Most institutions don’t fail because they picked the “wrong” system. They struggle because the technology decisions made along the way are not anchored in shared, strategic guardrails.
That is the role of design principles.
Design principles are short, durable statements that describe how your institution will make technology decisions across selection, implementation, and operations. When they are clear and consistently applied, they reduce risk, protect scarce resources, and keep multi-million-dollar investments aligned to institutional goals.
What Do Effective Design Principles Look Like in Higher Ed?
In a higher education context, design principles might sound like:
- Student-first by design: When trade-offs arise, choose the option that improves the student journey, not only internal convenience.
- Configure before customize: Use standard product capabilities and configuration before you add custom code or one-off workflows.
- Cloud SaaS preferred: Favor secure, modern SaaS offerings over on-premises or heavily self-hosted solutions, unless a clear, documented exception is approved.
- Data is an institutional asset: Systems must expose and steward data so it can be reused across analytics, student success, and operations.
- Integrate via standard patterns: Use agreed integration patterns and data models rather than ad hoc, point-to-point connections.
Each principle is short, understandable to non-technical leaders, and broad enough to apply across solutions and projects.
How Design Principles Improve Vendor Selection
When institutions enter a selection process without principles, the RFP and demos tend to reflect individual preferences rather than institutional strategy. Design principles shift that dynamic.
They help you:
- Narrow the field early: If “Cloud SaaS preferred” is a principle, on-prem-only solutions face a higher bar. This saves evaluation time and reduces long-term operational risk.
- Translate strategy into evaluation criteria:
- “Configure before customize” becomes: To what extent can this solution meet our needs through configuration rather than custom development?
- “Data is an institutional asset” becomes: How well does this solution expose and govern data for analytics, reporting, and cross-system use?
- De-personalize difficult decisions: When stakeholders favor different vendors, you can return to agreed principles: “We collectively agreed to minimize customization and protect our upgrade path. Based on that principle, Vendor B is the better fit, even though Vendor A offers more bespoke options.”
The result is a selection process that is more transparent, less political, and more defensible to executive leadership and governance bodies.
How Design Principles Protect Value During Implementation
Most costs and risk emerge after the contract is signed. This is where design principles either show up or disappear.
Applied well, they:
- Prevent customization creep: “Configure before customize” creates a default stance: any request for custom logic, complex integration, or exception processing must show clear value and long-term sustainability. Many expensive “nice-to-haves” never make it into scope.
- Control scope and timeline: Principles such as “Deliver value incrementally” encourage institutions to protect Phase 1 from becoming an “everything we’ve ever wanted” release. That discipline shortens time-to-value and reduces change fatigue for staff and students.
- Align cross-functional teams: When enrollment, IT, finance, academic leadership, and data teams share principles like “Student-first by design” and “Data is an institutional asset,” design reviews and decisions are made against a common, strategic lens—not departmental silos.
- Reduce long-term operating costs: Less customization, fewer one-off integrations, and cleaner data flows translate directly into lower support effort, smoother upgrades, and more predictable total cost of ownership.
In short, design principles turn strategy into operational decision rules.
How to Start Defining Design Principles with the Right People in the Room
Design principles are not an individual architect’s side project. They should be co-created.
A practical approach:
- Anchor in strategy: Pull out two or three themes from your institutional and IT strategies, then ask: “If we really mean this, what needs to be true in our tech decisions?”
- Draft a small set: Aim for six to ten principles. Short, plain language, reusable across systems.
- Co-create with stakeholders: Bring a small group from IT, enrollment, student services, academics, finance, advancement, data/privacy. Refine together and test the principles against a real RFP or in-flight project.
Common Traps—and How to Avoid Them
Several patterns limit the impact of design principles:
- Too many: A list of 25–30 “principles” becomes noise. Focus on the few that truly matter.
- Too specific: “Use Vendor X” or “Always use Tool Y” belongs in standards, not principles. Principles should survive product cycles.
- Contradictory or unprioritized: If principles conflict and there is no guidance on trade-offs (e.g., cost vs. experience vs. speed), teams will revert to local preferences.
- Written once, never used: If design principles are not visible in governance, procurement, and project practices, they quickly become shelfware.
Good principles should be stable, but not frozen. Reviewing them on a regular planning cycle is usually enough to keep them relevant without rewriting them for every project.
Which design principles in your organization genuinely shape decisions today, and which ones have you had to revise, retire, or add as your context changed?
I’d love to hear from you. Join the conversation on my original LinkedIn article.
You May Also Like
Originally posted by Novita Rogers on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow her there to catch all her great industry insights.
