Tools for Vendor and Higher Ed Collaboration

Campus web service departments are tasked with a daunting mandate. Not only must they help develop and maintain campus web sites; they’re also responsible for facilitating vendor relationships and charting a larger strategic vision for the campus.

Conversely, vendors who work in higher education are often sorely tempted to work outside of the guidelines provided by the campus. Instead of bringing specialized skills to the campus and helping improve central tools, the efforts of these vendors can lead to unforeseen maintenance costs, brand alignment problems, project overruns, and a variety of other issues.

In this session, we’ll review successful methods for collaboration between vendors and web service departments. Together, we can work together to improve web development efforts on campus.

If you’re a vendor, we’ll show you how to interact with your campus clients’ based on their degree of centralization. A few topics we’ll cover:

• When and how to use/contribute to a campus distribution.

• How to encourage campus adoption of new technologies.

• When to use your tools, when to use campus tools.

If you’re a campus web services professional, we’ll show you how to select and interact with different types of vendors. Some questions we’ll answer:

• How to select a hosting partner.

• How to create distributions.

• When should you recommend a freelancer, a webshop, or a full-blown digital agency?

Along the way, we’ll draw on our experiences as a vendor and a campus web services member respectively. We believe the relationship between vendors and campus IT should be a dialogue; this presentation is one manifestation of that dialogue!