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.

Now, you're probably familiar with the interface for our webinar, but in case you aren't, here are a few reminders. We hope you'll help make this session interactive. So please do use the chat box on the left to submit questions, share resources, make comments, and also if you're tweeting, please use the #EDULIVE. That's E-d-u-l-i-v-e. Now, if you have any audio issues, just click on the link in the lower left-hand corner. And any time you can direct a private message to technical help for support, because we want to make sure you got the most out of this webinar.

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 from

conversation 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?

>> Sure. I think that this is really at the heart of what is happening at many institutions and what we're wrestling with in terms of how we can institution-wide IT strategy and the other forces at play there really influence how we provide our services and what we're all about. How can we be more efficient? How does our work and services need to change, and what are cost-effective ways that we can do our jobs to serve our students as we respond to these pressures? So, the idea of the integrator and, you know, making connections and sort of the shifting landscape there really resonates with me. Rae?

>> Yeah, me as well. I mean, one of the things that we have done at Davidson is really shift the focus of IT from being sort of a follower to a leader with a charge of driving digital transformation. So really thinking about how we can take that leadership role and help the

institution really kind of think critically about digital disruption and digital transformation and what that means for us.

>> I think for all of us, the role of the IT department has just become so central to the operations of the college but also the learning mission of the college. As Susan mentioned, all of these themes are so integrated together. And they really are. This notion that the IT department is a critical player in student learning is a first-time top 10 issue of this year. And I think that's been a significant change in my time in the IT department where we used to be kind of subsidiary to the learning part of the college, we've really become central to the learning mission of our institutions. Have you seen that as well, Rae and Dave?

>> Absolutely. We talk about something here about how everybody is a co-educator, and so that's definitely one of the things, when we think about how we talk about this issue with our staff is thinking about how we can think of ourselves as co-educators, as partners, sort of losing that kind of client or customer mentality and thinking about that, you know, that partnership mentality and how we all support the mission of the institution. It was a great kind of old famous example of somebody walking down the hallway at NASA and seeing a janitor sweeping or mopping the floor, I think, and asking, well, what are you doing? And the janitor says, well, I'm putting a man on the moon. So how we all think of ourselves as integral to that mission of educating students and students' success and not simply running the servers in the back end, seeing how those servers connect to a student educational experience and therefore educating students.

>> Yes.

>> At Ithaca, we're using a lot of the language of becoming a student-centered organization and looking to how we can partner with the institution, which is a slight shift in some of the ways that we had thought about ourselves. And in fact, a few years ago, when we were talking with our staff and the institution, we started to articulate the changing role by defining something--

[Audio Failure]

[Audio Restored]

>> --you know, really shifting environment, new sourcing models, growing external composition, rising salaries and demands for technology. So the bottom line when I think about these two issues is really how do we keep up? That's kind of the fundamental sort of thread between the two. How do we keep up with this? The nature and pace of change just feels like it's sort of exponentially increasing, whether that's, you know, ever-increasing security challenges or more and more demand for tech following services and solutions, rising licenses costs which I know have come up on listserves numerous times and the things our teams need to prepare to deal with. When I think of this theme I think about how do we develop and grow talent not only from our existing workforce but also from our student body. And if we think about reaching down into our student bodies and interacting more with our programs, we also might be able to improve the diversity of our workforce as well, which is an important issue and one of those rising trends that Susan showed that they're tracking.

And coming in are also things like what are alternative ways to get work done. How do we think about remote workers and work from home and maybe outsourcing or even offshoring which is something that big industries have done for a long time, and then ways, as I said, to think about our student body in ways that we've never done.

We, of course, have to think about new roles in IT, things like engagement and relationship management and communication, vendor management, business analysis, architecture, innovation. So all these different types of things that are just not traditional IT roles and for which maybe we don't have the right sort of skill set today. Thinking about our jobs as integrators and the different types of positions that cloud bring with it, about data and all those related issues as well. And then, of course, keeping up with the information security demands and thinking about how we just think about this not just as an IT person's job or a department's job but because it's so sort of ever present, how it becomes part of everyone's job and how we start to embed that into the culture of our institution and to our security as a thing that we have to do or, you know, that's sort of stacked on top, it sort of becomes an intrinsic part of how our processes and our operating.

And then thinking about culture as well. So the culture of our institutions and culture of our IT departments. How do we make it fun and innovative and create work/life balance and provide our staff with the ability to do things that maybe they couldn't do in a more traditional corporation. So seeing some more value and benefit to working with the edu space. Those are just some of the things that I've been thinking about when I think about this notion of IT adaptiveness. I know John's on the phone. Kathy, do we have you with us as well at this point? Maybe not. So John, do you have any thoughts about this IT adaptiveness thing and how you're starting to think about it and maybe talk about it with your staff?

>> I do. And particularly information security. I think, you know, what happened in 2017 with the Equifax debacle, the release of so much personal identified information really rippled through the IT community industry-wide. And I think that it was very evident in the results this year in information security. Again, three years in a row at number one is quite telling. We have really changed our approach to information security here at Central Wyoming College. I think part of this interrelated theme piece, we are getting the necessary resources we need from our senior leadership in terms of really expensive things, new-generation firewalls for a little institution like us are very expensive, and we've made—took that financial hit to really buy a next-generation firewall, for instance. We're looking at phishing mitigation techniques, information suppression coming out of e-mails, Social Security Numbers, all of those kinds of things that for me are really reflective of information security.

In terms of the staffing and organization models, we have really struggled with that, as you might imagine. We are a small, extremely rural college in Wyoming. And finding IT staff and filling IT staffing needs in this environment has been very much a challenge, looking towards outsourcing some of that talent and bringing in some contracted work, all of the things that you talked about, Rae, we're looking at here as well. I also think that's institutional-wide and across all institutions in the country, but particularly difficult for small institutions and particularly difficult for rural ones.

>> Well, actually, I came from a somewhat—a mid-sized public many years ago but in the heart of the Bay Area, and so not rural at all but also similar challenges because of the demand around for tech talent, right? So I think actually institutions across the board sort of faced that. Kathy, I think that you're on now. You know, what are some of your thoughts about how you think about this theme of IT adaptiveness and maybe how you talk to your staff about the importance of it and how they might shift? Okay. Not hearing anything from Kathy. So John, it looks like it's going to be just you and me.

>> Okay. I see we have a question for you, Rae. From Andrew. At Drew University. He says thanks for the reminder to look for talent in our student bodies. Well-designed and well-mentioned campus work experience can have a great outcome for our students in their career development.

>> Yeah, I absolutely agree. You know, we work really hard here to think about sort of pathways for students not only throughout their four years but also into sort of post-graduate fellowships and what that might mean to developing student leaders. So one of the things that I did is I put a fellow on our senior leadership team, so he's–In this case it's a he –but that position is a recent graduate who is now serving in kind of a leadership role for other students coming behind him. And so, he's not only gaining kind of developmental experience in terms of stepping into a management role but actually gets to sit in a senior leadership level. So there's a lot of things that we can do. You know, we only have a minute or so left. So, you know, in terms of how we talk about this IT adaptiveness with our institutional leadership, John, do you have any sort of parting thoughts on that?

>> We asked ourselves as CIOs in EDUCAUSE for many years—I'm sure it's still on all the surveys—kind of the direct reportability. And we talked about the rise of the IT department in terms of the strategic mission of the institution. And most of us now are very closely reporting to either the president of the institution or one rung down from the president. So I think that battle has been fought and won as well. I think technology is just well recognized through really all industries, but especially in higher ed which is an information industry that the IT tech requirement is so mission critical to the institution of teaching and learning that that has really changed over time. And I think there's just a lot of battles there won. We have access to senior leadership, and I think as the poll this year says, we have access to adequate funding as a result of that.

So I don't have any issues bringing important initiatives to the attention of senior leadership at my institution, and I would beta that's true for most CIOs in all of our institutions. We seem to now have the ear of our senior leadership given the importance that our role plays in teaching and learning.

>> Yeah, and I also think—I'm just going to close with this—I think we can also serve as models. So the things that we're facing in terms of how to think about new ways of working, how to be more agile, how to do sort of, you know, more adjusting time, performance management and what we're working on here is our OKRs, I think we can work with our institution to serve as a model for things to come that will hit sort of generational workforce issues but maybe haven't

quite hit other parts of the institution as well. So that's the way in which I talk about is, like, hey, we're piloting this, and this could serve as a model for the institution as it thinks about generational tech things to come. Well, I think we're going to move on.

>> Yeah, we're going to move on now. Can you hear me? This is Susan.

>> Yes, we can.

>> Wonderful. And let's try to do a quick sound check with Dave. Dave can--

>> Hi.

>> You speak up a little?

>> Yep. So this is Dave from Ithaca. Can you hear me?

>> I can't hear you, Dave. Yeah, no Dave.

>> Can you hear me now?

>> So we're troubleshooting it in the back, and this is why it's really kind of wonderful that we have so many people here today because right now we can --

>> How about now?

>> We've got three folks who can help us, and we're working on getting Kathy and Dave so we can listen to them. But what we're going to do is we're moving things around just a little bit. And we would like to talk about the theme of decision-making. And in order to do that, we've just put up a little poll. And this is, again--

>> Hello?

>> --in which we ask you to pick all the ones that apply. And in this question, we're saying there are a lot of elements that really support and improve decision-making. And so if you look at this list of examples, which ones are you actively using on your campus today? So are you routinely leveraging BI and analytics to inform answers to your big questions? Do you have mature data governance processes? Do you have holistic Enterprise IT architecture? Are you using Integration Platform as a Service to standardize flow of information between IT solutions? Are you integrating data in best of breed versus relying on a single vendor? Formalizing data analyst roles. So you can see the list goes on. And it looks like from the poll right now, the most common thing is using the BI and analytics followed by—I think it's integrating data from best in breed. Yes. Followed by that. And not so common, Integration Platform as a Service, or ensuring end users are well prepared to use data to make decisions. So that's kind of a big deal, working with your end users and making sure. So that suggests a little opportunity for us to be able to improve. Now let's end the poll. And let's see if we can move to the--

>> This is Dave.

>> -- the fourth issue on decision-making. Dave, this is wonderful.

>> Hi.

>> What wonderful timing.

>> Great.

>> Welcome back.

>> Thank you. In Ithaca, we're centrally isolated. So it took a little while.

[Laughter]

>> There you go. That's great. Well, you've come in just in time. So talk with us about the decision-making theme. And so we've got Dave, Rae and let's hope that Kathy can get connected, too, because I know she's got some great insights on this topic that I would really like to hear more about. So Dave, would you like to talk a little bit now about decision-making?

>> Sure. Well, really, data is the heart of much of this theme, and it's really about the data-enabled culture and then the things that we need to make that happen. And so the two components of data management and governance and digital integration are all things that really help enable the data-enabled culture, which I believe most of our institutions are really trying to achieve. And with all of these issues, IT is really a partner and not necessarily leading this process, but we need to be one of the strategic partners at the table to really enable a better institution. And I think this also speaks to the expanded CIO role. So, you know, where does big data function lie within the structure of the institution? And I think a number of institutions are giving thought to that. I know here at Ithaca College, we just recently created a role of chief analytics officer that reports up through management. But she sits at the table and really is helping the institution to advance in many ways along these themes.

But as an IT organization, it's so important that we take attention to the data integrations, and it really falls to IT to look at how can we ensure that data flows freely through our institutions as we build new systems and put more up in the cloud, it's becoming increasingly important to be able to integrate that. And that's some of the things we talked about earlier as well under the new ERPs becoming the hub of our enterprise with the data flowing throughout. So with that, Rae and Kathy, if you're here, what are your thoughts on this?

>> The thing that we have to look at is that governance of the data to make sure that everyone's using the same definitions of the data and then how do we store that data, how do we secure that data and how are we using it appropriately?

>> I agree. I also think it's really incumbent upon us on think about, you know, again, our roles and not just sort of the client service role but also how can we really be partners in this and bring to bear different types of expertise that maybe we haven't historically talked about. But thinking about things about ethics and privacy and bringing those conversations to light and understanding the bias that sometimes gets written into tech solutions and into data analysis-type things. And especially as we start working more and more with machine learning and other types of automated interventions, you know, really thinking critically and having those critical conversations with our constituents.

>> So how about as we think about talking about this with our staff, I know we've had a lot of conversations about architecture and our role evolving as architects around the data and around different systems and that flow. What are you folks thinking about related to this?

>> We're kind of having the same conversations with our staff, and especially about the integration and how all of this data, you know, that's becoming the bigger and bigger role for many of our staff is integrating the data and understanding what that data means.

>> Also, just how we think about things in terms of platforms, not systems, right? So we're so used to kind of sliding into systems and thinking about that kind of broad data layer and what that looks like and how that differs from sort of architecture of the past.

>> All right. It also has a major impact on our jobs. And I think, you know, the evolving roles of our staff and what skill sets do we need. And then from an institution perspective, a lot of this also leads to a shift in culture, a shift to how we think about data. I know for many years, data used to be viewed as the property of a particular department. That's my data. Or, you know, I'm the only one who can grant you access to that, or you have to interpret it. So I think, you know, this theme is really about looking at it as institutional data, and it's our data, and how can we allow the free flowing of data and have people have access to it? But yet we still have to understand the integrity of the data and make sure that, you know, your definition is the same as my definition. So it goes into, you know, data governance and the issues around that. But a lot of this is a cultural shift.

>> Yeah--

>> I think--

>> I agree. We always used to call data particular site owned by a particular are And we have to look at it as the university now owns that data. And a particular area may be the steward of that data, but how do we share all that data and where is it needed?

>> I think as we're talking about and thinking about institution-wide data, then we also have to be talking and thinking about institution-wide data culture. And so what does that mean for the skill sets that people need overall to be able to use that data, and how can we start having those conversations around sort of what problems are we trying to solve and what questions are we trying to ask, not just what pieces of data do we think we need.

The other thing that I talked to our institution about is just that maturity level of sort of crawl, walk, run and that it's great to want to do predictive analytics, but there are some basic foundational pieces. And if we don't have those in place yet, then we need to sort of think about, you know, moving ourselves up the maturity model but not trying to skip steps in the process.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> Now I'm sorry we don't have more time to talk about the decision-making theme. But I am going to move us to the last theme of student outcomes. Just so that hopefully we won't spend as much time as we planned to with this, but we do want to have a few minutes at the end to answer

any questions. So Kathy, would you like to introduce this theme and talk a little bit about it with Dave and John?

>> Sure. Sure, with all the themes that's taking place in higher education, I think the focus on student success and student-centered organizations are even more important as we look at all the technologies that we're either implementing or planning to implement, they're all about making that student experience better. You know, everything from active learning classrooms or making our LMS or SIF more mobile friendly. We talked a little bit about the predictive analytics and the students—I mean in the data decision-making section. And, you know, we are looking a lot more at student analytics and looking at, you know, early warning signs and integrating that data so that we can understand the student outcomes and student success and make sure that we can jump ahead if we need to where there are issues. So John and Dave, do you have anything to add to that?

>> For me, I think this has been a real shift in attitudes of my staff, frankly, where we really need our technical staff at the college to understand the mission of the institution is about teaching is and learning and needs to be student-focused on how to fulfill that mission. We are not tech companies. We are learning institutions and educators. And we all need to buy into that. And I think our best staff understand that the most important thing that they do every day is to help our students learn.

>> Right. Right.

>> I think—yeah, absolutely. And, you know, at a private institution like Ithaca, student success is so important and at the forefront at a lot of our thinking. And I think it also speaks to the expanding role of the CIO because as an IT organization, we sit at the crossroads of the institution. And I think we can make connections and see things in a way that maybe some others can't at the institution because we know what this department is doing. We know what that department is doing. And I think we can bring that to the conversation about how we can leverage the different aspects of the institution in a way that really helps contribute to student success in ways that may not be readily apparent or maybe more siloed.

>> I think that's very true. You know, you said it before, I believe, that, you know, we're moving from just kind of a back-end provider to really more of a service provider. And I think we can play that role because we understand how these different systems interact. So how are the students, you know, reaching us? How are they working with us? And how do we integrate that data? I think we have an opportunity to see where it's best to provide that integration. And we're doing more and more of that with everything. And we have that data in order to—you know, to really take a broader look at that student success and making sure that we're not doing a bunch of one-offs that from a student perspective it makes a lot of sense. The other thing I want to add about that is, you know, as we look at this with student success, it's kind of everybody's responsibility, not just IT, but it's a really, big important part, it's critical for us, probably more than ever. And I think we need to kind of wrap this up. Is that correct, Susan?

>> Yeah, it is. I'm really sorry that we didn't have more time, especially on these last two themes. They're so, so interesting. But I want to make sure that—we have five minutes left—that we

have just a few seconds at the end to say good-bye. And between then, we've got some questions that we'd like to ask the panelists. And you might see there's a nice conversation going on now in the chat room. And it was kicked off by Susan Carr who asked are you seeing more best-of-breed adoption of ERP systems that make data decision-making a bit more of a challenge without a data warehouse or similar? Or do you see more institutions using a single vendor to make the data more easily accessible? So Kathy, Dave, John, Rae, what are you seeing, this best-of-breed adoption of ERP, single vendor to make data more easily accessed? What are you seeing?

>> This is Kathy.

>> What I see--

>> The ERPs. But we still have our ERPs, but I think we're adding other pieces to it. And that's where that integration comes in, and that's probably where some of those best-of-breed applications are coming in at this point. But that whole environment to be changing and is changing, and it's hard to say what we're going to end up with, you know, say five years down the road.

>> Right. And John and then Dave, I think I heard both of you.

>> It's always difficult to predict the future, but if I put on my progressor's hat, I would bet that we will continue down the road we're on. The ERP might remain a hub to many, many different applications that are feeding data in and out of the ERP. That, to my mind, will be the best outcome for the ERP. I see us going very diverse and using best-of-breed applications that integrate into a greater whole. I think the best ERP vendors are recognizing that themselves and working on improving integration techniques.

>> I tend to agree with that. I really feel that IT really needs to create the infrastructure to allow for the free flow of data that, you know, as much as we might like to go with the monolithic ERP solution, I think there will always be, even if we did that, I think there will always be other things there. And so we're investing heavily in i pads, integration platform, data governance, data warehouse and everything just so that we can ensure that we can move the data around in a way that we can leverage it for our decisions and other things there.

>> Wonderful. Now, I've got another question, and I think this will probably be our last one, unfortunately. And Rae, I'd like to ask it of you to start off with. Do you have any tips for getting faculty buy-in and participation in information security programming? That comes from Steve.

>> Sure, Susan. You know, I think that with anything, you know, getting faculty—maybe not buy-in but participation in particular can be challenging, right? Because their focus is on so many other places.

But we're just having—here we're having really frank and open conversations about sort of the importance of what's going on in the world and how that impacts the college and some of the regulatory pressures. And so I think, you know, having those frank conversations, very openly, very transparently, you know, being, you know, transparent, I guess, without some of the tradeoffs can be helpful, but I also think when we talk about the IT adaptiveness overall, you

know, part of the theme was really thinking about how you kind of bake that into your process, culture, environment structure. So, you know, instead of trying to get people to voluntarily sort of sign on, are there ways in which we can design our system that's automatically baked in? And the example I use regularly are banks. You know, banks have started doing this sort of, you know, multi-backdrop where if you log in from a different browser, it automatically texts you and those types of things. It's not like we're opting into this, it's just sort of part of the process and how it's baked more into the process.

>> Great. Well, we are almost out of time. I want to thank you all so very, very much, particularly for that little blip in the middle of the webinar. And we feel real badly about that, I guess. I guess that is IT issue number 11. I'd like to thank you for a great session otherwise, and thanks to all of our participants joining us from around the world. Before you sign off today, please click on the session evaluation link. You'll find that in the bottom left corner of your screen. Your comments are so important to us, I can't stress that enough. The session will be archived on the EDUCAUSE Live! Website including slides and a complete replay, good, bad and ugly. So please focus on the good. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues. And join us for the next E live which will be Thursday, March 8 at 1:00 P.M. eastern time. On that we're going to shift directions and focus deeply on the number one IT issue. Kim Millford will be joining Steven Wallace who is Enter Surprise Network architect at Indiana University-Bloomington talking about surviving the aftershocks of a cyber-attack, coordination, communication and where to get help. So with that, on behalf of EDUCAUSE, this is Susan Grajek. Thanks so much for joining us today for EDUCAUSE Live!

End of Webinar