A CIO's Guide To Architecting Campus-Wide IT Agility In Higher Education

IT is a critical part of an enterprise's organizational infrastructure, and higher education is no different. The traditional monolithic, years-long ERP project for deploying and managing IT infrastructure is giving way to a new, agile model built on responsiveness to the needs of faculty and students. A growing number of IT leaders in higher education act as architects of these agile systems. This model of continuous iteration addresses many of the challenges facing CIOs by prioritizing a simple principle: get the fundamentals right before chasing innovations like AI.

This is the reality for Tom Armstrong, an IT executive whose career spans years with major firms like PwC and IBM spearheading these kinds of transformations. As the current VP of Technology and Chief Information Officer at Southern Connecticut State University, Armstrong is on the front lines of the move to agile systems development in higher education. Drawing on his background as an enterprise architect, he is rebuilding campus technology at SCSU in this image, with a focus on consistent, dependable iteration and scalability. Accordingly, his approach to agile IT is rooted in fundamental best practices.

"Big bang transformation is dated at this point," Armstrong said. "We’re in an era of continuous modernization, building roadmaps with the assumption that capabilities are changing much faster than they used to." For Armstrong, agility is built, first and foremost, on rigor and stability.

• Blueprint for agility: "I'm an enterprise architect by background and I believe architectural rigor is what allows us to be more flexible as new capabilities come out. That means having a flexible integration platform, governing our data so it’s not locked up in silos, and ensuring we have a stable and scalable infrastructure." Armstrong is creating a new approach to IT governance built on a participative model that borrows concepts from Agile methodology, like a story points-style scoring system, to evaluate initiatives and inform the development of modern higher-ed AI governance frameworks.

• Green lights, not gates: Armstrong clarified that developing these governance architectures isn't just another hoop universities need to jump through. "While higher ed has a fantastic framework of shared governance to build from," he said, "the institutions that will succeed are those that treat governance as an enabling function, not as a roadblock or a compliance exercise."