There’s a quiet crisis unfolding across higher education and it doesn’t show up in enrollment numbers or budget reports. It shows up in the daily friction of getting work done.
A financial aid decision that depends on three departments coordinating over email. A compliance review that stalls because no one can locate the right version of a document. An approval process that was designed for one office but now spans six. These aren’t edge cases. They’re the everyday reality for campus operations teams.
Our new eBook, Content is Infrastructure, makes the case that this friction isn’t accidental and it isn’t inevitable. It’s the predictable result of treating information management as an afterthought rather than as foundational infrastructure.
Campus leaders have long recognized that operations are getting more complex. Decisions span more teams. Compliance requirements keep growing. Staff are stretched thin. The instinct has been to reach for more tools – a new workflow app here, a document repository there.
Our eBook argues that traditional systems are built for narrow, linear use cases. They assume predictable workflows and a small number of stakeholders. Campus operations rarely work that way.
The result is fragmented adoption: some departments use the new system, others fall back on parallel tools, and most continue to rely on manual workarounds. Information gets siloed. Governance becomes inconsistent. And the system that was supposed to solve the problem becomes another thing to manage around.
The eBook frames this as a structural mismatch, not a people problem and not a technology problem, but a fundamental misalignment between how campus operations actually function and how the systems supporting them were designed.
