Educational Leadership

EDUCAUSE community members offer corporate perspectives on the 2020 Top 10 IT Issues.

The worst-case scenario is that hackers still have access to the university systems via a backdoor and are siphoning off critical data as it emerges.

Even as technology proliferates in education at unprecedented rates, new hurdles — including limitations of the human mind to keep up with technological advances — are throwing themselves in the way of effective implementation.

A vice chancellor of information technology for twenty-five years looks back to review some of the areas that any central IT organization—and its leader—must address in order to succeed more frequently and become more trusted.

Last year, he became a cult figure of sorts in the world of enterprise IT. As IBM’s VP of Workplace as a Service, Previn is the guy responsible for turning IBM (the company that invented the PC) into an Apple Mac house. 

Previn gave a great presentation at last year’s Jamf tech conference where he said Macs were less expensive to support than Windows. (Jamf is a company that makes software that manage fleets of Macs and iOS devices.) Only 5% of IBM’s Mac employees needed help desk support versus 40% of PC users.

At that time, some 30,000 IBM employees were using Macs. Today 90,000 of them are, he said. And IBM ultimately plans to distribute 150,000 to 200,000 Macs to workers, meaning about half of IBM’s approximately 370,000 employees will have Macs. 

Previn’s team is responsible for all the company’s PCs, not just the Macs. All told IBM’s IT department supports about 604,000 laptops between employees and its 100,000+ contractors. Most of them are Windows machines — 442,000 —  while 90,000 are Macs and 72,000 are Linux PCs. IBM is adding about 1,300 Macs a week, Previn said.

When an American company outsources work to an Indian firm, plenty of IT professionals bemoan how management is willing to bury middle-class jobs in pursuit of profits. But what if the organization doing the outsourcing is a public university?

The most effective IT leaders solve institutional problems, not simply IT problems. Their success relies on a shared understanding with institutional leaders on how technology can advance the institutional mission.

While higher ed faculty and IT professionals see technology in different lights, they share two major concerns when it comes to tech adoption.

Appreciating and welcoming various generations into higher education IT organizations enables us to both mentor and learn from one another while looking to the workforce of the future.

An information technology strategic plan provides tech workers with guidance and ensures that all personnel are working in alignment with the university mission. Here are three things to keep in mind when formulating an IT strategy.

Nearly half of those surveyed said exam results had been infiltrated with over
three in five claiming that students pose a threat to data

Scam email tries to exploit Microsoft platform used by schools in bid coinciding with prime minister’s warning of wider cyber-attack

The 2020 Top 10 IT Issues list reveals the 10 most important IT issues higher education leaders are focusing on, starting with information security st

With billions of dollars in research funding at stake, higher education institutions have several reasons to reconsider their approach to academic IT.

For institutions to fully benefit from their investments in student success and to position themselves for continued improvement, IT leadership must get engaged and develop an IT strategy that supports student success and can evolve with the institution's needs.

More than a third of educators in our 2016 Teaching with Technology survey said they lack access to adequate support and training for the technology in use at their institutions.

Gone are the days you can delegate the job of keeping up with technology to your CIO or IT staff. Today, it’s every executive’s responsibility. And while that can be daunting given the myriad of possibilities, it’s also incredibly exciting.

Lessons from the research report The Higher Education IT Workface Landscape, 2016 provide helpful guidance on how colleges and universities can retain IT workers and avoid unnecessary employee turnover.

Today’s daunting threat landscape means colleges and universities must accept all the help they can get to strengthen their security postures.