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Holiday Spirits: Change Management Imperatives Distilled from the 2024 EDUCAUSE Top 10
For the last twenty-three years, EDUCAUSE – a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance the strategic use of technology and data to further the promise of higher education – has been publishing a Top 10 IT Issues list to help IT organizations contemplate major trends and what may come in the new year. But even this long-standing tradition changed this past October, with the introduction of the 2024 EDUCAUSE Top 10 list. Note that EDUCAUSE explicitly dropped “IT” from the title of this list to signal the organization’s intent to address a broader and more nuanced constituency focused on technology in higher ed. This change is yet another illustration of how enterprises are doing a better job weaving technology into their missions, strategies and operations, and the list itself projects an interesting mix of education, departmental function, and technology themes:
#1. Cybersecurity as a Core Competency: Balancing cost and risk
#2. Driving to Better Decisions: Improving data quality and governance
#3. The Enrollment Crisis: Harnessing data to empower decision-makers
#4. Diving Deep into Data: Leveraging analytics for actionable insights to improve learning and student success
#5. Administrative Cost Reduction: Streamlining processes, data, and technologies
#6. Meeting Students Where They Are: Providing universal access to institutional services
#7. Hiring Resilience: Recruiting and retaining IT talent under adverse circumstances
#8. Financial Keys to the Future: Using technology and data to help make tough choices
#9. Balancing Budgets: Taking control of IT cost and vendor management
#10. Adapting to the Future: Cultivating institutional agility
EDUCAUSE has also done a nice job of organizing this Top 10 list into three categories of “resilience” after pointing out that higher ed is “afloat in an ever-shifting sea of challenges: the public’s lack of confidence in higher education, the ongoing student debt crisis, climate change and weather disasters, cybersecurity breaches, deep fakes, culture polarization, mental health crises, the campus demographic cliff, AI overlords, hate crimes, global instability, or, yes, the next pandemic.”:
Mission Resilience
#3. The Enrollment Crisis: Harnessing data to empower decision-makers
#4. Diving Deep into Data: Leveraging analytics for actionable insights to improve learning and student success
#6. Meeting Students Where They Are: Providing universal access to institutional services
Operational Resilience
#1. Cybersecurity as a Core Competency: Balancing cost and risk
#2. Driving to Better Decisions: Improving data quality and governance
#7. Hiring Resilience: Recruiting and retaining IT talent under adverse circumstances
#10. Adapting to the Future: Cultivating institutional agility
Financial Resilience
#5. Administrative Cost Reduction: Streamlining processes, data, and technologies
#8. Financial Keys to the Future: Using technology and data to help make tough choices
#9. Balancing Budgets: Taking control of IT cost and vendor management
An Alternate Perspective
Upon first reading, I really liked the sound of “Mission Resilience, Operations Resilience, and Financial Resilience” for their collective gravitas and respective points of emphasis. However, if I were leading an institution (or an institution’s IT department for that matter), I would find it hard to organize the aggregate change effort prompted by this list, or at least the portion of that change effort that warrants action for my institution this year. And so I would like to suggest an alternative categorization scheme for the 2024 EDUCAUSE Top 10:
Leadership Imperatives (Owner: Chief Executive)
#10. Adapting to the Future: Cultivating institutional agility
#8. Financial Keys to the Future: Using technology and data to help make tough choices
Customer Imperatives (Owner: Provost)
#3. The Enrollment Crisis: Harnessing data to empower decision-makers
#4. Diving Deep into Data: Leveraging analytics for actionable insights to improve learning and student success
#6. Meeting Students Where They Are: Providing universal access to institutional services
People Imperatives (Owner: HR)
#7. Hiring Resilience: Recruiting and retaining IT talent under adverse circumstances
Financial Imperatives (Owner: CFO)
#5. Administrative Cost Reduction: Streamlining processes, data, and technologies
#9. Balancing Budgets: Taking control of IT cost and vendor management
Technology Imperatives (Owner: CIO)
#1. Cybersecurity as a Core Competency: Balancing cost and risk
#2. Driving to Better Decisions: Improving data quality and governance
Some may find this structure odd, unclear or even confusing, and so I clarify several things below. As always, I invite any and all feedback.
Note that the Customer Imperatives map to the same things that EDUCAUSE included under Mission Resilience; this should come as no surprise since the mission should be to serve the customer. Also, I did not mean to imply that the provost should always own Student Services in addition to Teaching and Learning; however, I am suggesting that regardless of organization structure, the aggregate student experience should be intentional and for many organizations, that would mean putting both of these important domains under the same person.
All of the imperatives (regardless of owner) should consider three aspects essential to the future of all organizations operating in the digital era:
Strategy, which describes why we do what we do, but then triggers an ongoing gap analysis (what we should do versus what we now do)
Change, which is all about implementing the stopgaps prioritized by an organization (expanding what we now do)
Operations, which is all about running the organization (what we now do)
This structure really helps organizations think about and manage how things get done, especially when you consider that virtually all of Operations represents processes and data flows automated by technology, and thus Strategy is all about determining what we should do next (first manually, but as soon as possible in an automated way), and Change is all about helping the organization to embrace the latter as an extension of the former. While this concept might seem new, it is very similar to prior efforts to describe enterprise management life cycles in prior eras/contexts (e.g., “Plan/Build/Run”). In any event, the key is to consider the organization holistically, operating to deliver on its mission, rather than operating in silos related to departmental responsibility.
The first of the two Leadership Imperatives – Adapting to the Future: Cultivating institutional agility – is all about developing a culture, a self-awareness, an aptitude and a confidence related to “Change.” With the magic wand that is this blog, I have assigned this imperative to the chief executive not because I think that the chief executive needs more responsibility, but because it is rapidly becoming the most important responsibility of the chief executive (in my humble opinion : ). Any good leader accepting responsibility for owning this imperative will certainly rely upon a strong lieutenant to lead it in the interest of smart delegation, but just like the Customer Imperatives I lumped under the provost, the chief executive should be intentional about continuous improvement in this endeavor.
The second of the two Leadership Imperatives – Financial Keys to the Future: Using technology and data to help make tough choices – is one of several imperatives from the list related to data, but from the descriptions provided by EDUCAUSE, sits squarely in the domain of existential survival. This is not about outfitting all members of the organization with good data to do their jobs; this is about having the right data to make the right decisions on an ongoing basis so that those jobs continue to exist. To me, this is the imperative from the list that speaks most directly to Mission Resilience and so that is why I have put it under the chief executive. As with the other Leadership Imperative noted above, there is certainly room for delegation here, but handing this to your CFO and hoping for the best is not adequate. These challenging times (and future opportunities in the increasingly dynamic higher ed market) will reward the leaders and CFOs and other cabinet members that collaborate effectively and efficiently across their Strategy/Change/Operations apparatus.
I could continue adding more points of clarification, but we both might tire of that. Instead, I invite any and all feedback on this proposed structure, approach and points of emphasis.
About Cybersecurity…
Before I close, I do have to express some disagreement with the very first item on the 2024 EDUCAUSE Top 10 List: Cybersecurity as a Core Competency: Balancing cost and risk. I spent a large portion of my career in the enterprise information security domain, and I don’t believe that most higher education institutions should try to make cybersecurity a core competency. I can imagine exceptions but for most, it’s just too specialized to master as core, hire and retain the necessary talent, keep up with the ever-advancing threat landscape, etc. The EDUCAUSE material does state that a risk framework should be used to elevate your cybersecurity self-awareness and prioritize investments in new security policies and capabilities…and with this, I totally agree. But for most this will mean reclaiming (or adding anew) risk management as a core competency in the modern cybersecurity context, while relying upon strong specialized partners to deliver those cybersecurity capabilities.
Want to hear more clarifications? Share a different perspective? Reach me by email at discussion@higher.digital or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/joegottlieb/.