Adrienne Garber, Senior Strategist for Higher Education at Dell Technologies, an EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner, offers her perspective on the challenges facing higher ed IT today.
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Adrienne Garber
Senior Strategist
Dell Technologies
Q: What do you consider the biggest challenges in higher education and how can technology leaders address those challenges?
Garber: I'll share with you a few that are top of mind and what they encompass. The first one being sustainability. So this includes cost management, financial health, declining enrollments, and budgeting. The second would be equitable access to education. So this could mean access to student devices, networking bandwidth issues, and then supporting a diverse user set. The third would be student and institutional success. So this includes data information systems and data gathering about your students and your institution for decision-making. It also could encompass your graduation rates or your retention rates, as well as cost deficiencies within the university and forecasting your predictive models for making decisions about what's coming online and what's next as far as pandemic planning and recovery response. The fourth would be security, whether that's information security, physical security and campus security and monitoring, or cybersecurity and cyberattack, playbook planning, just all all-encompassing around security strategies for your institution. And lastly, data integration and data management. So how data is stored, who has access to it, how is it being used, how is it being secured, what is it being used for, what questions are you able to answer with it, and then reporting and utilizing it as part of your decision-making process and dashboards. So with those in mind of just being some general challenges that IT is facing today, I would say the biggest challenge that underpins all of those examples I just gave would be ambiguity. So the challenge around the uncertainty and the difficulty for senior leadership to be able to make decisions in a time when responsiveness to the pandemic and charting a recovery path for the institution can be very difficult.
Q: How is Dell assisting higher ed IT to take on the challenge of operating during the pandemic?
Garber: EDUCAUSE recently shared its top IT trends for 2021 during its conference, and they had a report that they shared that had three pandemic recovery scenarios that they shared that would be applicable to all academic institutions, higher education institutions. And those three scenarios were restore, evolve, and transform. And internally, as the education strategy team, we discussed this report and some of the assumptions that were made in it. One of the ones I'd like to highlight is the assumption that all institutions do not fall solely within one category or another. For example, their cost management challenge that may be in a restore mode, you may be in the restore scenario because of falling enrollments and the need to have better budget and better forecasting due to new inputs because of pandemic response, maybe you've had to shift some of your IT budget, maybe due to some of your CARES act and stimulus funding, you've had a different or unintended spends. That may put you in the restore scenario, however, you may have also experienced some cultural changes and cultural shifts within the institution from senior leadership or due to pivoting or making some changes in your strategic plan. And maybe that would put you in the transform category. So solely within one institution, each trend may have you sort of responding and reacting in a different way. And our team discussed internally that that may be true even within a college or a university, how a particular department, academic department or a particular degree program or an executive director of one institute or research center within the university ecosystem may be reacting differently than another. So it's good to keep in mind that in interacting with your vendors or your partners that are helping you create some of these technology solutions, to share where you think your college or university fits within this continuum of recovery response and recovery planning so we can better tailor the solutions to what you need. And that may be around a shifting concerns, evolving priorities, and changes from senior leadership as far as directives to the IT department about what is first and foremost in the minds of the senior leaders as far as the strategic plan. Dell Technologies is committed to providing a tailored response to both reduce costs and maximize value for our higher education institutions. We value collaboration and partnership with our customers above all else, and we're committed to addressing the needs of the pandemic that have arisen with you as one of your strategic partners in this process.