Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Vicki Tambellini Reflects on 2019 and Looks Ahead to the New Year
The Tambellini Group’s President and CEO Vicki Tambellini talks about unforeseen higher education trends in 2019, predictions that came true, and what surprised her in 2019. She also makes predictions for higher education technology in 2020.
Hello and welcome to our top of mind podcast. I'm your host, Katleyn Ilkani, Vice President of Client Services and Cybersecurity Tesearch at The Tambellini Group. We have a special program for you today. I'm joined by Vicki Tambellini, who is the founder and CEO of The Tambellini Group. In this program, we will sit down with Vicki and discuss the top ed tech trends from 2019 and her predictions for 2020 let's get started. Thanks for joining me today, Vicki.
Speaker 2:Hi Katelyn. Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker 1:To kick us off, Vicki, I'd like to hear from you about the trends in higher ed technology that surprised you in 2019.
Speaker 2:Katelyn, that's a really interesting question and as I thought about the question that you asked, the number one thing that came to my mind was the number of institutions that slowed on major projects to build more support from their boards, directors and presidents. In the past when institutions were planning for major technology purchases, of course they spent, have spent a lot of time gaining support across their campuses and of course had socialized projects with their boards and the presidents will be aware of the projects that would be coming, but typically as the campus was building consensus, the boards would be advised and things would be scheduled and go right through board approval. And in 2019 we had quite a few institutions to start it down a process with their boards and projects were delayed or or sidelined and that was quite a surprise and in most of the cases, in fact, all of the ones that we were directly involved in, the board didn't say that the projects couldn't proceed. What they said was that they wanted the institution to take more time to gather more information, to be more sure that they had all of the information about the project and that they were gathering all the information that they would need over the total lifetime of the project. And that the, they anticipated that they would approve the projects, but it would be over a much longer period of time that was originally anticipated. So projects that we thought for example, might take six months to get approved and funded would now take in many cases over a year. So that was a big surprise to us in 2019. The second thing I would mention is that we in 2019 saw a number of institutions still buying on-prem applications. I think in 2018 we thought we had seen the last of institutions buying a client-server based student information systems. And yet we saw it again in 2019 and I think we may see one or two more, even in 2020 in the US so that is that was a big surprise in 2019 and I think we'll see it again in 2020. And the reason it was a surprise in 2019 is because we felt like the newer systems that were being built by vendors like Unit4 and Oracle and Workday were far enough along that institutions would buy those systems and know that they would by the time that they could roll the system out there, the functionality that they needed would be in the applications. But we saw what we saw in 2019 was that in fact that level of confidence was not there and in some cases it was the vendors themselves that went to the institutions and said, you know, we are not going to be able to deliver the functionality that you need and the timeline that you need it. And so institutions have been put in a really difficult situation. If they've got a system that's end of life, something that they really need to replace in a very short period of time. Now they've, they've been put in a position where they have to buy a solution that they know is basically only going to be able to be used for a couple of years before they are not going to get vendor support anymore before they have to replace it again. But that's, we are actually still seeing that in the market. So those are the two big surprises.
Speaker 1:Thanks Vicki. What did happen in 2019 that you predicted in 2018?
Speaker 2:The things that we saw in 2019 that we're not so much of a surprise were institutions understanding the importance of looking at integration as a service. First of all, um, most of the vendors that provide Integration as a Service or iPasS solutions are not higher education specific vendors. Right. And sometimes they may have one or two sales reps that they even call on higher education. So they're not necessarily very well up to speed on all the things that higher education cares about. So it can be difficult for higher ed to get the attention that they need. But we did see in 2019 a number of institutions make new commitments to integration as a service platforms and to in some cases multiple platforms depending on the size of the institution with the understanding that integrations are painful to write and maintain, difficult to keep up with. The more the more applications are being bought, especially as institutions continue to buy point solutions across the enterprise and that as institutions continue to think about moving more and more to the cloud, there will be possibly hundreds of integrations to maintain over a much longer period of time. And so having that integration as a service platform become something that's really important for the institution to consider. So that was something that we saw and I think we'll continue to see and there are different approaches for it. Of course there's some, some it shops that want to have much more hands on experience with applications have different options than those that want to have more integration done by the tool. So that was important in 2019 we also saw reporting and analytics continued to take a center role in many of our discussions. And when institutions think about being able to make decisions based on data, it becomes very difficult with the applications that they have today because they have not always had good data governance or even data stewards within the institution. So there's an increased emphasis today on looking at the data, looking at data governance and thinking about how to put data in some sort of stewardship model so that reporting and analytics can be standardized going forward. So depending on the environment that the institution is operating in, there are many ways to look at reporting and analytics. Getting started somehow, even if it's a very small team with two or three people is something that we're seeing many institutions focus on. And that was a prediction that we talked about early in 2019 that the did come true.
Speaker 1:I'm curious if there were predictions you made in 2018 that did not come true.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, of course there are always some things that you think are going to happen that that don't materialize. And sometimes it's because you just missed the mark. And sometimes there are things that you just can't see coming. But in one particular area that was a surprise to us is in the advancement community of there been, there are some really good reasons that advancement solutions need to be replaced. There are some, many of the advancement communities are operating with a number of third party solutions that are being pieced together and they're, some of them are end of life. The institutional advancement communities are struggling with the solutions that they have in many cases and they want, want to replace the solutions that they have depending on where the, where they are in their life cycle and where they overall campuses in terms of the rest of their it organization. They may or may not be able to do something about their advancement problem, may have been not be able to do something about it in 2019 and they may or may not be able to do something about it in 2020. So if they have their own it organization, their own information technology director or their own CIO, they're in a much different situation to go out and look at a new solution, begin implementing a new solution, especially if they're not in the middle of the campaign. If they are in the middle of a campaign or they're getting or just started a new campaign many times there, they need to wait till they get all the way through a campaign to start to implement a new system because obviously they don't want to be going through a system upgrade while they're also in an important fundraising initiative. So me advancement spending that's been delayed was a big surprise. We also saw a couple of vendors that had high hopes in that, in that community, um, that changed ownership. For example, Salesforce bought roundCorner in the last year or so. And that, that made a difference in the way the advancement solutions were lining up. And we've seen solutions from outside of the US coming into the US market. So solutions like thankQ and Causeview from outside of the US coming into this market which has given US institutions more to consider. And that's also slowed some spending as institutions think about other options and of course we always see Blackbaud and Ellucian as competitors in this space.
Speaker 1:So looking ahead to this year, what are your predictions for 2020?
Speaker 2:Well, in 2020 we think that institutions will continue to be very thoughtful about how to deal with the rapid pace of technology change. Even if the institution has a fairly stable technology infrastructure and ecosystem technology continues to change all around the institution because then every vendor that institutions work with continues to upgrade their technology. The tools that institutions are using or being faced with, continue to be upgraded and changed. Certainly security issues continue to change. So institutions are forced to continue to try to keep up with what's happening all around them. And we are going to continue to see, I believe more emphasis on assessments, assessing IT organizations, assessing the future of what the cloud looks like for each institution, assessing organizationally how to prepare staff, infrastructure, and spending for what these new models look like for the organization. So I believe we'll see more spending on assessments in 2020 and I think we'll also see more emphasis on change management going forward. There's a real understanding that no matter what, how much you socialize and change, that's coming to an institution. We never hear institutions say we spent too much on change management. When we often hear institutions say we wish we'd paid more attention or we wish we'd talked to this group or that group sooner or we wish we had spent more in training or some facet of change management had had paid more than paid more attention to. So we think that that's going to continue to be very important. And, um, and then I think we're, we'll see more spending in 2020 on student systems that there's been a lot over the last three or four years on student spending. That's an area that we track very closely as an indicator of what's happening in the rest of the market. And there will be an increase in student information spending in 2020. We think that as Workday has more institutions live on more components of their system and more to celebrate in that area, they'll give the rest of the market more confidence that there's more coming for higher education in terms of cloud systems. We also think we'll see more selections on the Oracle Cloud product, which will be good for higher ed overall. We see campus management also being selected more broadly in the traditional higher education spaces may have been a vendor that has traditionally been in the for-profit space. So that's, that's been very good for higher education. And then the last thing I've mentioned is that we're seeing more spending on faculty information systems, which has been an area, it's a relatively new area for higher education technology. So faculty has often felt that, that the institution needed to do more for faculty when they spending on administration and that having solutions in place to help track faculty tenure faculty publications is something that's really important and there's more emphasis today on understanding the role of faculty and the contributions that they're making and doing a better job of tracking that faculty value and this whole area faculty information system that's really expanding very rapidly in the last, the last several years. So we think we'll continue to see more spending in that area as well.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, Vicki, for your today.
Speaker 1:It seems like 2020 is going to be a very exciting year and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it should be very exciting. We plan to publish somewhere close to a hundred new market reports this year and we'll continue to track as much as our customers ask us to and look forward to it as well. Thank you for inviting me today.
Speaker 1:This concludes our Top of Mind Podcast. Please check back with us next month for another great topic on higher education technology.