5 Urgent Priorities Guiding Investments in Higher Ed Digital Transformation

Economic and regulatory pressures are bringing more colleges and universities to the IT marketplace for digital transformation. The IT partners they choose will be the ones that best understand higher ed’s top modernization priorities, say Kelly Otter, Dean at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies and Richard Sheehe, principal and founder of Sheehe Consulting Group, as they examine and elaborate on those transformation necessities.

Colleges and universities are typically major enterprises, yet they remain seriously behind in digital transformation (DX) compared to other sectors. In just one recent sign of this, a January 2023 reportOpens a new window showed fewer than half of colleges and universities use CRM software, a ubiquitous technology that a majority of companies with even just ten employees or more are using. The timing couldn’t be worse to play DX catch-up as institutions face declining enrollment, revenue and government funding while also bracing for tougher compliance, including a recent GAO directiveOpens a new window for the U.S. Dept. of Education to enhance regulatory oversight. 

Let’s take a closer look at how these combined pressures are increasingly bringing colleges and universities to the DX marketplace. We’ll see how this creates a huge opportunity for IT partners to engage on solutions – provided they understand the sector-specific operational requirements and DX focus areas that many universities themselves are only now just learning to identify. 

A Challenging Landscape 

Colleges and universities that commit to focusing more closely on modernization will find themselves with a sizable to-do list – a unique set of DX challenges and opportunities specific to higher ed that we’ve been cataloging over more than two years of collaborating together in this space. In working to connect academia’s domain-specific pain points with the broader DX market trends and options that can address them, we’ve found several key factors that define the landscape.

To begin with, many DX efforts in higher ed today limit their focus to technology-enhanced learning initiatives. This attention is certainly justified, given the core academic mission and how the pandemic catalyzed the need for virtual platforms. But colleges and universities too often neglect broader transformations of underlying IT infrastructure, data management systems, supply chains and business processes – critical targets for modernization that are well-understood and highly prioritized by most other industry sectors and organizations pursuing enterprise transformations.  

University data and systems are also more heavily regulated than most other sectors. Beyond the typical compliance burden any enterprise must meet for data security, financial auditing, reporting and other measures, higher education institutions face a skewing of additional federal and state regulations. The reasons for this range from tax-exempt status, accreditation, Title IX and other reporting requirements to accountability stemming from heavy reliance on government funding for financial aid, scientific research and other support. 

These are just some of the factors raising the stakes for DX investments to help colleges and universities be more agile and compliant with the underlying data, systems and processes at the heart of their operations. Budgeting for such investments is no easy task, especially for smaller institutions, but it’s imperative at a moment when tough economic and regulatory pressures in higher ed make modernization toward a more lean, efficient and cost-effective enterprise more crucial than ever.

See More: Why Are We Still Talking About Digital Transformation?

5 Urgent DX Priorities

Fortunately, academic decision-makers are learning to isolate the most crucial DX targets so they can be more proactive and customized in their IT investment choices. While approaches may vary, here are five key priorities that should top the modernization to-do list:

• • Compliance and reporting: Perform discovery and rationalization across the IT estate of the data and systems most critical for regulatory compliance, then modernize these systems for better access management, metadata/tagging and automated reporting.
  • Analytics: Consider analytics as a service (AaaS) options and leverage API integration wherever possible to become more self-sufficient in reaping value and insights on data you own (i.e., data sets on marketing, enrollment trends, graduate placements, workforce analytics, etc.) 
  • Organizational efficiency and benchmarking: Replace slow, subjective and high-priced consultant reports with modernized access and integration of internal and external datasets to benchmark and optimize university processes, staffing numbers and more. 
  • Coherent data culture: Under the right conditions, colleges and universities embracing DX can potentially uncover new synergies across research, teaching and enterprise systems that elevate technology best practices wherever they originate. This can revitalize both internal operations and curricula for any number of subjects in computer science and applied technology. 
  • Create a student value chain: Consider adapting the ITIL v4 service value chain or similar IT service management (ITSM) models to better connect systems and processes seamlessly across the entire lifecycle of student recruitment, enrollment, education, job placement and alumni engagement. 

Bridging the Cultural Divide to Clarify DX Value

These five priorities have helped guide some of our own successful efforts in positioning and advising universities to be more effective in their own operations and more strategic in the IT partnerships they pursue. The caveat here is that success relies on traversing the historic divide between “business” and “academic” culture; this goes beyond just terminology and buzzwords to include communicating DX value to academic decision-makers.

Let’s take the example of our final bullet in the list above about creating a student value chain modeled after a popular ITIL v4 framework for ITSM. At first blush, that may seem like a conceptual stretch – until we connect it to one of the few regulatory bright spots on the higher ed horizon: the likely lifting of a ban that’s been in place since 2008 on a federal Student Unit RecordOpens a new window data system. 

The ban prohibits the federal government from collecting and analyzing data at the student level. But there’s now considerable advocacy and bipartisan momentum in the U.S. Congress to lift the banOpens a new window on Student Unit Record data. This would enable more insights into educational quality, student performance and graduation rates, debt-to-earnings ratios for particular majors and more. 

Transforming Education

When you imagine what a university armed with today’s technology and analytics could do securely and efficiently with federal data sets that were last available when the iPhone was first introduced, the idea of a student value chain modeled after a time-tested ITSM principles doesn’t seem so far-fetched.  

That’s just one of many examples of how DX can help colleges and universities thrive while fulfilling their mission to recruit, teach and prepare students for better lives and careers.

How can higher education institutions embrace digital transformation more effectively? Share your thoughts with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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