The seventh annual Educause Current IT Issues Survey Report highlights two areas which I have been following. First, Security & Identity Management (IdM) rose to the top, displacing IT Funding as the most strategic issue needing to be resolved for future success. Second, Portfolio Development & Management was a new category this year and immediately received attention, appearing among the top-ten issues expected to become more significant in the coming year. Other issues I have been tracking of late were also covered, including ERP, Academic Alignment, and Web Services (SOA).
Here are some of the highlights from the report, with additional resources referenced at the end. Overall, this report is a treasure trove of Higher Education IT strategic thinking:
Identity Management
The report defines the crux of the challenge facing IT Security & Identity Management:
Institutions face a tenuous balance between the need to expand information access and the requirements to protect information assets from unauthorized and inappropriate use.
The question that always comes up in my mind regarding Security & Identity Management, is that its logical and yet perhaps unfair to combine the two. IdM to me is as much an integration strategy as is it soley a security issue. Rising threats of malware and such on PC's may elevate the combined category in an unnatural way. Yet, being that authorization and authentication, proper handling of identity, and policies relating to privacy are all lumped in IdM I can't argue against its relation to security. It was nice to see some confirmation of this tension in the educause comittee responsible for this report. "A related challenge that the Current Issues Committee has wrestled with the past two years is whether Security and Identity Management should be split into two distinct issues. Survey item stability over time is a factor that contends with the myriad policy and technology dimensions of these two concepts."
In any case, Identity Management needs to be divided and conquered if IT is going to continue to be able to provide broader access with increased personalization and security. Its not simply a technology problem, being very policy driven. (see all AWG site posts on IdM)
IT Funding and Portfolio Management
As IT Funding, is still very high on the list of major issues facing higher education IT, I found the following strategies quite interesting:
- Aligning funding and institutional priorities
- Creating fiscal flexibility to support innovation
- Constructing and facilitating a structured and transparent IT budget process
I see alignment, agility, and a rational approach to priority based budgeting related to Enterprise Architecture, and IT Portfolio Management. Without taking stock of existing applications and services, determining which ones are costing the most maintenance resources with decreasing benefit, you will not have the means to remove poorly performing assets. Without removing poorly performing assets, you will not have any free resources to innovate; nor will you be able to measure or ensure future alignment.
Interesting to me in the report is that though Security & IdM was listed as one of the top strategic priorities, it was not the thing receiving the most time or resources in respondents organizations. It was not a surprise for me to see that ERP and Infrastructure are the target of the most financial and human resources.
The thoughts offered in the "Strategic Planning" section of the report are perhaps also appropriate here:
"Planning informs and builds confidence in IT’s ability to deliver services and programs to organizations. For this reason, strategic planning is one of the essential organizational artifacts of all IT organizations."
"Without a focus on the path to enabling collaboration, communication, and project management, strategic planning efforts result in faded artifacts stored in a binder on the shelf next to Scott Adams’s The Dilbert Principle."
ERP
ERP implementations and upgrades continue to be a major focus for Higher Education. I found some of the no-nonsense questions provided in the report interesting:
"If you have completed your implementation, does your institution get more timely and intuitive access to information, especially for strategic planning and decision making? Have reengineered processes improved operations and increased efficiency? Has the system improved services for students, faculty, staff, and administrators?"
IT Alignment with Academic Needs
The category entitled: "Faculty Development, Support & Training" seemed to offer some of the most provocative questions, I find echo some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my mind lately. Something along the lines of "What have you done for me lately?" resound as I consider that IT focus on infrastructure and administrative software may have taken a toll:
- How might we use newer delivery methods such as podcasts and wikis to provide information to faculty that has historically been delivered in more traditional ways?
- Can we provide a “digital asset repository” that can be contributed to and shared by faculty?
- How do we measure the success of our service offerings?
- Can we manage our organizational units in a way that creates a culture of flexibility in our services so that we can respond effectively and quickly to new opportunities?
- What is the role of the IT organization on this campus regarding integration of new technologies into teaching—driver, supporter, or somewhere in between?
- How do we identify the academic programs that will likely gain advantage by particular new technologies?
And in the category of "Governance, Organization & Leadership" I found a set of questions that seemed in line with whether higher ed IT is really organized for service oriented architectures. They reminded me of two posts I wrote a while back, Service Oriented Department, and Connecting the Dots?
"As technology continues to evolve, we are faced with new generations of students and faculty with growing expectations for delivery of anytime, anywhere, always-on—oh, and by the way, secure—services. How do we structure IT organizations to be nimble enough to anticipate and respond to our customers’ changing needs? Traditional IT organizations tend to be dedicated to either academic or administrative computing activities. While there may still be a distinction, those lines are blurring, and a number of broad areas of service now span all users of technology. In particular, telecommunications and security provide the underpinnings for the entire information environment. Is the institution rethinking legacy organizational structures in favor of those more able to function in the emerging world of collaboration, integration, and digitization?"
Software as a Service (SOA)
Web Services landed pretty low on the list of strategic priorities for some demographics, however some great thoughts are posed:
- What implications does “software as a service” have for higher education?
- What is the impact on IT planning of the increasingly blurred lines between infrastructure and applications? What does the resulting fusion of business and IT strategies mean for strategic planning, IT management, IT governance, and university effectiveness?
- Will Web services facilitate a shift from “leading with technology” to “leading with business processes”? How will IT grow business process integration skills among staff?
- Where can Web services provide new value to students, faculty, and staff, moving beyond wrapping legacy applications? [How many current web offerings are simple web wrappers around legacy apps, rather than innovative web based service offerings?]
- Amazon’s shopping cart and eBay’s “provider-consumer matching” models may have applicability beyond commercial retail channels. Which commercial Web services models are applicable to higher education?
- Which technologies are needed to allow for the provision and consumption of Web services? For example, which technologies are required for RSS feeds?
Resources
A benefit of the educause report, is the summation of several related industry reports that have been released over the last 6 months, several of which I read but failed to report on, such as The Horizon Report. Educause has provided an extensive list of Current Issues Survey Resources related to this report, including slide presentations and further reading.
