Current State
Institutions often lack visibility into their cross-department technology stack.
TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT AND GOVERNANCE
Technology Baseline to Roadmap
A comprehensive review of your IT environment that baselines where you are today and plans for what's next using our jumpstart assessment process.
CHALLENGE
Understanding Where to Start
Understanding the maturity of a higher education IT department and strategy is critical to meeting the evolving needs of students, faculty, and staff. Often, executive teams feel they don’t have a clear understanding of the decisions made and the technology being used at their institution, which makes it hard to know whether you’re doing the right things now and how you could evolve. In addition, governance models may be outdated and fail to account for the impact of AI and other external platforms that access institutional data.
Technology challenges facing today's higher-ed environments
Aligned Strategy
Alignment with institution mission is critical, but oftentimes IT focuses on keeping the lights on rather than enhancing services.
Risk Profile
From compliance to cybersecurity, Institutions don’t always understand what is at risk or why.
Utilization
With multiple systems in place, often loosely connect or not at all, IT teams need to know if they are over- or under-resourced.
Spend Optimization
Knowing if the right tools are in place, or if there are alternatives that might be more cost-effective or operationally efficient.
Peer Analysis
Leadership teams want to know if their technology approach is sound and how peer organizations are performing.
SOLUTIONS FEATURES
Real Understanding, Tailored Guidance
OculusIT’s assessment and governance advisory service enables colleges and universities to establish a baseline for their existing IT structure and strategy, including peer-group benchmarking. Using our jumpstart process, we conduct a carefully built, proprietary discovery to outline everything used in your environment and your existing governance processes. We’ll work with your leadership to develop your as-is baseline and propose a future state aligned with best practices in higher education. From high-level operating models to granular resource reports, we define an approach up front to ensure we meet your institution's needs.
Software Inventory
A full inventory of your current on-premises and SaaS applications, what they each do, so everyone sees what they have and their purpose.
Prioritized Recommendations
Recommendations based on the highest-priority needs both from a foundational IT perspective and from an institutional goal-oriented one.
A Path to Change
Recommended changes aligned with core needs, and a 30-60-90-day plan that prioritizes critical actions first.
Risk Identification
We identify and prioritize all identified risks to show a clear view of your risk profile.
Governance Recommendations
Targeted guidance on how to manage data and software going forward, aligned with GLBA, FERPA, PCI/HIPAA, and other best practices.
Data & Analytics Strategy
We establish stewardship, access models, and decision-support dashboards to enable your teams.
Transparency
We provide clear insight, so your leadership team understands the full workings of your technology team and environment.
Frequently asked questions
How do you do this assessment?
We work with your existing IT team to map out the current environment, across the institution, to deliver a 360-degree view.
What areas get covered?
We cover everything your IT team manages. ERP/SIS, network, email, office software, HRIS, servers, AI, productivity tools, and more. We capture everything in your environment, so you really have the full picture.
What is the jumpstart process?
After the initial evaluation, we put together a plan for the first 30-60-90 days based on the highest priority concerns and goals for onboarding your environment. From there, we can begin working with your leadership team on a long-term governance and technology strategy.
What makes OculusIT’s evaluation different?
We have a higher education-focused process. It informs how we do everything in our organization, and it lets us ask questions multi-purpose MSPs wouldn’t.
How do you report your findings?
We present these findings at the onboarding wrap-up, along with our jumpstart priorities, so you can understand exactly what work is underway.