At the end of a long week a couple of years ago, while serving as CIO, I remember looking out from my office across our campus and thinking: “For all of the money the institution had spent on technology over the past 25 to 30 years, has it really made that much of a difference? We don’t register or graduate significantly more students. We don’t have significantly less staff than before we began heavily incorporating technology at our institution.” Thus, I often reflected on whether our investments in technology truly moved the needle for higher education. The real challenge lies not in the amount we spend but in how we allocate those resources to achieve transformative change.
Along with others, I started by viewing the role of the CIO as largely stewarding our institution’s funds and looking for ways to become increasingly financially sustainable while also advancing the use of technology, minimizing risk, enhancing services, keeping the lights on, etc. The list of initiatives competing for limited resources goes on and on and can be daunting. When looking at “the problem we’re trying to solve,” it looked something like this.
The bucket illustrates the total resources available to achieve an institution’s technology goals. The blue section labeled “Operational” illustrates an approximation of the fraction of the bucket (~65%) dedicated to basic needs or “keeping the lights on.” The yellow portion reflects a piece of the three-dimensional pie needed to address cybersecurity, and the red portion reflects the amount of total resource we dedicate just to keeping up with the technological change that is imparted on us from our vendors (upgrades, patches, etc.), compliance (GLBA, PCI, etc.), enhancements, and augmentations to existing systems. Again, the list goes on.
It’s interesting to note that the yellow and red sections are dynamic and always changing. Thus, the proportion in the diagram is somewhat arbitrary. However, it is also important to recognize that both cybersecurity requirements (yellow) and technological advancements (red) lie outside of our control—they are done to us, and we have to keep up with them. The point of the diagram is that there is only a sliver left for investing in truly strategic opportunities, using the definition of strategic to mean “yielding a competitive advantage.”
Thus, the problem becomes how to rearrange the bucket so that more resources are available to invest in strategic initiatives. Take cybersecurity as an example. Do we really think that we can control the rapid change on the threat horizon? It’s more likely going to expand and require additional resources. The cybersecurity threat landscape impacts our vendors, too; thus, many of the resource sinks in the red technological advancement section are also influenced by the threat landscape. In addition, our vendors are in competition for business, leading to the perpetual cycle of functionality releases (and fixes for them).
On top of all of this, many institutions are having to reduce the size of their buckets due to revenue losses from enrollment declines, reductions in state allocations for public institutions, etc., precisely the things to which we are hoping to apply our strategic resources. This begs the question, “So what do we do about it?” This is where the CIO’s role becomes interesting and rewarding. Both the blue and red areas are ripe with opportunities to free up resources to move into the green strategic portion of the bucket.
Higher-ed’s technology ecosystems can be visualized as a giant hairball. At the dawn of the information age in business—when computing, networking, and other digital tools became the primary means of accomplishing myriad tasks—there was no blueprint for how to implement them thoughtfully or in a way that would scale effortlessly and cost-effectively. It was nobody’s fault; these systems grew across our campuses organically, creating the giant hairball.
But this challenge isn’t limited to technology. It reflects a broader need for structure and alignment across the institution. That’s where enterprise architecture (EA) comes in—not just as a tool for IT but as a framework for aligning strategy, operations, and governance. In many ways, the business architecture within higher education has become its own tangled hairball.
This is where the CIO can have a transformative impact on an institution. Creating a blueprint to slide beneath the technological hairball makes it possible to untangle complexity without disrupting operations. While challenging, success depends on understanding market trends and selecting products, solutions, and services that align with the blueprint and can evolve sustainably. The rewards won’t be immediate and will require upfront investment, but the long-term benefits are significant. A simplified architecture creates cascading benefits, reducing workloads shared across teams and potentially decreasing the number of employees required to support the ecosystem. It optimizes processes, minimizing administrative burdens related to managing, approving, and paying for goods and services.
Furthermore, on the cybersecurity front, simplifying the architecture plays a crucial role in reducing vulnerabilities. While architecture improvements can yield resources from the red and blue resource pools, cybersecurity remains a distinct and growing concern. By slowing the expansion of the yellow cybersecurity portion in our bucket, institutions can better allocate resources to manage cybersecurity’s evolving demands without compromising other priorities.
Where this gets challenging is doing it synchronously with the rest of campus. Simplification on all fronts needs to become a virtue, requiring the CIO to be a true leader who helps campus constituents see the light of what is possible when creating and applying a simple and sound enterprise architecture to the institution across all of its disciplines, regardless of the pushback coming from various silos on campus. Consequently, one must create a strategy, a blueprint for a new, simple, and more agile architecture, and be the change leader and change manager necessary to slide this blueprint underneath a functioning institution without crippling it.
Once architecture provides the foundation, tactical levers amplify these efforts by unlocking resources from the red (technological advancement) and blue (keeping the lights on) areas to invest in green strategic initiatives. One such lever, inspired by the concept of aspect-oriented programming, is addressing cross-cutting concerns like vendor management. Many resource drains in the red and blue sections stem from financial costs and operational burdens imposed by vendors. By improving vendor management, institutions can slow annual cost increases, eliminate unused modules or functionality (right-sizing contracts), gain faster issue resolution and better support to alleviate team workloads, and even strengthen negotiation leverage.
Centralizing expenditures is a tactical lever that dovetails with vendor management. Even in highly distributed IT environments, consolidating software licensing through a robust asset management program can uncover redundant purchases and unused licenses, yielding significant savings and strengthening vendor relationships.
Another tactical lever to pull is to really dig into the IT budget, the chart of accounts, and the funds beneath them. Ensuring that costs are allocated properly against the correct funds (e.g., to the technology fee fund or to an instructional technology fund vs. general fund) can also help move resources from red and blue to green.
There are countless other tactical levers to pull, and I don’t claim to know them all. The point is that examining how important it is to unearth and define the greater problem(s) to solve and creating a strategy for defeating the problem(s) is the key to freeing up more resources within IT and for the institution. As in chess, it is important to develop a strategy that has a trickle-down effect, where each move causes another that yields its own result, leading to a collection of positive outcomes that redistribute resources from red (technological advancement) and blue (keeping the lights on) to green (strategic potential). This type of strategy, which must also include effective change leadership and management, is key to moving the needle in higher education IT.
I remember walking around that same campus early in my tenure as CIO, having a conversation with the registrar and the vice president of student affairs. I shared that being a CIO means more than managing technology; it’s about leadership that drives transformation. It’s about challenging entrenched norms and envisioning what’s possible—not just for IT but for the institution as a whole. It requires the courage to reallocate resources, rethink priorities, and lead conversations that inspire change across silos.
This role demands strategic thinking and deliberate tactics, such as managing vendors more effectively, identifying opportunities for consolidation, crafting architectures that simplify complexity, and aligning every decision with a blueprint for the future. Imagine a future where the green strategic potential portion of the bucket grows—where strategic investments transform not just technology but the very fabric of the institution.
The question isn’t whether this future is attainable—it’s whether we’re bold enough to reimagine the bucket. By shifting resources from technological advancement and operational costs into the strategic potential bucket, we can transform technology and the fabric of our institutions. What could your institution achieve by daring to invest in what truly matters? Tambellini’s optimization, evaluation and selection, change management, and negotiation services can provide critical support and expertise as you navigate your institution’s strategic technology investments. Reach out for help.
Originally posted by Thomas Battaglia on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow him there to catch all his great industry insights.
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