| | August 20168By Bill Balint, CIO, Indiana University of PennsylvaniaTechnology Challenges Barring theIT DisruptionThere are incredible Information Technology (IT) challenges in higher education. Budgets and staff sizes are shrinking at many higher ed. IT organizations, but the level of demand being placed onto those same organizations is often exploding. We must spend a vast amount of our resources on technologies that did not exist in our environment five years ago without reducing the attention we pay to our critical traditional services.There are numerous examples of this explosion. Many administrators and educators are looking to data analytics and predictive modeling as key tools in helping attract more and better-qualified students and then retaining those students once they arrive. Formal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are being deployed at many institutions for the first time and some institutions have multiple CRM-type tools to address recruitment, student retention and/or fundraising needs. There are also rapidly-growing demands for teaching and learning tools like adaptive learning, mobile, collaborative tools, online, streaming video and specialized software.But perhaps the most glaring impact is in the area of cybersecurity and compliance. Protecting sensitive data is very challenging in a highly complex computing landscape where `Bring Your Own Device' (BYOD) is an absolute requirement. Since most users are students, the user community churns continuously, making the lack of safe computing practices by users a constant concern. Moreover, the expectation is that IT systems must enable instruction, academic research, scholarly activity and academic exploration. However, these pursuits must thrive in an environment where significant sensitive personal, academic, financial, and even health information needs to be accessible in a highly secured manner.All of these challenges do present opportunities for new technologies that can improve both effectiveness and efficiency. One potential area is tools that can better integrate the many disparate information systems that permeate higher ed. institutions. Student information, instruction, CRM, ERP, alumni, housing, health, dining, athletics, co-curricular activities and others still tend to live in silos--some local and some in the cloud. But holistic data analysis requires meaningful integration of information housed in various sources.Future of IT in Higher EducationIN MY OPINION
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