The 2017 focus for the EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program is integrations and partnerships. You can read about our plan for the year here. As new resources for integrations and partnerships become available, they are published on the Enterprise IT Program web page. For our fourth and final focus of the year, we turn our attention to the challenge of how IT can support an institution's continuing and growing need for reliable data and information, highlighting the importance of cross-enterprise partnerships in the process.
Next-generation enterprise IT is characterized by an expanding set of services, systems, and sourcing strategies as institutions move away from monolithic ERP solutions in an effort to increase agility and scalability and meet stakeholder demands for new functionality and services. This expanding ecosystem can bring with it an ever-increasing number of disparate data sources that need to be integrated and connected for analytics and business intelligence efforts to be successful. Complicating the picture is the ease with which functional departments may purchase and implement systems without involvement from IT, resulting in the potential for a host of problems that includes siloed systems, lack of agreement on data definitions, uneven data security efforts, and unreliable information. Despite the potential difficulties, this complex data ecosystem also presents an important opportunity for those institutions that can align and integrate these rich data sources in a way that gives institutional leaders a powerful view into everything from student success initiatives to facilities management plans.
The Enterprise IT Program has compiled resources that can help you understand and address these challenges while also setting your institution up to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities an integrated data initiative can bring.
A new web page devoted to Supporting Analytics through Data Integration and Governance provides access to a curated set of relevant materials, including research studies, working group papers, benchmarking information, and recent articles from thought leaders within the EDUCAUSE community. Because it's important to understand the impact of these efforts beyond the IT unit, you will find links to resources from other professional associations such as NACUBO (the National Association of College and University Business Officers), AACRAO (the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers), and AIR (the Association for Institutional Research). The new resources also include case studies that describe the efforts of IT leaders to develop and implement the kinds of cross-enterprise partnerships and governance that are necessary for effective analytics and business intelligence efforts.
We hope you find these new resources helpful. Send us your questions and your suggestions by contacting [email protected].
If you have a story to tell about your own institution's work in the area of integrations and partnerships, or if you have suggestions or questions about the Enterprise IT Program, please contact Betsy Tippens Reinitz at [email protected].
Betsy Tippens Reinitz is the Director of the Enterprise IT Program for EDUCAUSE.
© 2017 Betsy Tippens Reinitz. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.