Welcome to the inaugural HEUG blog post from me, Kari Branjord. This will become a monthly event; set your calendar reminders accordingly…
I’ve been watching our industry through a couple of lenses over the last few months. First, most of you know, we’re implementing a large new footprint of applications at the University of Colorado. That has driven very interesting conversations with many of my colleagues around the world. Secondly, I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in Oracle Open World and I circled around Educause since it was in my hometown. In both cases, I’ve gotten an interesting and consistent piece of feedback: the HEUG covers technology well for the technologist audience. The blog posts on web services (http://www.heug.org/p/bl/ar/blogaid=137) and web service security (Part 1 http://www.heug.org/p/bl/ar/blogaid=153, Part 2 http://www.heug.org/p/bl/ar/blogaid=190) have been well received. The papers we’ve published in the past (http://www.heug.org/p/do/si/topic=796) have been informative. The year in the life diagram for the continuous release model of Campus Solutions product delivery (http://www.heug.org/p/do/sd/topic=63&sid=8664) clarified the maintenance load that we can anticipate. I also heard from folks that we don’t talk enough about the strategy of WHY you might implement a particular piece of technology, what the overall reference architecture of higher education might look like, and how do we evaluate our institutional next steps.
I’ve gotten no end of questions from our membership around the world about staffing model “best practices” and organizational structure. I’ve always said: never waste a good crisis. We’re all in one with the current state of the economy. I’ve been searching for outcome-based information, and it isn’t there. We cannot tell as an industry whether our practices are “best” or what strategies drive costs down over the long haul while maintaining adequate or even good service to our institutions. We seem to not gather that information in a way that allows comparison across institutions or longitudinally. How can we talk about funding level requirements and service level agreements if we don’t even gather basic data about our performance?
To that end, over the next few weeks, the Higher Education User Group, along with Oracle will introduce the benchmarking survey. It is most assuredly not a sales tool for Oracle; individual institutional results will not be shared with anyone outside the institution without permission. Participating institutions will receive their individual results compared against the aggregate. I am of the belief that this exercise will be instructive in many ways. I think we will learn as much by what we cannot answer as by what we can and can compare.
Why is this the subject of the Vice President for Technology blog, you might ask? Because as the ones responsible for the overall application footprint in our organizations, we must know what needs we are meeting, what our ERP investments achieve on campus, and what data we need to pursue improvement within our schools. There will be more information to come as we roll this out broadly, but I wanted to give our technology executives an advance notice. If you think your management might be interested in the same questions I articulate above, please forward this blog post link to them.
This just scratches the surface of what we individually need to learn and do over the next year in order to be positioned with sustainable funding and a roadmap of what our technology investments will require. If you have ideas about how to get our community talking about these things, please shoot me an email. What are the gaps in our group as you see them? We are open to suggestion.