EDUCAUSE Live!
The EDUCAUSE 2018 Top 10 IT Issues, Technologies, and Trends
Thursday, February 8, 2018
11:00am – 12:00pm MT
> Hello, welcome to EDUCAUSE Live! Everyone. This is Susan Grajek, Vice President of Communities and Research at EDUCAUSE, and I'll be your moderator today for EDUCAUSE's e-live webinar. Today's EDUCAUSE Live! Webinar is supported by Dell. Dell EMC is a Platinum Partner, and they use the IT issues report to develop and deliver innovative technology solutions that help you in your institutions throughout higher education, solve complex IT challenges and improve student outcomes.
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Today's session recording and slides are available. The session recording will be archived later today. The slides are already available on the EDUCAUSE Live! Website if you'd like to download them and follow along. Now before we start, I would like to introduce EDUCAUSE's president and CEO, John O'Brien, to help mark today's event. John, I'll turn it over to you.
> Thanks, Susan, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. This sort of annual review of our top ten Issues, Technologies, and Trends is such a wonderful moment of illumination for our community. I think it's important for us to take an intention pause, and so we build that into our yearly rhythms at EDUCAUSE because we're all so busy doing so much, we want to be intentional about looking at the landscape together. It's a much-anticipated day and a great conversation, but it's not the final word. It's really just the start of a great conversation, today with great speakers. So, I just wanted to welcome you and let's let the conversation begin. Susan.
> Thank you so much, John. So, our webinar today is EDUCAUSE 2018 top ten IT Issues, Technologies, and Trends. We released our research-based member-driven top ten IT issues, top ten Strategic Technologies and Trends Watch reports every year and collectively these resources can help members plan for the year and describe technology's impact and opportunities to staff, to institutional leaders, and even to your family. Today we've got four CIO panelists who helped us identify the Top 10 IT issues. They're joining us to reflect on their meaning and uses to them and how they plan to use them at their institutions. And so we're absolutely delighted to be joined by Raechelle Clemmons who's CIO at Davidson College, Kathy Lang, CIO at Marquette University, David Weil, Associate Vice President and CIO at Ithaca College, and John Wood, CIO at Central Wyoming College.So we've got the west, the south, the midwest and the northeast all represented all throughout our country. So let's begin. And let's talk about the Top 10 IT issues.
Well, you can read about how we actually select the Top 10 IT issues, but just very briefly, I'll tell you that the IT issues panelists, and it's a panel of about 24 leaders throughout higher education, mostly IT, more than half of them are CIOs, and they have a track record of active participation in EDUCAUSE.They meet regularly, and they talk about the most strategic IT-related issues facing their institutions. Every summer they get together. They reflect on their meetings, and they select the slate of issues that then we ask you, the members, to vote on for the Top 10 IT issues. The slate usually consists of 15 to 20 issues, and you select the top 10. So, these are the top 10 issues of 2018.
Now, these are the overall themes for the top 10 issues. And in this next slide, I'm going to show you the specific wording, and that wording was selected by our IT issues panelists of experts. And as I said, we've got four of them here today to talk a little bit more about this.
And so, I'll give you a chance to glance at these. You know the slides are available online. The article is available as well. So, you can look at these in greater detail. But one of the things that I wanted to do before we start talking with the panelists is I wanted to walk you through a little bit of historical perspective on the IT issues and give you a sense of how they are kind of organized into themes in our perspective.
So first let's look a little bit back in history. And we've been collecting these issues since 2000. So, for this entire century so far. The number one issue for the second year in a row is—I'm sorry, the third year in a row is information security. You can see that it wasn't always the number one issue. It wasn't always even on the top 10. It appeared very briefly in 2002, then went away, had a little bit of a resurgence from 2007 to 2011, a brief pause, and then has come back on the list.So, you can see that there's been some trending there.
Sustainable staffing is another issue. And that's the issue as we framed it this year, making sure that we've got adequate staffing capacity and that we retain staff in the face of retirements, new sourcing models, growing external competition, rising salaries, and simply the demands that technology initiatives.So staffing is a big issue. It has been a big issue since 2012, but it wasn't always the case. So there's another look at that.
And then the last thing that I wanted to show you is the issue that is not on the Top 10 IT issues for the first year is funding IT. Now, we had a related issue, we had a financial issue, and that was number 6, higher education affordability, but that was about balancing and rightsizing IT priorities and budget to support IT-enabled institutional efficiencies and innovation in the context of institutional funding realities.And so, IT funding as a standalone issue did not appear on the list.
Now, before we go any further, what we'd like to do is we'd like to involve you in this webinar a little bit, and we'd like to ask you, who do you share the Top 10 IT issues with at your institution? So, you can check all of these or none of them, if none of them apply, just one of them. But we'd like to get a sense from you who you share the Top 10 IT Issues with. Your IT Leadership team. What about the entire IT organization? Do you review those and reflect them? What about people outside IT organization? Institutional leadership? Because in today's webinar, we're going to be talking with our four CIOs about how they share the Top 10 IT Issues and talk about them and use them both within the IT organization but also with the institution at large.And so it looks like many, many of you, the most common thing is to share them with your IT Leadership team. And then next most common is with institutional leadership. So you're really looking at these primarily but not entirely as a leadership conversation opportunity. At least it looks like from this poll.
So how about if we end the poll, and we can go on. And let's look at the themes. So there's ten issues. And we organized those ten issues into four different themes. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to reflect a little bit on the four different themes. So, let's start with institutional adaptiveness. That has three issues, institutional-wide IT strategy, higher education affordability and change leadership. In that instance, we see that institutional and IT leaders are strengthening their capacity, collective and individual, not just for effective and efficient, but also consequential and strategic uses of technology. So that's kind of the overall way we're interpreting that theme.
Then we see another adaptiveness theme, and this time it's about the IT organization. And with IT adaptiveness, what we're really seeing is IT organizations are adapting themselves to new models, whether they're economic, demographic or industry and realities.And they're approaching the information, the security of the institution with even greater rigor because it demands it.
Now let's move over to the right-hand side of this diagram and look at student outcomes. With student outcomes we're finding that student success initiatives has both become more tactical with a focus on integrations but also more aspirational with a new emphasis on student's entire lifecycle and experience at the institution. And that issue number 5, student-centered nugs is the first time it's appeared in the top 10, which is pretty cool. Then finally, decision-making. And the data issue is every bit as complicated as we've feared and thought and as has been predicted. And so, we're seeing the efforts to gather data, manage and then apply it are advancing. Whether it's through data-enabled institutional culture to make sure the institution is really using data to make decisions, or focusing on digital integration at the very, very deep level. So those are the themes that we're seeing with the Top 10 IT Issues.
And now I would just like to show you a couple things before we start our conversation. The first is that I would like to share with you a couple of other data sources that we also use to be able to start to predict and think about what's coming in the year ahead. The first is a set of trends that we monitor that are very closely related to the Top 10 IT Issues but not entirely related to them. We track now more than three dozen trends. You can see the whole list in this compressed right-hand diagram. And then in the middle you can see the two groups of trends that are most influential, and those are trends that are influencing institutional IT strategy at 61% or more of institutions. And complexity is a major theme, whether it's security or technology, architecture and data. Also contributing IT institutional operational excellence, student success and data-driven decision-making.
Then there's a whole set of trends that are taking hold in around influencing the strategy of around half of institutions, maybe a little more. And you can see that list. And you can see they vary widely from IT-related trends like service management, ITSM, vendor management, IT as an agent of institutional transformation, but also the overall compliance environment, campus safety, diversity, equity and inclusion. They're all in there. So, this is another resource that you can look at. We have a combined report that is coming out next week. The 2018 Trend Watch and our top 10 strategic technologies. And this is the last piece of our three-legged stool that we look at using research and getting input from you on what your plans are for 2018. We picked the top 10 strategic technologies, and they are not the most widespread technologies. They're not even the newest technologies. They're technologies that are roughly used in 30% or less of institutions that institutions are planning to pay the most attention to in 2018, whether it's tracking the technology and learning more about it, whether it's piloting it or actually actively deploying it. And so you can see, again, there's a lot of resonance between these top 10 strategic technologies, but there are some things in this list that aren't there. 3 and 4 have to do with mobile, and so that's in there as well. Number 11, IT asset management tools, kind of related to the Configuration Management Database, things like that.
So that's our family of trends, technologies and issues. And here again are the four themes of the Top 10 IT issues. And I really want to emphasize, those themes are very interconnected.We divide them into a group of four just as a way of kind of telling a story about them. But our panelists really, you know, remind me and us that they're very, very connected.So, let's start with one more poll. And in that poll, we'd like to ask you how your president or chancellor would describe the current role of the IT department. And that will introduce our first discussion about the issue of institutional adaptiveness.So, this is just pick one. And would your president or chancellor just say, you know, the IT department really has never been very proactive. They support initiatives that come from elsewhere, but they don't really initiate innovation. Or would they say this has changed over time, and would they say the IT department used to initiate adoption of new strategic technologies, but now we're seeing that functional areas are the initiators, and then they're coming to IT. Or would your president or provost or chancellor, excuse me, say that the IT department is the initiator? They bring new technologies to the institution and seek broad adoption?
And so we can see that it's really about half and half between the second two options. And it's great to see that not too many of us would say that our president or chancellor would describe IT as not proactive. So that's great to see.And now let's close the poll. And let's move on and have a conversation with our CIOs. For this first conversation, I'd like to introduce John Wood who's going to moderate this part of the conversation. And he's going to be working with Raechelle Clemmons and David Weil. And they're going to be talking—John is going to give you his personal reflection on the theme of IT adaptiveness. Then John, Rae and Dave are going to be talking about how they're using it with staff and how they're using it as leadership. So, John, let me hand this over to you now.
> Thank you, Susan. And it's wonderful to be here for me this morning but for most of you I suspect in the afternoon. The poll question that we just talked about really comes fromconversation that the chronicle of higher education videotaped and sent out with one of our emeritus members, Martin Ringgold who's been a CIO for so many years and really a wonderful conversation with Martin about the role of the IT department. And as the poll results showed, Martin's view that institutional adaptiveness of the IT department has really changed in recent years. We are extremely mission-critical still. I think that hasn't changed. And Susan, I think that probably reflects why IT funding is not as separate category anymore. I think we do have the attention of our senior leadership at our institutions, and we really have fought that battle and won, that IT funding and the role of the IT department is mission-critical to our institutions. But at the same time that that's happened, I think what Martin has said in that video that I watched was that the IT department used to be what I think the words I would use is we used to be the well spring of innovation with our institutions. And if anything with technology would come first to the IT department and then eventually we would send it out to the institution. And I think a really perfect example of that in my institution was probably for most of us was the institution's website. It used to be in the IT department. That's where it first started. We put up the first website for our institution, and we had our first web developer. But, of course, now everyone understands that that's so integrated into the fabric of what it means to be really any entity, service entity, in the enterprise. It's now moved in my institution to our marketing area. And they have the website, and we've migrated that innovative piece from the IT department out to another functional area. And I think what Martin has said, and that's really true for many of the IT departments around the country in higher ed, that we used to be the well spring of that technology integration, innovation, but now that's moved to other areas, and now what's happening is the functional areas are finding the best-in-breed applications that they need to use and want to use in their areas. And they're bringing that to the IT department and asking for our support and asking for us to help them with their technology that they've chosen.
I think in the article I really appreciated this word that this is a portfolio approach to applications, that the IT department is changing in our roles so much in many ways, one of which in particular is we are becoming the master integrators of multiple best-in-breed applications, and that our personnel really need to adapt and change from being the experts in one area to being the people that integrate all these different applications into one institutional function. And I think that's very true here for me at my institution at Central Wyoming College.Rae and Dave, do you want to add anything to that introduction?