Silent Cleanup: Managing Technical Debt in Higher Education Mergers and Acquisitions
With financial, political, demographic, and cultural pressures, higher education institutions are looking for new ways to operate and strengthen their standing (as recently highlighted in this survey.) Institutional leaders are increasingly pursuing mergers and acquisitions focused on aligning resources, simplifying operations, reducing duplication, and either direct or complementary alignment of academic offerings and student profiles. […]
Understanding SaaS and Cloud Terminology in Higher Education
Navigating the world of cloud technology and Software as a Service (SaaS) can be confusing, with various terms used to describe the architecture of software solutions. In this blog, I’ll clarify these terms and discuss their implications for institutions investing in these technologies for the long term. Why You Should Care About SaaS and Cloud […]
Why Is Modernization Planning Urgent?
Over the last several years, we have heard much about digital transformation (DX) being important to higher education. However, DX is not a goal for every institution, as one of our clients recently reminded me. DX addresses fundamental change in an institution’s approach to delivering on its core mission areas: education, research, and service. […]
Higher Education CIOs Support Student Success by Easing System Navigation
COVID-19 accelerated and emphasized the need for change, but the movement towards a more holistic and humanizing understanding of student success has been in the works for a long time. By now, most higher education CIOs know that expectations for student success in their institutions are evolving. What was once the purview of faculty, advisors, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Insights for Public Universities: Tambellini’s 2020 Finance and HCM Market Trends and Leaders Report
With the publication of Tambellini’s 2020 Financial Management and Human Capital Management Systems US Higher Education Market Share, Trends, and Leaders Report, many institutions can benefit from the in-depth view of the finance and HCM technology selections across the higher education landscape. However, public universities can draw specific insights from the report’s information and help […]
Easing Out of COVID-19: Three Things for IT Leaders to Focus On
For much of higher education, the descent into the current COVID-19 state looked—and for those in the midst of it, may have felt—a little bit like a crash landing. Many institutions began engaging in continuity planning weeks in advance, but when the decision was made to “go remote,” first for instruction and then for administration, […]
