Reimagining IT – The Journey Continues

Conference Recap

The theme for the 2017 MOR Associates Leaders Conference was “Reimagining IT, the Journey Continues.” As the conference unfolded, it became clear that the journey is continuing through a thicket of financial and business-model challenges faced by higher education, and equally compelling challenges that face information technology departments in higher education.

Those challenges will compel colleges and universities and their IT departments to get out in front of these trends as they face disruption of any kind, that could instead dictate changes for them and possibly diminish their roles.

The four-hour conference provided guidance on how to handle those challenges, through examples at universities that have grappled in different ways with reimagining IT and through asking conference participants to share ideas on how they should deal with those challenges at their schools. Some specific examples included:

• University of Nebraska-Creating a More Integrated OneIT Entity (video linked)
• CWRU-OneIT Circling the Wagons to Secure the Perimeter  (video linked)
• Harvard University-Creating a Stronger Federation (video linked)
• Berkeley-Re-imagining IT with the Community Shaping the Future
• University of Minnesota Developing an IT Eco-System

Those shared experiences produced suggestions and approaches to meeting those challenges at the more than 30 participating institutions and their more than 1,000 IT staff members who attended the video-conference.