Already stretched thin by leading digital transformation and campus modernization initiatives, higher ed IT teams face new pressure to build a strong foundation to support artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Higher education IT also faces competing pressures to streamline services, do more with less, and alleviate repetitive business processes and tools whose friction slows users down or contributes to cognitive overload.
In an era of shrinking budgets, cost savings is a meaningful driver of IT evolution. But when institutions take on the work of consolidating tools and calming the chaos, they also help faculty and administrative teams deliver exceptional student experiences while reducing their own day-to-day friction.
“Leaders should be trustees of other people’s time,” says Robert Sutton, Stanford University professor emeritus of management science and engineering and co-author of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Sutton argues that organizations and universities have labored under an “addition” philosophy for many years, but a “subtraction mindset” proves more valuable when seeking to reduce friction. That subtraction applies to people, processes, tools and more — anything that gets in the way of getting real work done, gaining time back in the day and other efficiencies.
DISCOVER: The latest CDW research report explores how organizations can best address friction.
“Friction is often an orphan problem that we point at other people, and we tell them it’s their job to fix it,” but a team-based effort tends to provide better results, Sutton says. “A lot of times, for friction fixing, just getting people to pause and think about the impact can have an effect.”
Burnout among higher education faculty and staff increasingly falls under IT’s operational purview, with IT leaders better positioned to address the challenge than many institutions may recognize. Poorly designed workflows, redundant approval processes and fragmented digital tools all quietly erode productivity and morale across many teams, including students, campuswide. The question for IT leaders may no longer be whether technology affects employee wellbeing but whether tools have been deployed intentionally enough to make a difference.
Since 2023, the Pennsylvania State University system has undertaken a massive, multi-year effort to consolidate 64 separate IT units, including central IT, sprawling across several satellite campuses. What began primarily as a cost-savings strategy now encompasses intentional conversations and preparations for meeting new demands for AI-fueled solutions and other game-changing innovations, says Chris Lucas, Penn State’s deputy CIO.
“We had duplicative contracts, duplicative IT services, and it really comes down to the question of are we investing in IT in a way that maximizes and delivers the institutional outcomes that are needed?” Lucas says.
READ MORE: Creating a unified digital experience enhances collaboration.
Freeing IT team members to work on innovations that improve user experiences, as well as reskilling and preparing to partner with institutional teams on AI-backed research, for instance, also helps the university maximize IT investments. Here are a few of the lessons Lucas and his teams have uncovered along the way.
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Removing Roadblocks, Building Partnerships
At Penn State, friction grew up out of the sheer number of systems run throughout the university system. Frequently, faculty would use one system on a campus in the morning, then drive to another campus to teach an afternoon class — where they would encounter an entirely different system.
“They shouldn’t have an entirely different IT experience,” Lucas says. “These are things we’re finding through our discovery sessions and hearing from faculty, that the technology in the lab, and how you connect your device to it, could look very different depending on which campus you’re at."
Central IT has made progress in the past year to standardize tools and setups systemwide, but much work remains to be done. The IT consolidation effort grew out of Penn State’s broader Optimized Service Teams model for shared services, which also encompasses finance, safety and facilities. Lucas says the approach has helped to boost attention and compliance. “Our university leadership has set the vision and said this is what we need, and positioned it as part of our broader transformation."
Understand Tools, Improve Experiences
Over the past year of the consolidation effort, Lucas’s team has completed more than 60 engagements, in which IT leaders meet with a business or campus unit, review relevant data and participate in a four-hour work session with deans, chancellors and other stakeholders. The opportunity to openly discuss processes and precisely how certain tools help (or hurt) workflows provides important context for funding programs and platforms.
“It’s a change management effort, but for some of these folks, it’s the first time they’ve really reviewed a comprehensive inventory of all they provide within their units,” Lucas says. “Our goal now is to develop a universitywide IT service catalog and implement a new operating model and new organizational design model that improves end-user experiences and reduces duplication of contracts and technologies."
UP NEXT: Higher ed workplaces have evolved, and so has the technology that supports them.
Innovate and Drive Strategic Outcomes
“We can take that money and reinvest it in some new areas where we’ve fallen behind and gain some needed agility,” Lucas says. In some ways, the university’s IT teams have struggled to meet demands for new solutions and technologies because costs were sunk in duplicate service contracts for work that could be performed with in-house teams.
The consolidation work has included adoption of a more sustainable funding and operational model, known as “Shift Left,” which will allow many programs now running within an individual IT unit to be merged into enterprise solutions that already exist.
“We’re also identifying where we need new, universitywide systems in order to aggregate all of the dispersed things,” Lucas says. “We have to become more efficient and have more agility to help the institution drive these strategic outcomes and recruit students, as an example. Do they have the best technologies we can provide to increase student enrollment? We need to go on offense now."
