Keith Fowlkes has served in higher education nearly 25 years in administrative, academic, and consultative roles. Keith is currently vice president, technology business category for E&I Cooperatives, Inc. in Jericho, NY. E&I is a not-for-profit organization that creates and manages collaborative contracts for its 4,000 higher education and K-12 member institutions.
Fowlkes was previously Chief Information Officer at Centre College in Danville, KY. where he was in charged with the strategic development and management of information technology across the College. Fowlkes is also co-founder and Vice President of the Board of Directors for the Higher Education Systems and Services Consortium (HESS). The HESS Consortium is a association of private, non-profit colleges and universities focusing on collective agreements with enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors and shared personnel services.
Fowlkes has also served as Vice Chancellor for Information Technology & Chief Information Officer at the University of Virginia's College at Wise and taught in the Department of Business Administration and Economics from 2007-2013 and CIO at Saint Mary's College- Notre Dame, Indiana from 2001 to 2007. Previous to this, he served as Director of Academic Computing at Hanover College in Southern Indiana for ten years (1991-2001) where he taught in the Department of Business Administration and the Department of Math and Computer Science six of those years.
He has been a consultant for many major corporations and non-profit organizations and is a frequent writer and speaker on information policy, strategic planning, technology buying and emerging technologies. He has been a contributing writer for EDUCAUSE review, InformationWeek and the ACUTA Journal. Fowlkes received his B.S. in Business from the University of Tennessee and his Masters in Information Management and M.B.A. with honors from Webster University of St. Louis, MO.
In 2018 the EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program is examining the concept of next generation enterprise IT. This blog identifies ERP pricing challenges and proposes a collaborative approach involving technology purchasers and providers to address those challenges.
Given the changes in today’s educational marketplace, to succeed institutions need to collaborate and look deeper into not only where technology dollars are spent but how they are spent.
To manage the financial challenges of developing a cloud strategy, make a compelling business case, communicate clearly with the rest of the institution, use governance for decision making, align with institutional mission, and pay attention to risk.