| |April - 20189The key challenges and greatest opportunities for IT service providers and innovators are to create the scaffolding and technical frameworks necessary to enable the most complete empowerment of educational constituents. This allows education to take advantage of the promise of advancing technology, when they are ready to do so, in a pragmatic and clearly identified roadmap. This is the commitment the Clearinghouse makes everyday to our many stakeholders.In providing SaaS solutions to the education industry, it is really important to understand that schools have a wide range of capability. In our case, the Clearinghouse must have the technical flexibility to accommodate a wide variety of capabilities among our constituents. In other organizations, and businesses, I assess that the service provider has a greater ability for more ubiquity in their solution offerings. This places a lot of pressure on product management teams to have a very good sense of institutional readiness so they can evolve and assure they have the right product roadmaps to facilitate institutional orclient evolution. One major difference is the approach to managing personally identifiable information and academic records. As software development has moved from waterfall to agile methodologies, and the pace of innovation accelerated, assuring that teams are equipped to evolve their delivery on a reliable points-based system has grown in importance. We try to maintain a healthy tension between point demand (coming from our various business service lines) and point production from the technical teams supporting those lines. Managing this healthy tension, in tandem with building the organizational capacity to throttle up and down based on project urgency and roadmap commitments are also essential. This is particularly relevant when working to achieve goals within a balanced work life eco-system.The list is long in seeing where IT services are headed in education and other industries. In education, standards to meet the evolving digitalization of records and support student mobility are two key areas to address. Education is also following in the footsteps of healthcare around demands for portability, security, privacy and transparency. IT platform service provision to education will continuously need to thread the needle to assure that they can serve institutions on the bleeding edge. This includes establishing nodes on the blockchain to deposit educational artifacts created today and a decade or more from now. A key factor will also be minimizing the number of platforms schools need to manage, while increasing the use of APIs to connect legacy data sources.In all of this, privacy, security and transparency are becoming the mantra of the day. While it looks for more efficient and effective solutions, higher education needs a firm set of requirements around the privacy of student records and transparency and visibility into any privacy commitments. In general, education needs to step up its security. On October 23, The Wall Street Journal published an article on hackers targeting education. There is a lot education can learn from the financial sector about how to manage relationships with vendors that seek, for example, to provide solutions behind the firewall. What protections should they have in place, and what obligations should they put on the vendors to validate that platform changes will not compromise their system?These are some of the issues keeping higher education leaders and their technology staff awake at night, as they seek to deliver their education mission, and the Clearinghouse is with them every step of the way.Rick Torres is the Chief Executive Officer and President of the National Student Clearinghouse, a position he has held since January 2008. Prior to joining the Clearinghouse, Torres spent his career in the private sector, both in the U.S. and abroad, spanning several industry sectors, including health care, financial services, and fast-moving consumer goods in leadership positions, including finance, sales, marketing, operations, technology, and executive management for PepsiCo, Philip Morris/Kraft Foods and Capital One. Throughout his career, he has served on several boards, including the John Tyler Community College Foundation, National College Access Network, and the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, and the American Association of Community Colleges, where he is currently on their Commission on Economic and Workforce Development. In addition, Torres was a founding member and sits on the Executive Committee of the Groningen Declaration Network Group, a multi-national group of leaders dedicated to developing a trusted international data exchange ecosystem. As a mission-driven non-profit, we serve all of education with ubiquitous Software as a Service, Data as a Service, and other service solutions
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