Page 11 - CT Innovation in Education, 2021

...While Dealing with the Immediate
Hazards of the Job
When a student or staffer is complaining about performance, IT has to establish the source of the issue. Two years ago, it might have been a lack of WiFi in a particular area on campus or a faltering virtual machine. Now it might be figuring out whether that laggy web session is a problem with Zoom or a snafu with the on-premise learning management system. Being able to focus just on those pieces of infrastructure seeing the greatest pressure makes response more efficient and effective.
That was the idea with the crisis dashboards — to bring clarity to decision-making. But the same solution can also help steer IT’s larger journey.
As we all know, the IT roadmaps of 12 or 18 months ago have undergone drastic alteration. College and university leaders have had to re-examine what their organizations are going to look like going forward. Priorities have shifted, and in plenty of schools, those long-awaited digital transformations have moved from nice-to-have to must-have. Getting visibility is your first step forward for going in new directions.
Brandon Shopp is the vice president of product strategy for security, compliance and tools at SolarWinds.
Monitor and Manage IT
Scalable, end-to-end IT monitoring software from solarwinds.com/solutions/ education-it-solutions
4 TRIED-AND-TRUE SUGGESTIONS
Talk with others in your community. You’ll get a
lot of useful insight, advice, and feedback from your peers. Find out what they like and don’t like about the various technologies you’re considering. They’re sure to be candid.
Follow up on vendor references. Make sure the ones you receive are equivalent to your school, by virtue of segment, size or IT structure.
Ask how many full-time employees will be required
to run the application once it’s deployed. After all, any commitment you make to this solution will suck time and resources away from other work on the IT roadmap.
Put the solution to the test. If it requires a set of professional services or a sales engineer to come on site — whether physically or virtually — to get the system configured and running, is it going to be sustainable once you’re holding the keys?
CAMPUSTECHNOLOGY.COM | 11