View the complete set of 2018 resources on the Top 10 IT Issues web page.
The 2018 top 10 IT Issues is a story of the convergence of higher education’s biggest concerns with technology’s greatest capabilities, and focuses on remaking higher education, through four primary themes.
Institutional adaptiveness: Institutional and IT leaders are strengthening their individual and collective capacity for not only effective and efficient, but also consequential uses of technology.
These issues include:
3. Institution-wide IT strategy
6. Higher education affordability
10. Change leadership
IT adaptiveness: IT organizations are adapting themselves to new economic, demographic, and industry models and realities, and approaching the information security of the institution with even greater rigor.
The issues under this theme include:
1. Information security
7. IT staffing and organizational models
Improved student outcomes: Work on student success initiatives has become both more tactical, with a nuts-and-bolts focus on integrations, and more aspirational, with a new emphasis on students’ entire experience with the institution.
The focus issues are:
2. Student success
5. Student-centered institution
Improved decision-making: The data issue is every bit as complicated as has been predicted, and efforts to gather, manage, and use the data are advancing.
Data issues include:
4. Data-enabled institutional culture:
8. (tie) Data management and governance:
8. (tie) Digital integrations:
The issues on the Top 10 list and are NOT just for IT departments to solve. Technology may be difficult, but it may be the easiest issue to address---the challenges related to people, processes, and policies dwarf the technical work. The 2018 Top 10 IT Issues are about nothing less than remaking higher education. And that takes all of us.