News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education
May 9, 2005
Finance remains the top issue for information technology in higher education, according to an annual survey of institutions by Educause. But security issues are becoming more and more important.
Since 2000, Educause has conducted a poll of institutions — typically answered by chief information officers — about their priorities and about the issues they think have the potential to become more important. Finance has consistently been a top ranked issue, and was the No. 1 answer this year and last to the question of the issue that must be resolved to assure the institution’s strategic success.
Last year, finance also topped the list of issues “with the potential to become more significant.” But this year, it dropped to second place, replaced by security issues. Security issues have received increasing public attention as a series of breaches have embarrassed institutions.
The CIO’s ranked the following as the top 10 issues for their institution’s success:
Educause noted that some issues that ranked quite high in the survey’s early years — such as distance education and desktop computing — no longer are top priorities, either because institutions have systems in place or are no longer pursuing certain programs.
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ID and Card Programs Can Help
On many campuses you have an opportunity to address both security and finance right in your wallet. Auxilliary services tend to have a pretty clear ROI. Combining campus cards with physical access control is already widespread. The provisioning done for those identities tends to be very comprehensive and they often have better decommisioning policies in place than IT identity management efforts. As responsibility for physical and logical security increasingly merges the ROI for combining IT identity management efforts into the same process as campus cards becomes clearer.
This likely means some additional training for campus card staff, but reduced overhead for IT. Regardless of whether or not IT uses tokens for authentication, the identity provisioning process and policies are where the true value of integrated identity provisioning comes from.
I wrote more about this at http://www.identityinitiative.com. Feel free to comment here or there. Thanks for the article.
Bret Tobey
Bret Tobey, at 1:32 pm EDT on May 10, 2005