In 2018, the EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program is examining the concept of next-generation enterprise IT. The third set of materials for that topic describes resources that help IT leaders transition from technology providers to institutional partners and brokers.
The 2018 focus for the EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program is preparing the institution for next-generation enterprise IT. (Read about our plan for the year.) As we prepare new resources for this topic, we will publish them on the Enterprise IT Program web page. In our third set of resources for the year, we look at the opportunity presented by system implementations for IT leaders to accelerate the transition to their new institutional roles.
Next-generation IT is characterized by numerous interconnected systems organized to provide information in support of achieving an institution's vision. These systems are a mixture of on-premise and cloud-based technologies and must be unified to provide the analytics and services needed for unit and enterprise-level decisions.
Many institutions are increasing the cloud-based portion of their systems' mix, and this has a number of implications, some of which are obvious while others are less so. Some of the obvious ones are a more regular schedule of system upgrades; changes or additions to some required IT staff competencies; and possibly a more current user interface and more robust feature set; changes to organizational business processes. Some of the less obvious implications are that contract negotiation and vendor management are more critical than ever before; enterprise-level systems can be purchased and implemented without IT involvement, so transformation of the IT role is a prerequisite to success; and the discovery and feature exploration of potential systems needs to be more fully representative of the affected campus community than in the past.
Generally speaking, many areas of the university simply do not understand the implications of cloud versus on-premise systems. As a result, moving to the cloud provides an opportunity for IT to better collaborate across the campus community in a way that highlights the emerging role of IT as a partner and broker. Based on past roles, as well as current experience, IT can use this opportunity to help the community understand just what it means to investigate and own a cloud system; to drive the contract review process; to help ensure that all the necessary stakeholders are involved; and to begin vendor relationship management as soon as the request for information (RFI) step begins to set the stage for a productive vendor relationship throughout the length of system ownership.
The Enterprise IT Program has collected resources to help you on this journey. A new web page dedicated to using system implementations to help in IT's role in transformation provides a link to an organized set of research studies, working group papers, member blogs, and recent articles from leaders within the EDUCAUSE community. Because the work of the evolving IT role goes beyond IT, you will also find links to resources from other professional organizations such as NACUBO (the National Association of College and University Business Officers). These resources also include case studies that describe how IT leaders at Emerson College, Furman University, Syracuse University, and Wellesley College are using enterprise system sourcing efforts as an opportunity to better collaborate and cooperate across their organizations.
We hope you find these new resources helpful. Send us your questions and your suggestions by email.
If you have a story to tell about your own institution's work in the area of next generation enterprise IT, or if you have suggestions or questions about the Enterprise IT Program, please contact Betsy Tippens Reinitz.
Andrew Clark is President of Andrew Clark & Associates and EDUCAUSE Consultant.
© 2018 Andrew Clark. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 International License.