Management

Campus IT Leadership Must Break Down Traditional Silos

As more technology becomes integral to the everyday workings of higher ed, IT leaders must maintain focus on their service.

Ryan Petersen

Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 18 years, with the last 12 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

Technology today pervades every aspect of life on — and off — the higher education campus. From the dining hall to the football field, and every place in between, students, faculty and staff navigate a complex network of devices and IT services. And colleges and universities wouldn’t survive very long without all of that technology in play.

This issue of EdTech: Focus on Higher Education brings that dynamic into focus, highlighting not only the work that institutions like Saint Louis University are doing to bring ever-growing networks to the next level with 802.11ac-ready tools, but also the new ways in which more tried-and-true technology can be leveraged. Beyond tapping tools to improve classroom instruction, institutions are fully embracing technology as a means to provide workforce training while improving student creativity and performance — truly setting up students for success after graduation.

Readers will discover how the University of Pittsburgh integrates video in its sports teams’ training and practices, how the University of Southern California is putting a new spin on the makerspace model and how Georgia Gwinnett College is training tomorrow’s IT professionals with unique in-class data center environments.

Breaking Barriers

This issue also shares insights from higher education IT professionals who are breaking down the traditional silos that frequently prevent campuses from getting the most out of the technology their campus leaders deploy. University of Arizona CIO Michele Norin discusses increased collaboration among researchers and IT services on her campus, and how the role of central IT as a service provider is shifting to a partnership role across all aspects of her institution.

Indeed, IT’s role on nearly every college campus is shifting to the forefront as institutions lean more heavily on technology in all facets of academic and athletic life. Here at EdTech, our goal, always, is to help our readers better equip themselves to implement successful solutions on their own campuses.

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