There exists a need for a strategic approach to enterprise software licensing in higher education. With vendors like Adobe, Microsoft, and others moving user management, licensing, and provisioning to the cloud, IT departments face new challenges to support their use. Coupled with individual departments purchasing ad-hoc, further problems are introduced around visibility, cost-control, and compliance.
We will review several real-world cases of how consolidation and centralization has enabled IT departments to reduce & recover costs, get access to better data, and ensure that the digital resources required for teaching, learning, and research are made available to faculty, staff, and students in the most efficient manner.