Tackling the Technology-Enabled Reset in Higher Education

Technology leaders in Higher Education face a decade of challenges under difficult circumstances. GTSG is here to help.

Changes in demand: well before the pandemic, shifts in the long-term marketplace demographic for undergraduate students combined with a trend toward career-based education.

New demands require new service levels: for many, this means introducing new services with an eye on the student and customer experience for all services. Today, in most industries, technology is sufficiently ingrained in the “customer” relationship that excellence becomes table stakes. More plainly, a negative experience is more likely to become a competitive “differentiator.” In 2022, reputations can be harmed by a technology experience in any business.

Resources are constrained: financial challenges for many and skills shortages across the IT industry make the successful adoption of new technology and the ability to deliver it even more difficult. Our clients require a strategy grounded in best practices, enabled by a focus on automation. GTSG wont be suggesting what programs or courses to offer – but we are here to help with the enabling technology.

Dislocation has been underway for years.

“Rising costs are no longer matched by a willingness of governments and students to
pay for them. And yet the traditional operating model of a university cannot produce
sufficient productivity gains to cover the gap.”

Before the pandemic

  • Declining enrollment: from a 2010 peak, undergraduate enrollment had already fallen 12% by 2020.
  • Customer demands: students (and employees) have higher expectations for their user and student experience and its expected outcome.
  • Career-based: includes the development of co-created credentials but also brings competition from non-traditional entrants making significant investments in delivery at a substantial scale.

And then 2020

In Spring 2020, one (very) top-tier school told us at the outset of the pandemic, “We went from “zero
percent online to 100% online – for both workforce and education delivery- in ten days.”

Implications on technology

2020 saw many of these heroic achievements. While our friends have every right to be proud, this “accelerated agility” consumed resources previously focused on a move to cloud, diverting many from their modernization path at an unfortunate moment.

The pandemic accelerated the need for change

Demographics continued to drive a decline in traditional on-campus enrollment, demand for career- based education continued to increase, and expectations for better technology accelerated – partly due to these achievements during the pandemic.
Some saw a further enrollment decline, particularly with international students, due to travel restrictions and (to some extent) the emergence of online alternatives. As of late 2022, some institutions have rebounded, but not all.

The time is now.

The pace of change demands immediacy. With revenue challenged for many, budget constraints exacerbate the challenge of making the required investments and retaining, training, and building the right team to support.

Transformational leaders are changing operating models, architecture, processes, and delivery vehicles.

Back to KPMG:

…institutions that [are flexible, agile, deliberate and …led by evidence] will be far
better equipped to survive disruption and, in turn, create it. And to be blunt, they will
likely be more efficient, cost less to run and have more resources for their core
purposes of learning and discovery. 3

The quality of the experience: technology service delivery is mission critical

Not only the choice of the technology but the quality of service delivery – the student (and employee)
experience itself. Reliability is table stakes.

The solution provider marketplace has evolved to meet rapidly changing needs. Options are vast.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Higher Education classifies technology trends on pace to reach mainstream
adoption

  • within two years: education analytics- particularly relevant for financially challenged institutions
    and scenario planning- more relevant than ever as we anticipate the next dislocation (as with
    2001, 2008, and 2020, we know dislocations are coming, if not which type or when) and
  • within five years, including digital credentials (with their impact on employment and career
    advancement), design thinking (vital to success in student experience), FIDO (fast ID online, also
    contributing to the user experience through password elimination), and master data
    management (also contributing to user experience).

Workloads matter

Architecting workloads for performance, scalability, availability, and resiliency- is part of the delivery experience that is as important to today’s students as is the traditional campus.

While the cloud is the direction for most new development, migration is rarely as simple as advertised for on-premises systems, many of which have been customized over decades. Another illustration: a Forrester study notes that for specialized HPC and AI workloads, an on-prem component of a hybrid cloud solution can be better than pure cloud, with cost, latency, and data gravity as primary drivers). 

Sustainability matters

Climate change is an increasingly important driver. Sustainability is an evaluation criterion for an increasing percentage of workload placement decisions.

Talent and Skills matter: organizational change management is a foundational consideration.

Institutions can struggle to retain skills. While the “great resignation”exacerbates the challenge, some struggle with adaptability to change, resulting from their loyalty to employees.

Requiring close attention to organizational change management practices. And skills challenges in any technology organization can impact sourcing decisions.

Automation matters

Automation is essential for any technology organization to meet expectations for delivery excellence amidst increased complexity and skills challenges.

Many organizations across all industries struggle: they focus on long-term planning, missing out on incremental success and the development of experience and momentum. GTSG has built a “twin-track” approach that both lays out a strategy and gets progress underway.

Management and Governance of Hybrid IT matter

Many are familiar with cost management gone awry – “it (the cloud service) was $10,000 per month until it wasn’t – then it was $120,000.”

An analyst said this several years ago, and it’s even more true today: “When the service goes down, the business ain’t calling [insert service provider name]. They’re calling you!”

Governance, management, processes, and tooling are critical to success.

The right strategy positions scarce resources for effective execution.

While funding may be constrained, the demands of the business are not. Our charge is to respond to
competitive pressures and macroeconomic headwinds

  • with a modernized technology footprint,
  • combined with a modernized, intelligent version of “doing the same or more with less.”

The right kind of decision framework maximizes the benefit to the business from finite available
resources.

Decades of experience have taught us that while technology changes rapidly, time-honored principles and techniques retain value. We begin our strategy work by building guiding principles, which are widely discussed and debated before being adopted. These guiding principles must account for cloud
strategy, facilities strategy, and legacy modernization initiatives.

We then convert these principles to a set of technical design points, which translate the principles to an
executable (and testable) level.

For example, “we’re going to be sustainable” is aspirational until we measure quantitative progress
against a concrete plan. And it’s probably not practical without an economic metric to ensure that we’ve
provided for it financially.

Change is continuous: Gartner tells us that a staggering 50% of workload placement decisions will need to be revisited between 2022 and 2027. 

This fluid situation calls for a truly “living” workload placement strategy. The institution will continually make decisions on where to move from today and must do so without losing sight of its strategic priorities.

Dwight Eisenhower is said to have found that “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Our approach reflects this wisdom. Good consultants do not “hang around” forever. They build a structured framework to enable downstream decisions based on what we have learned.

We apply this belief in an agile fashion – in the true sense of the term, ‘the ability to create and respond to change…a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment. 

Performance considerations are at the forefront of workload placement decisions.

As students of the Higher Education community and Gartner-recognized subject matter experts, GTSGunderstands that we must only move workload with a complete and detailed understanding of the interrelationships among applications, databases, and services. This thorough knowledge is required to
construct least-risk move groups, but more importantly, to be confident that workloads will perform in a way that is an asset to the student or employee experience.

Even as on-premises data centers become smaller, infrastructure & operations disciplines become more critical.

Even in the simpler days of the on-prem data center, many organizations struggle with some components of the [hybrid] cloud management function. We all know shops for whom DR has been an issue forever, cost management is a struggle, service catalogs are inadequate, or for whom problem determination is overly labor intensive. The hybrid environment only elevates the degree of complexity.

As macroeconomic headwinds and competitive pressures continue, financial considerations are paramount for planning this “sea change” in workload placement.

Vital to the institutions- and career make-or-break to the executive – is a business case considering all the transition costs. It is a long-term transition, and funding does not come at once: realistic financials are essential and can be complex. Appearances can be deceptive.

There are duplicate infrastructures and migration, refactoring, and other costs for a season of time, along with training and skills requirements associated with all of them. Organizational change management needs to be a primary consideration.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen promises of rapid payback on legacy systems replacement – without considering contract, lease, or facilities terms, let alone refactoring costs.

The answer is always, always in the details.

Automation is table stakes: to meet the skills challenges and to drive productivity to help fund the change.

GTSG built a straightforward, practical workshop-based approach that

  • examines and evaluates the opportunities for automation,
  • sets the context of
    • what’s most important to the organization,
    • what resources will be required, and
    • places each potential initiative into a “high/low pain/gain” matrix.

We do this while concurrently working through an initial implementation target – a pilot – which focuses the organization on getting started while learning valuable lessons applicable to a 6-12 month roadmap. [Anything long-term tends to add more complexity to the decision-making process and dilutes focus.]

For over 30 years, we have focused solely on excellence in technology service delivery.

Our clients find the advantage in working with a firm committed to your success- and not trying to sell you anything else. GTSG does not accept one dollar of commission from providers of any technology we recommend. We focus solely on helping you get from here to your end state with the right technology in place:

  • strategy supported by
    • an effective operational model,
    • an executable roadmap and
    • a business case that stands up to reality,
  • tactical help with migration and transition
  • assistance in building an executable approach to automation.

* * * * *

We hope that you have found value in these thoughts. If you’d like to discuss any of these observations,
just let us know at Partners@GTSG.com. Thank you.

1 https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2020/10/future-of-higher-education.pdf, retrieved 10.10.22
2 https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics, retrieved 10.26.22
3 https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/xx/pdf/2020/10/future-of-higher-education.pdf, retrieved 10.10.22
4 https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/dell-technologies-cloud/industry-market/forrester-
hpc-and-ai-higher-education-spotlight.pdf, retrieved 11.29.22
5 https://www.nutanix.com/blog/why-customers-value-application-mobility-in-hybrid-multiclouds, retrieved
11.13.22
6 https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/, retrieved 10.24.22