A Corporate Perspective on the EDUCAUSE 2025 Top 10: CDW

Which one or two of the EDUCAUSE 2025 Top 10 issues are going to be most relevant to CDW, and why?

They're all extremely relevant, but they all tie together, too. Right now, the most important issue in higher education is #3, Smoothing the Student Journey, because through that lens, leaders can identify the opportunities and obstacles campuses face today. The more an institution can delight students with an exceptional student experience, the more it will be able to enroll, retain, and graduate them, and the more financially stable the institution will be. It all feeds itself. We're happy to engage with institutions across the country to help them identify those obstacles and realize those opportunities through our products, solutions, and services. We have the capacity to serve as a high-level consultancy and equally ensure seamless implementation processes.

The CDW value proposition aligns most closely with issue #1, The Data-Empowered Institution, which encompasses many solutions to modernize processes that directly impact issue #2, Administrative Simplification. Equally, we have services and solutions to help with the entire student lifecycle represented in issue #3, Smoothing the Student Journey. More and more, higher education IT leaders tell us that they need support in using data to modernize processes from the earliest stages of recruitment to the ongoing relationship with alumni—and you cannot execute any of these processes effectively without using data. We help institutions at any point that they might be struggling with, regardless of whether they have bigger strategic and mission goal-planning ideas they want to implement or a specific goal, such as centralizing data to implement a new AI chatbot or a customized large language model (LLM).

Regardless, even the sleekest projects rely on qualified talent. At CDW, we understand that financial resilience and institutional resilience are directly related to doing more with less. We have a team dedicated to helping institutions understand how a major implementation can be accomplished with short-term strategic Talent Orchestration—from sourcing talent to preparing, implementing, managing, and, when possible, continuing contracts. Strategic sourcing also reduces staff burnout, saves colleges and universities money when hiring new staff isn't possible, and helps institutions move more quickly into digital solutions.

While augmented staffing increases financial resilience, we can also add diverse suppliers into a strategic sourcing contract, which is good for the institution and great for the small businesses in the institution's local community.

We are a national company that helps institutions, both big and small. There are a lot of technology providers and suppliers in the market that can help institutions streamline processes, gain efficiencies, reduce costs, and remove friction for staff, faculty, and students. We can help IT leaders create comprehensive solutions using multiple providers so that institutions don't have to work with each provider individually. We can help IT leaders understand how they can harness what they're already doing more affordably and effectively through our strategic sourcing for contracts, various IT solutions and services, and consultancy software.

What challenges do you think are in store for higher education in 2025?

There's going to be an enrollment challenge. It's a challenge we can't change; we can't go back twenty years and change the birth rate. This is an opportunity for colleges and universities to reevaluate their value proposition. Those institutions that modernize, pivot, and innovate are going to excel. Institutions need to modernize their infrastructure with the goal of attracting, supporting, and retaining students. And technology can play a big role in how someone perceives a college or university before that person even steps foot on campus.

I mentioned earlier that CDW views the Top 10 issues through the broader lens of the student lifecycle, and I want to highlight another challenge related to the student experience. Planning for and implementing intuitive and frictionless campus systems for students is a priority for creating a competitive advantage. Institutions that have already made progress in modernizing facilities and IT infrastructure are in a fantastic position to excel, and institutions that have not will need to prioritize campus modernization to create a positive academic and cocurricular experience.

One of the challenges associated with modernization and other strategic projects is ensuring strategic alignment across campus units. We see that a lot. In the most successful programs or implementations, there's a rich coalition across multiple departments to accomplish something significant and impactful. Projects that are great ideas but live only in one department or college tend not to get the support needed to achieve broad implementation. One strength of our consulting efforts is bringing multiple institutional stakeholders together to identify and achieve common goals. We bring different departments together and function as a change agent, gaining confidence with our technical expertise while honoring the autonomy of individual departments or colleges. That ultimately helps college and university leaders advance institutional strategic and mission goals, especially when they don't have the time or the resources to do it on their own or when bringing in outside expertise will more effectively achieve alignment.

We offer services in all areas of higher education technology. Yet, right now, our consultancy services are being engaged in various artificial intelligence (AI) projects focused on governance, broad implementations, and project-specific initiatives. While we can help campus leaders leverage and implement AI technology, we can also help teams develop and articulate the project story to the president, provost, CIO, and other institutional decision-makers. The strategic expertise we bring from the field can help colleges and universities develop various technologies to become data-empowered institutions. Again, the data piece is critical and hits on a lot of the 2025 Top 10 issues.

What opportunities do you think are in store for higher education in 2025?

The opportunities across higher education are very exciting. A modernization effort spans not just one area of technology within a college or university; it spans the entire institution. I'll share a great example of something we've seen at many institutions that paints the whole picture of how we partner with them. Imagine a traditional one-hundred-year-old football stadium at one of the most prestigious universities in the country—a stadium with a rich institutional history but without adequate wireless access points for the modern fan experience. Initially, we partnered with institutional leaders across multiple units to deploy the right wireless solution to improve the fan and staff experience at this massive football stadium. With the hardware (e.g., smart cameras) and software we provided, attendees can have a digitally responsive experience, all the way down to seeing which lines are shorter across the entire stadium. The technology also allows campus security to monitor different activities within the stadium to ensure safety and security for all events. Our work helped this institution improve the entire experience for people attending major football events at its historic stadium.

The expansion of the technology at the stadium led that same university to state, "We've been hosting all of our event and athletic data on-prem. We've got all this data. We're having issues because of how much we're storing. We really want to explore moving to the cloud and getting more flexibility now that we've modernized our fan experience." So, our team came back in and facilitated the comparison of multiple cloud service providers.

I mentioned that CDW is a national company that partners with many providers and suppliers in the higher education technology landscape. For that reason, our conversations can be agnostic while providing the campus with multiple options. "Does AWS make the most sense? Does Azure make the most sense?" Once they decide which cloud provider they want to migrate to, the team that did that consultancy will help them migrate their data to the cloud. When the project is complete, the institution will have a modernized experience at its cherished one-hundred-plus-year-old stadium, and students and alumni can enjoy a digitally rich sports experience.

Students and fans won't just have a great stadium; they'll also have an awesome fan experience, and they'll really appreciate that. And that experience ties into everything from the recruiting efforts to attract new students to engaging alumni who come back and expect an experience like what they would have in a corporate setting. These are the types of things that we're doing for higher education. We do everything from basic consultation on hardware or software to emerging technology, and we can then manage the implementation and maintenance of those systems. So, we're excited about these types of experience opportunities for students.

Are you primarily excited or optimistic about higher education or concerned or scared about higher education in 2025?

I couldn't be more excited about higher education because the whole business model is transforming. The post-pandemic business model shift is one of the most consequential things that's happened to higher education in over twenty years. Institutions are taking a more modern approach, using technology to advance everything we discussed—data, data governance, AI, the student experience, and the student journey—and I couldn't be more excited about it. That's how colleges and universities tie their strategies directly back to all those inflection points and what we're seeing in the market.

If you asked higher education leaders this question, there's probably a laundry list of things they're worried about. Still, the leaders across the country also understand that this is an opportunity to advance. And, yes, there's a competitive nature to it. But they're delivering a better outcome for every student, whether that student is attending courses virtually or physically. And technology plays a big role in that. So overall, I am very excited.

One more Top 10 issue I want to call out is #10 (tie), Building Bridges, Not Walls. I'm glad that issue showed up this year because I spoke earlier about cross-departmental alignment to get big things done. For colleges and universities to advance their big ideas, they have to modernize, and this decision typically requires collaboration across all departments. You need to build a big bridge to do that. We help institutions build those bridges, but then we ride across the bridges with them.

How do you see the Top 10 issues changing the relationship between your company and the higher education community in the future?

There's one key message I want to get out to the EDUCAUSE community: As institutions leverage data analytics, we know they're trying to improve the student journey and experience, especially by leveraging AI. CDW sits at the intersection between the AI companies, services, and the institution. We provide the consultancy needed to implement these tools effectively, and we assist in developing a point of view that lets the institution choose what makes the most sense for them. We do that via some key offerings. One is called MOAT (Mastering Operational AI Transformation). Through an intake process, we frame what the institution is trying to do with AI and assess where the institution sits along a readiness continuum. Through this consultancy, we have helped institutions unify newly formed governance teams and campus AI committees. We also have teams that can focus on a specific outcome, like a robust LLM-based chatbot for multiple campus units to create a single solution for students. In all cases, we map out how to achieve institutional goals using all the best technology.

There are only so many companies that sit at that intersection in the way we do. We're not forced to talk about just one thing because there is not just one thing. We offer a whole host of things, and those typically need some walkthrough to help with decision-making.

For institutions to modernize and win the enrollment race, it is more critical than ever to harness disruptive technologies like AI, and we're in the best position to help them do that, regardless of where they want to go.

Joe Simone is Vice President of Education at CDW.