Designing a software support model for tiered IT support services will improve IT governance, reduce support costs, and reduce business risk. If you haven’t already developed a standardized software support model, and your current approach is where everything is an ad hoc one-off solution, then you will find the next few posts to be very useful to you. Continue reading
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) is conducting a survey to help determine the “thematic framework” for their activities in the year ahead which has me puzzled. Here is the survey link so you can take it yourself, but you better hurry since it closes this Friday. Continue reading
The higher education enterprise software market biggest issue isn’t simply vendor consolidation of Ellucian (Datatel+SunGard) and BlackBoard acquiring Moodlerooms and Netspot. The biggest issue is that SIS market leader Ellucian now joins and BlackBoard as a privately held company with no public debt. Continue reading
5½ weeks ago Datatel+SunGard became Ellucian and Blackboard purchased Moodlerooms and Netspot. So let’s talk about what drove them here. Let’s start by being clear this doesn’t have to be about Ellucian and BlackBoard specifically. It’s about the enterprise software market in higher education as a whole which is affecting all vendors. That’s why I chose to use a generic story to describe many of the broad issues occurring today which might help explain the journey of Ellucian and BlackBoard.
Have you noticed transformational leadership creeping into our language lately? Is ‘transformational’ the term du jour of the leadership lexicon or is there something more to it?
It seems given its increasing use that we should have a fairly clear idea as to what is transformational leadership. That should be especially true if we are going to start requiring it in the job descriptions of higher education CIO’s, not to mention university presidents. So what is transformational leadership anyway? Continue reading
I have been stewing over several higher education survey reports lately to the point of it becoming an obsession. So I have decided to try convert my obsession into action with the hopes of it relieving my own stress but also to address what I see as a major issue.
And that is, there is a lack of information in higher education on products and vendors essential to effective decision making on IT investments that is normally found in other industries. Continue reading
Google continues to refine the search experience for its users with the Panda 3.4 updates reminding us all that what Google gives you today they can always take it away. For college and university CIO’s and CMO’s there is an important lesson or two to be learned from this round of changes which resulted in some organizations seeing their search prominence fall off in the rankings from one or more of Google’s penalties. Continue reading
Making Technology Investments Profitable is a book about maximizing the true value of IT projects and technology investments. Unlike so many other books on CIO and IT success, Jack Keen focuses on the absolute core issue for all success – how to deliver maximum business value from IT enabled projects. Keen tackles this question by focusing our attention on how to identify and stop the “value leaks” while offering over 30 specific and easy to implement techniques. Continue reading
It occurred to me very little attention is given to the importance of effective note taking and the advantages of notebooks vs laptops. I think there is an assumption the people we work with take good notes and that we assume they use their notes systematically after they leave a meeting. I often wonder that myself when I see people using legal pads and loose leaf paper for note taking or their iPads. Continue reading
The EDUCAUSE Policy Comment Forum is currently accepting public comment on 4 .EDU domain requirements policy change proposals. The public comment period runs 90 days during which time the proposed changes are open for public comment before the Policy Board hears the proposals. The 90 day open comment period for the current 4 policy proposals have deadlines of July 3, 2012. Continue reading
The Higher Ed CIO by Jerry Bishop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License