and challenges that affect chief information officers in higher education.
Enterprise Connections EDUCAUSE Review blog focusing the higher education enterprise IT world.
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9. Integrative CIO: Repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as an integral strategic partner of institutional leadership in achieving institutional missions

Becoming Institutional Partners and Brokers: The New Role for IT. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. IT leaders describe how they are collaborating and cooperating with their campuses as they transition to their new organizational role.
The Future of the IT Profession and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Today and in the future, the IT profession has a key role to play in taming the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Perspectives on the Future of the Profession: Looking Forward, Then and Now. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. IT professionals are engaged in more than could even have been imagined two decades ago. Yet the issues discussed then continue to resonate today and offer insight into the future of the profession.
Strategic IT: What Got Us Here Won't Get Us There. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. To fully realize the value of information technology as the strategic asset it is, we must embrace strategic IT.
Scenarios, Pathways, and the Future-Ready Workforce. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Strategic workforce development through scenario planning and job pathways mapping can build a common vision to transform technological and cultural disruption in higher education into a positive digital transformation.
The CIO's New Clothes. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018.Can we energize our institutions' capacity to socialize the next wave of information technology in ways that fulfill technology's promise while respecting our institutions' culture and legacy?
What Presidents Want from Their CIOs, and What CIOs Would Like from Their Presidents. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. A president and a CIO list the attributes and contributions they seek from each other in their critical partnership to further the goals of their institution.
Dx : Digital Transformation of Higher Education. This EDUCAUSE initiative seeks to help IT leaders play a critical role in helping their institutions understand the urgency and potential of digital transformation and designing the architecture and infrastructure that will enable it.
The IT Workforce in Higher Education, 2018.This ECAR research focuses on the evolving IT workforce in higher education and builds on previous ECAR research to provide a longitudinal perspective.
EDUCAUSE Review Leadership Column. Views from the top, written by campus and association presidents and CEOs.
CIO Community Group. This group engages in discussions of issues and challenges that affect chief information officers in higher education.
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10. Higher Education Affordability: Aligning IT's priorities and resources with institutional priorities and resources to achieve a sustainable future

2017 EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS) Benchmarking Report. 2018. The 2017 Core Data Service Benchmarking Report summarizes key findings from the CDS 2017 survey, providing a glimpse into the breadth of CDS data.
OER Cost Assessment Strategies. EDUCAUSE Review, 2018. Open educational resources can provide access to high-quality resources while offsetting the costs of traditional textbooks.
The Power of a Higher Education Consortium. EDUCAUSE Review, 2017. The future requires having a keen eye for truly differentiated needs and opportunities and the ability to move with agility in and out of those spaces. It means knowing that evolving digital workflows might require changes in governance, processes, or pedagogy, and the value of extensions to infrastructure.
In Enterprise Technology Operations, Sometimes It's Not What We Buy but How We Buy It. EDUCAUSE Review, 2017. Given the changes in today's educational marketplace, to succeed institutions need to collaborate and look deeper into not only where technology dollars are spent but also how they are spent.
2018 ACUHO-I State of ResNet Report. 2018. This report, published by ACUHO-I, is the seventh installment of a study to measure the pulse of ResNet practices and policies in higher education.
The Impact of Cloud Implementations on Budget Strategies. EDUCAUSE Review, September 2016. Moving technologies and services to the cloud has financial implications. The transition may include a shift from capital to operating expenses, changes in implementation and migration costs, new staffing requirements, and the urgent need to communicate changes across the enterprise.
Aligning IT Funding Models to the Pace of Technology Change: Enabling Financial Flexibility for Core, Flexible, and Transformative Services. ECAR working group, December 2015. ECAR brought together a group of high-level IT and finance leaders from a wide range of institutions to work together to understand how to better align IT funding models to the pace of technology change. The results of this collaboration between technology and business officers provide guidance and suggestions to help institution.
TCO for Cloud Services: A Framework. ECAR working group, April 2015. This framework enables more accurate identification of the cost to a specific department, as well as the cost to the institution as a whole.
CIO Community Group. This group engages in discussions of issues and challenges that affect chief information officers in higher education.
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