| | September 20188Dynamic and Agile By Brian Fodrey, Assistant Dean for Facilities and Information Technology, CIO, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillIntroduction The value in working with EdTech startups is as powerful as ever given that technology is increasingly becoming more portable and the marketplace competitive. Similar to a successful startup, organizations are constantly striving towards finding optimization between timing, opportunity, and capacity. Today's user environments are no longer as in need for robust or enterprise level solutions, and instead for more nimble - often cloud-based - and niche offerings that offer flexibility to meet the needs of today and tomorrow all the while knowing that the future can rapidly change, and they will need to react as close to real-time as possible. Organizations are often less likely to be looking for long-term, turn-key partnerships and instead for more targeted providers that will create a more diverse service footprint. As a result of Environments for Learningthese new-look partnerships both sides find themselves adapting to ever-changing dynamic relationships and organizational culture environments.LandscapeOne reason for why we are seeing this change in the technical landscape is infrastructure moving to off-premise and as-a-service becoming more prolific. The EdTech market is better positioned and much more scalable to offer products and services from the cloud allowing organizations to instead focus on building much more diversified and distributed vendor portfolios. One benefit to this portfolio transformation is an organizations' ability and increasing willingness to "fail fast" and/or pursue specialized providers. Organization level services are no longer anchored in less flexible partnerships or substructure. Additionally, because the EdTech market is growing at a rate that makes it extremely difficult to scan and proactively offer the latest innovation in every service area; organizations will often look to and encourage their users to bring the tools that interest them to the conversation. This puts EdTech startups in an advantageous situation and better positions them to promote their solutions and strategies directly to a user population, and offer the potential to influence an entire organization's direction or priorities.IN MY OPINION
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