AiPEX Center Launch: Higher Education Just Leapfrogged Into 2026
Drivestream just opened a new hands-on center designed to showcase what AI can actually look like in practice. Last week, Hampton Shive and I had the opportunity to spend time at the launch of Drivestream’s AiPEX Center in Leesburg, Virginia. Why This Felt Different I’ve been to a lot of conferences, seen countless demos, and […]
Academic Operations Is Becoming the Next Battleground in Higher Education Technology
For years, the center of gravity in higher education technology strategy has been relatively clear. Institutions invested heavily in student information systems, learning management systems, and CRM platforms to modernize the student lifecycle. Vendors built ecosystems around these core platforms. Technology roadmaps often revolved around replacing or upgrading one of these major systems. And in […]
P3•EDU MAP Summit Recap: The Expanding Role of Mergers, Affiliations, and Partnerships
The P3•EDU MAP Summit, P3•EDU’s first standalone event focused on mergers, affiliations, and partnerships, captured a higher education market that is rethinking how institutions build scale, resilience, and capacity. Held March 16 and 17 in Arlington, Virginia, the summit brought together college and university leaders alongside thought leaders from government, associations, foundations, and corporations to […]
The Hidden Thinking Tax of AI: How to Stay Cognitively Sharp
AI tools are changing how we work. Left unchecked, they’ll change how we think too. You’re staring at a blank document. A strategy memo is due by the end of the day. Instead of wrestling with the problem, sketching out arguments, weighing the trade-offs, you open your AI assistant and type: “Write a strategic memo […]
What NERCOMP 2026 Revealed About Higher Education’s AI Priorities
At NERCOMP 2026 in Providence, the conference theme, “Connect Locally, Think Globally” underscored the event’s role as a forum for higher education institution leaders to share experiences and best practices on how they are navigating universal pressures. NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program) is a nonprofit consortium serving higher education library and IT professionals in the […]
The Vicious Fractal of Complacency: When Leadership Trades Agency for Comfort
Complacency is one of those words we think we understand immediately—usually as a character flaw. It conjures images of laziness, low standards, or people who simply don’t care. But in the real world, complacency is rarely that simple. More often, it’s what happens when friction becomes familiar. When complexity becomes “normal.” When the path of […]
Enterprise Planning—Take the Reins
Most institutions and their vendors are still framing technology conversations around transactions, analytics, and user experience: better HR, cleaner financial reporting, faster close, fewer manual touches. That work matters, but it is not the operating capability that will differentiate institutions in our current climate of volatility as a constant. Over the next five years, the […]
Bhusri Returns as CEO: Can Workday Accelerate Innovation Pace?
Workday reset its leadership model. On February 9, 2026, Workday announced that co-founder and executive chair Aneel Bhusri is returning as CEO, effective immediately, replacing Carl Eschenbach, who stepped down the same day. This is the third act in the following timeline: During this time, Aneel was still very present as the board chair with […]
A K-12 Dean’s Perspective on TEFA: Promise, Process, and the Reality for Families
As conversations around the Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program continue to evolve, I wanted to step out of my usual higher-ed analyst role and spend time listening to someone who is dealing with TEFA at ground level. I asked my wife, Jenifer Winn, M.Ed. to sit down and answer a few questions about TEFA […]
Making Platform Capabilities Central to Modernization Decisions
Modern cloud administrative solutions, including finance, HCM, and student, have delivered one clear set of outcomes: standardized, configurable processes where customers cannot customize the core application. That’s real progress, based on the critical weakness of legacy on-premises solutions —expensive customization and the need for massively disruptive upgrades. But it also created a very different data […]
