3 Starters for Digital Leadership in Higher Ed

A higher education technology leader offers his take on three transformative themes that will dominate in colleges and universities for 2018.

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/08/18

United States higher education is struggling to move into the 21st century digital era, according to Dr. Samuel Conn, president and chief executive officer for nonprofit technology consortium NJEdge. Holding back the segment, he said, are legacy processes and "last-century" thinking, which can no longer meet the demands of students who are more digitally savvy than their instructors — not to mention the growing competition coming from global institutions that are attracting those same students.

What institutional leaders need, Conn noted, is "re-energizing." Only then will they have the spark and inspiration needed to undertake the change they wish to see in their organizations. Enterprise transformation is the major theme of this year's NJEdge Annual Conference, taking place Jan. 11-12 in Whippany, NJ. Although the organization and its event are situated in New Jersey, its products and services have stretched far beyond state borders, and even outside of higher ed.

NJEdge was founded in 2000 to deliver access through EdgeNet, a high-performance optical fiber network spanning the state's colleges and universities. Since then, the organization has added additional solutions: EdgeCloud (for co-location and platform-as-a-service), EdgeMarket (for consortium buying), EdgeSecure (for security coverage), EdgePro (for professional services), EdgeMedia (for digital asset management and cloud-based videoconferencing) and EdgeEvents (for professional development activities).

Along the way, new kinds of members have joined, including K-12 districts, local government agencies and healthcare providers. And that EdgeMedia media management system, Illumira, which Conn calls "a YouTube on steroids," has been adopted by schools outside of the state, including higher ed customers in Michigan, Maryland, New York, Virginia and Connecticut.

The annual conference reflects that diversity. Although there's a heavy emphasis on the subjects higher ed will care about, since that's the major type of member NJEdge has, the two-day event will also offer coverage of topics of interest for leaders seeking to remake their organizations to reflect current trends in digitalization.

In a recent interview, Conn offered his take on three themes colleges and universities can expect to pay more attention to in the coming year as starters for kicking their transformation efforts into high gear.

1) Big Data and Analytics

Predictive modeling using business intelligence applications should be a big deal to schools, said Conn. Forget about the buildings, faculty and other aspects that campuses have "historically prided themselves on," he asserted. "Institutions are really starting to understand that data is one of their primary assets, that the data is what's telling the story."

Conn

NJEdge isn't new to the data realm. The company is part of New Jersey's Big Data Alliance, an initiative formed by legislative action and run from Rutgers University, with a membership that includes academia, industry, nonprofits and government. NJEdge provides the transport mechanism for big data initiatives and, in particular, for research. "The composition of research environments is all about three things," Conn said: "Networks that can transport data at very high speeds, storage and high-performance computing." Those same components are being picked up to power other kinds of data analysis as well.