In its annual list of top IT issues Educause encourages college and university IT leaders to divest, reinvest, and differentiate in 2016. A panel of experts — including IT and non-IT leaders, CIOs, and faculty members — curated the list, organizing the top 10 critical areas of focus into groups based on these three major challenges.
Colleges and universities have made significant investments in their physical infrastructure and services over the past several decades to differentiate themselves from the competition and to attract and retain the best students and faculty.
Technology now has the potential to offer an arguably even greater value by helping to transform, not the facilities and food, but the very experience and process of learning, scholarship, and community.
Divest
Issue No. 5: Institutional Data Management
Issue No. 8: Enterprise Application Integrations
Reinvest
Issue No. 1. Information Security
Issue No. 4. IT Workforce Hiring and Retention
Issue No. 6. IT Funding Models
Issue No. 9. IT Organizational Development
Differentiate
Issue No. 2: Optimizing Educational Technology
Issue No. 3: Student Success Technologies
Issue No. 7: BI and Analytics
Issue No. 10: E-Learning and Online Education
Top 10 strategic technologies
A vetted set of 83 technologies was trimmed to the top 10 following a survey of Educause members. The list represents recommendations for IT leaders considering new initiatives and serves as a tool belt for those looking to implement the divest, reinvest, differentiate strategy. The 2016 list is more diverse than the one from 2015, which featured seven mobile-related technologies. It focuses heavily on analytics across a range of functions and is almost exclusively made up of technologies the Educause team expects will achieve at least mainstream adoption within the next five years.
- Incorporation of mobile devices in teaching and learning
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Administrative or business performance analytics
- App development (responsive design, hybrid, etc.)
- Accessing online components of blended/hybrid courses from mobile devices
- Mobile apps for enterprise applications
- Service desk tool and management strategy
- Learning analytics
- Data collection and sophisticated analytics methodologies for information security
- Application performance monitoring.