The EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program helps institutions address the challenges and opportunities associated with defining and maximizing the value of enterprise IT services to the institution. We are examining four themes in 2016: effective sourcing strategies, costs and funding, analytics and business intelligence, and business process management. As we develop resources for each theme, you will be able to find them on the Enterprise IT Program website.
Our current theme is analytics and business intelligence, with a focus on providing the kinds of data and analytics that institutions need for planning and decision making. A link from the Enterprise IT Program website takes you to the new page on providing campus leadership with the data they need. It includes case studies describing four institutions' experiences and the lessons they learned while developing data dashboards to facilitate the decision-making and planning process, as well as curated information from across EDUCAUSE resources.
Campus leaders are looking for information about institutional performance that helps them plan for the future, make both minor and major course corrections, and understand the impact of those changes. IT faces a varied set of challenges in providing data and analytics to meet that need, from the technical work of data integration across multiple systems and applications to the leadership work of managing data governance and stewardship.
The new Enterprise IT Program web page about data and analytics provides access to a set of relevant materials — including research studies, working group papers, benchmarking information, and policy materials — to help you navigate the process of building the analytics resources that institutional leaders need. You'll also find case studies that show the importance of data governance, data stewardship, and cross-institutional agreement on data definitions as part of that effort. Interestingly, the notion that effective governance and cross-enterprise collaboration are critical to success echoes similar ideas that emerged from previous Enterprise IT Program case studies about effective sourcing strategies and understanding and defining costs and funding, suggesting that these are important considerations for doing enterprise IT well, regardless of the particular topic at hand.
We invite you to take a look at these new resources. Let us know if they're helpful. Send us your questions and your suggestions for improving them by contacting [email protected].
Betsy Tippens Reinitz is the director of the enterprise IT program for EDUCAUSE.
© 2016 Betsy Tippens Reinitz. This EDUCAUSE Review blog is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license.