The Jazz Musician as CIO: Creativity in IT Leadership
“Whether it’s at NASA or a university system level job, a CIO wants to be able to expand the scope of our technology and systems to impact the largest number of people.” In this month’s Top of Mind Podcast, host Jazz musician and CIO for the Georgia Tech Foundation, Dwight Dozier, joins the Top of […]
How Higher Ed CIOs Can Leverage Cloud Service Providers for Strategic Gain
For some time, we have been talking about the trend of developing new commercial applications almost entirely in the cloud. Companies either host their older application code in the cloud or build cloud-native SaaS applications (or both in some cases). Higher education institutions have begun migrating to these new cloud applications, as have most industries, […]
Why Identity Management Is So Important in Higher Education
You are two or three weeks into your new role as the university’s CIO and have learned a lot about the institution and its students, the technology at a high level, and some of the major players on campus and in your own organization. You are starting to visualize options for a path forward, but […]
Data Management: What An Adventure!
The longer I work in higher education, the more interesting the adventure! During my time in higher education, we have seen the rise and fall of technology solutions, the expansion and consolidation of vendors, and the adaptability and resiliency of institutions and students. More recently, higher education began to discover the benefits of technology advancements […]
What Did I Forget?! Top 5 Non-Implementation Issues to Think About During a Cloud Application Transition
After living through three generations of technology that have swept through higher education administrative systems over the last 30+ years, I have added the unique experience of stepping out of the institutions and into my role as an industry analyst. Thinking about my own experiences as I listen to many of you talk about what’s […]
The Plumbing of IT: Implementing an Integration Strategy
You have a request from your business area to integrate your student information to a new system. You ask your development team to assess it, and they determine that they can clone a batch interface that already has four versions that are running for four other departments. It will take six weeks and require forty […]
Student Success, Continuing the Transformation Journey
Co-Columnist: Dave Kieffer, Vice President, Research, Large Enterprise Systems, The Tambellini Group Increased and Changing External Pressures Pressures outside an institution’s control—beyond accreditation, compliance, and regulation—continue to expand. Diversification and the shrinking size of student populations, and student expectations for a personalized educational experience (when, where, and how they want to experience learning) are growing […]
DIY Information Security Program: It Takes the Full Village to Effectively Steward Our Data
Not able to create a dedicated Chief Information Security Officer or cybersecurity team in your environment? Or are you uncertain about whether such an investment would yield the desired programmatic risk-mitigation results? It didn’t make sense in our context to prioritize creation of a CISO or new dedicated information security roles. We have taken an […]
Creating a System of Data Governance for New River Community and Technical College
Our Need for Data Governance New River Community and Technical College serves a nine-county region of southern West Virginia with four campus locations. Although New River CTC was founded in 2003, it didn’t achieve administrative independence until 2009—when we completed the separation of services from our parent institution, Bluefield State College. Since then, the college […]
The Coming Convergence of Campus Data Brings Educational Intelligence
As higher education institutions increasingly seek the data needed to support student success and demonstrate institutional effectiveness, they are turning to purpose-built software focused on particular areas of concern, such as assessment and curriculum management. Each of these software systems answers a specific set of questions or operationalizes specific processes, and many do these things […]
