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 […]
Reimagining ERP Starts by Letting Go of the Past
Stop Replacing Systems. Start Reimagining Outcomes. In many ERP replacement initiatives across higher education, institutions say they want reimagination. But what often shows up in practice is something else entirely: a deep, almost gravitational pull toward requirements. Pages and pages of requirements. Detailed mappings of legacy processes. Endless conversations about how the old system worked […]
Design Principles: The Missing Link Between Strategy and Technology in Higher Ed
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 […]
EDUCAUSE 2025: Exploring the Intentional Agility Fueling Higher Education Resilience
By the end of EDUCAUSE 2025, one prevailing sentiment stood out — recognition that higher education continues to be under sustained pressure, yet institutions are pushing ahead. Higher education leaders are carrying the accumulated weight of the last decade and a half. Many lived through the 2008 financial crisis, navigated years of enrollment and funding […]
Oracle’s Vision Comes Together: The Company That Now Builds AI from Silicon to Service
There comes a point when a company stops talking about what it wants to become and starts proving what it already is. That was Oracle this week at AI World 2025 in Las Vegas, a company now emerging as a unified force rather than a collection of disconnected ambitions. For years, Oracle’s story has been […]
New Delivery Models Open Doors to Modernization
One of the most exciting shifts we’re seeing in the higher education administrative technology industry is the service implementation partners’ role in reshaping access and opening modernization opportunities to new market segments. Partnering closely with software providers and offering long-term engagement models, firms are creating new deployment and support systems that promise to lower costs […]
Identity in the AI Age: SailPoint Navigate 2025 Conference Update
At Navigate 2025 in beautiful Austin, Texas, SailPoint took the opportunity to launch several meaningful products, focusing on the emerging threats in a rapidly evolving security ecosystem. The products are created through the lens that identity has become the new control plane for enterprise security. That vision makes sense. However, it also reveals some harsh […]
Anthology’s Strategic Shift: A Retreat from the All-in-One Bet
Anthology’s recent announcement of a “strategic transformation” signals a significant course correction. The company plans to divest its student, finance, and HCM products, with Ellucian named as the stalking horse bidder and Encoura also taking on part of the portfolio. At the same time, Anthology will restructure itself around its Teaching and Learning portfolio and […]
Is There a Better Way? How Higher Ed Can Finally Adapt
For too long, higher education has wrestled with inefficiency, silos, and structures that resist change. Now, in 2025, the cracks are impossible to ignore. Yet amid the dysfunction lies a chance to do things differently. Dynamic Work Design offers institutions a pathway to cut through complexity, connect people and processes, and build the resilience needed […]
