Introduction
Declining enrollment trends, shifting federal funding, and new tax implications for endowments are creating significant budget constraints across higher education. Hiring freezes limit capacity while institutional priorities shift rapidly in response to external pressures. And IT organizations are still being asked to “do more with less,” making it harder to move strategic initiatives forward.
Leaders are unsure whether to adapt their plans constantly or stay the course. Long-range planning feels nearly impossible in this fast-changing environment: many leaders say it feels like the early days of the pandemic, when simply maintaining operations required extraordinary effort. Employee burnout is rising, and service quality is at risk.
In this climate, strategic partnerships are essential for resilient institutions. Collaborations with consultants, vendors, and peer institutions can complement internal teams, provide specialized expertise, and help maintain momentum on key priorities. These collaborations offer more than just cost savings: they can provide additional capacity and specialized knowledge needed to navigate uncertain times while preserving institutional stability and strengthening organizational resilience.
This article outlines how IT leaders can use partnerships to build organizational resilience, support their employees, and reducing burnout during a time of constant change.
Identify the things you can reasonably stop doing
Most of the time, “doing more with less” isn’t realistic. Instead, to keep staff engagement high and to keep burnout at bay, we must review and cut low value tasks.
Knowing where to focus your energy requires an honest assessment of what tasks you can stop doing. One approach to this, known as the “25% Plan,” is an exercise we conduct with clients as part of their strategic planning efforts. It’s a way of finding the least efficient and least valuable quartile of the organization’s work so that teams can focus their efforts on tasks with the most impact.
In working with clients, we’ve found that every team has a selection of tasks that they believe to be mission critical but which reveal themselves not to be essential upon further inspection. Sometimes it takes an external party to identify those tasks.
The 25% Plan
While we offer the service, you can also facilitate this exercise on your own! Check out the 25% Plan to learn more.
“It’s critical to communicate the purpose of this exercise clearly with your team: this is not about downsizing or layoffs. This is about taking action to empower your team to work on impactful, meaningful projects.”
– Cathy Bates, Vantage Senior Principal, Associate Partner
Leverage consortia and partners for shared benefits
As deep higher education discounts have largely disappeared and vendors have shifted away from education-friendly pricing models, the power of aligning with peer institutions has become critical. Organizations like Internet2 and NERCOMP demonstrate how collaborative purchasing can secure meaningful discounts that individual institutions cannot achieve alone.
This approach extends beyond simple group purchasing. Other consortium benefits include sharing technology resources, staff expertise, and even collaborative product development that can be helpful to all partners. When vendors force larger service bundles or shift product direction away from higher education priorities, user groups and associations can more effectively represent community needs and influence vendor decisions. The key is proactive collaboration: build these relationships before crises arise so you can respond collectively.
“Higher education IT leaders may not be enjoying the same steep discounts we came to enjoy over the past few decades, but that doesn’t mean that you must accept drastically higher costs or reduced services. A little creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking can go a long way as you strive to provide the best solutions for your campus. Remember: you’re never in this alone.”
– Cynthia Golden, Executive Strategic Consultant, and Jon Young, Vice President (from the blog: “Deep Higher Education Discounts Are Gone. Now What?”)
Access intentional peer discussions and shared experiences
Partnerships with peer institutions offer some of the most accessible and mutually beneficial opportunities for weathering financial and other forms of uncertainty. These partnerships can extend beyond IT to include shared academic programs, articulation agreements, or collaborative research agreements that reduce individual institutional investment while expanding capacity.
Explore opportunities robustly and define “peer” broadly: while facing shared challenges is helpful, it may also be helpful to identify institutions with complementary (rather than shared) challenges and strengths. For instance, a liberal arts college might partner with a regional university to share specialized experience.
Adjust your AI mindset
Rather than viewing artificial intelligence and automation as future considerations, treat them as immediate efficiency multipliers that can transform how your existing team operates. Begin by identifying repetitive, time-intensive processes across departments and systematically introduce automations that can handle routine tasks while freeing staff for higher-value strategic work. This approach requires shifting from a growth-through-hiring mindset to a growth-through-optimization strategy. It also adds a focus on investing in the professional growth of team members to develop, implement, and maintain new solutions.
Continue to develop the team
When budget constraints make new hires impossible, investing in the professional development of existing team members becomes both a strategic necessity and a competitive advantage. Rather than viewing training as a discretionary expense, treat it as essential infrastructure that transforms current staff into the specialized talent your institution needs for the future.
Focus development efforts on both high-impact areas and operational priorities. High-impact areas might include cybersecurity, cloud architecture, data analytics, and emerging technologies that align with your institutional roadmap. Operational priorities might include training help desk staff in advanced troubleshooting to reduce escalations, developing project management capabilities among technical staff, or building data literacy across departments to improve decision-making.
This approach not only builds critical capabilities within your existing budget but also demonstrates commitment to staff growth during challenging times, improving retention and morale. Consider partnering with vendors for certification programs, leveraging online learning platforms for flexible skill building, or creating internal mentorship programs that spread expertise across the team.
Refresh your budget with expert support
Bringing in external expertise to refresh your IT budget can reveal hidden inefficiencies and optimization opportunities that internal teams, focused on daily operations, might miss. Independent consultants and specialized firms can conduct comprehensive budget audits that identify redundant software licenses, underutilized cloud services, and misaligned technology investments that may be consuming significant resources without delivering proportional value.
An outside perspective can also uncover opportunities to consolidate software subscriptions, right size cloud instances, optimize licensing models, and plan multi-year hardware refresh budgets that align with institutional priorities rather than vendor timelines.
Finally, experts can also provide benchmarking against peer institutions and industry standards, helping justify difficult budget decisions to leadership while ensuring your software, hardware, and cloud investments support long-term strategic goals rather than simply maintaining the status quo.
Thriving during times of financial and broader environmental difficulties is about making deliberate choices that build institutional resilience and create sustainable operations. Knowing that many institutions across the country are facing similar challenges can be reassuring. Building partnerships and embracing collaborative models can help your organization take positive steps toward sustainability.
This post was authored by Director of Strategic Team Operations Shannon Dunn, who advises clients on strategic planning, CIO executive leadership, educational and classroom technologies, and initiatives that transform institutional academic and administrative capabilities; and Senior Strategic Consultant Susan Featherston, who provides consulting related to IT and data governance, strategic planning, organizational assessments, process and service improvements, change management, and executive communications.
Need Help?
Our team of higher education experts is available to help you make strategic technology decisions that prepare your organization for long-term success, even in difficult financial moments. And don’t forget to leverage your incredible community of peers: higher education’s willingness to share is part of what makes it special.