Higher Ed Owns Plenty of Technology. The Question Is Whether It's Delivering Value.
Higher ed tech leaders face mounting pressure to modernize aging infrastructure, respond to AI, strengthen security, and improve the student experience — all while operating with tighter budgets and leaner teams.
Yet licensing costs, implementation timelines, and feature sets provide only part of the picture when evaluating technology investments. Institutions also need to consider how technology fits within the broader ecosystem, whether people will use it, what complexity it adds or removes, and what it will take to sustain it over time.
In recent conversations with higher ed tech leaders, one point came through clearly: Acquiring and implementing technology often proves easier than sustaining it for years to come. As institutions work to set technology priorities and budgets for the year ahead, now is the time to determine what to add, what to consolidate, and where to get more from existing investments.
Start With the Problem and the Experience
Before evaluating a product, define the experience or institutional problem to improve. One technology executive described beginning these governance discussions with a statement of need: What does the business area want to accomplish? What capabilities already exist within the institution's portfolio? What alternatives did the team consider? Answering those questions first prevents institutions from adding technology before they know whether they need another product.
For student-facing technology, map a meaningful portion of the student journey, such as admission through enrollment or orientation through the first semester. Then look for points of friction and fragmentation: how many systems and logins students juggle, how many communications they receive, and how many places they visit to complete tasks or find information. Each application may work as designed while students still struggle to navigate the overall environment. Staff often overcompensate by answering routine questions, directing students to resources, and bridging gaps between systems.
Look Beyond the License Price
Total cost of ownership becomes more complicated as institutions accumulate cloud platforms, AI tools, and specialized applications. The price of a license is easy to quantify. The staff required to manage integrations, access, support, security, contracts, and training often remains hidden.
Hidden complexity frequently runs deeper than institutions realize. In working with institutions to simplify their technology environments, we've seen one campus uncover 11 different enterprise project management tools and another identify dozens of CRM instances across a decentralized environment. Some duplication serves a purpose, particularly when academic, regulatory, or specialized requirements differ, but institutions should understand where it exists and why.
Evaluate technology by business capability and adoption, not simply by product. Take videoconferencing: How many tools support it, and what does the institution spend to deliver that capability? The platform with extensive functionality delivers limited return when few people use it. Return on value also provides a broader measure than financial ROI alone. A cybersecurity investment may primarily reduce institutional risk, while student-facing technology may improve access to resources or engagement. Both deliver substantial value without producing a simple dollar-for-dollar return.
Treat Fragmentation as a Cost
Technology sprawl creates costs beyond licensing. Every additional platform brings integration, administration, security, training, and support requirements.
Institutions should also account for staff capacity costs. Higher education IT teams must support AI, analytics, research computing, and other emerging priorities while maintaining increasingly complex technology environments.
Institutional leaders describe consolidation as a way to give higher ed IT teams back some capacity. Reducing overlapping systems allows staff to focus on work that advances the institution instead of maintaining multiple products providing similar capabilities. The University of the Pacific consolidated 29 front-end tools to five and reduced the related technology budget by 45% through a digital transformation campus experience initiative.
Modernize the Experience While Tackling Technology Debt
Many institutions sit in the middle of multi-year SIS, ERP, cloud, or data modernization initiatives consuming significant resources. As students and employees continue interacting with the institution throughout the transition, sequencing matters. Improving the experience layer often happens while deeper modernization continues, giving users a more coherent way to navigate existing systems and helping institutions deliver visible improvements before a multi-year transformation wraps up.
This approach also helps address technology debt. Consolidating overlapping front-end tools reduces complexity while extending the value of foundational systems the institution may not be ready to replace.
Put Governance Ahead of Procurement
Fragmented purchasing makes technology management particularly difficult in higher education, where institutions and departments may acquire products independently, sometimes at different prices and under separate contracts.
Centralized intake processes help technology and procurement leaders identify existing capabilities, consolidate contracts, and assess whether the institution has the capacity to support a proposed investment.
Effective governance preserves local flexibility without sacrificing institutional oversight. Infrastructure, identity, and enterprise platforms often benefit from institutional scale, while schools and departments need room to invest in technologies specific to their teaching, research, and operational missions.
AI demands particular discipline. Every AI investment brings operational, governance, and support requirements that remain after the initial experimentation. Asking who will administer it, how it fits into existing workflows, and what outcome it should improve prevents today's experiment from becoming tomorrow's technology debt.
Higher education will continue to modernize under significant resource constraints. A stronger investment framework helps leaders determine when to invest, when to consolidate, and when to gain more value from the technology already in place.