One of the things I have learned through KANE is that higher education is very good at solving the same problem more than once. We negotiate with many of the same vendors, evaluate the same technologies, struggle to recruit the same specialized talent, and work through similar cybersecurity issues, contracts, licensing questions, staffing challenges, and implementation problems.
Most of the time, we still do that institution by institution, and then get together later to compare notes. That has never made much sense to me.
I believe strongly in institutional independence. Every college and university has its own mission, culture, priorities, and constraints. But independence does not mean we need to approach every problem alone. That distinction is a big part of why I believe in KANE.
It started with permission to think differently
KANE did not begin with a complicated structure, a large budget, or a formal shared-services model. It began with leaders who encouraged us to think differently about what institutions could do together.
Presidents and executive sponsors matter more than they sometimes realize. Leaders such as Dr. Marysz Rames, Dr. Michael Chipps, Dr. Roger Hughes, Dr. Kimberly Krull, and others created space for collaboration by encouraging us to look beyond institutional boundaries.
One conversation with Dr. Chipps has stayed with me for years. He asked a simple question: “Why can't we share staff or systems?”
The question was bigger than it sounded. He was encouraging me to stop thinking first about organizational structures and start thinking about trust. What could institutions do together if we began with the assumption that we wanted one another to succeed?
Not long after that, three technology leaders met, talked about what was possible, and made a very simple commitment to one another. We agreed that we would help each other, empower each other, and share what we knew.
We shook on it.
That was KANE.
There was no elaborate governance model behind that handshake. There was simply enough trust among three institutions to say: if one of us knows something that can help another, we should share it.
Those three institutions eventually became a community of 21 institutions. Along the way, the definition of the community expanded too. Some of the people we now consider part of KANE work for commercial partners, because they have earned that level of trust through the way they support our institutions and our people.
That growth did not happen because we built a perfect structure first. The structure followed the relationships.
The value is not the consortium. It is the relationships.
I have never been particularly interested in collaboration just for the sake of collaboration. A consortium only matters if it helps its members make better decisions, save time or money, build expertise, reduce risk, or solve something they would have struggled to solve on their own.
What I have seen over time is that the real value of KANE is not a meeting, a contract, or even a specific shared service. It is trust. When people know one another well enough, the conversation gets much more useful.
You can call another institution and ask what they are actually paying, whether a product really worked, what they would do differently, who is good at a particular issue, or whether they would buy the same thing again. Those conversations are often worth more than a formal presentation or vendor reference.
Sometimes the most valuable thing another institution can tell you is, “Don’t do what we did.”
I have personally saved my institution roughly $30,000 because of a conversation over an omelet with another KANE member. No formal study, no consulting engagement, no committee. Just two people comparing notes honestly about what they were paying and what they had learned.
That is the kind of value that is easy to miss if we only think about shared services as formal contracts or platforms.
Better decisions matter more than group decisions
This is probably the most important thing I have learned about shared purchasing and shared services: the objective is not to make everyone buy the same thing. The objective is to make better decisions together.
We have had opportunities through KANE where a group agreement made excellent sense for some institutions and not for others. That is not a failure of the consortium. In some cases, the value of working together was simply having better information.
One institution may need a product another institution has intentionally reduced or eliminated. One may already have favorable pricing. Another may have a technical requirement that changes the economics completely. A consortium should create leverage and information, not pressure institutions into uniformity.
Sometimes the result should be a shared contract. Sometimes it should be a shared service. Sometimes it should be five institutions studying the same technology and making five different decisions. All of those can be successful outcomes.
We have already seen this work
Some of KANE's earliest value came from institutions comparing IT service management practices and service-center models. Instead of everyone independently redesigning the same processes, people shared what worked, what did not, and where they were struggling.
Over time, those conversations became more sophisticated. Institutions compared platforms, processes, staffing models, and eventually explored ways to work together more formally. ServiceNow is one example of that evolution.
Not every KANE institution needs ServiceNow, and that is not the point. The important part is that institutions were able to evaluate the opportunity together, share expertise, create leverage, and build a model that works for those who need it.
That model has continued because it solves a real problem.
The strongest example came during a cyberattack
One of the clearest examples for me came during a serious cybersecurity incident at a KANE member institution. Ryan Dorshorst and members of his team at Doane worked alongside colleagues from Central Community College and Wayne State College to help another institution through the incident.
Tevin Manuel helped lead that effort.
Tevin works in the vendor community, but that description does not really capture why so many of us value him. He brought expertise, leadership, and calm to a situation where another institution needed help immediately.
For roughly 90 hours, people rotated through an open Zoom meeting, bringing different skills, helping solve problems, and supporting the institution as it worked to recover.
What happened afterward matters just as much.
The institution that received the help did not simply take what the network gave it and move on. It shared what it learned back with the rest of us: what happened, what worked, what it would do differently, and what others could change before they faced the same situation.
In my view, the value that came back to the institutions that helped was probably greater than what they had contributed in the first place. One institution survived a serious incident, while several others became better prepared to prevent or respond to the next one.
Nobody had to mandate that collaboration. No legislation created it. There was no complicated governance structure that had to be activated first. The relationships already existed, people trusted one another, and they helped.
That is KANE.
Higher education has a capacity problem
This is where I think the case for working together gets even stronger. Most technology organizations in higher education do not have a shortage of things to do; we have a shortage of capacity.
There are only so many experienced cybersecurity professionals, network engineers, data experts, enterprise application administrators, project managers, and other specialists available. For smaller and midsized institutions, it is increasingly difficult to maintain deep expertise in every area internally.
That should force us to ask better questions. Do all of us need to independently develop the same expertise? Could one institution's strength help another? Could several institutions jointly evaluate something instead of duplicating the work? Could specialized expertise eventually be shared? Could we negotiate certain contracts together while preserving institutional choice?
Those are the kinds of questions I think a shared-services consortium should be asking.
Good partners matter too
I also want to be careful not to frame all of this as institutions on one side and vendors on the other.
There are some exceptional people representing technology companies in higher education. Call them salespeople, account executives, consultants, or CEOs; most of us who have been doing this for a while know who the good ones are.
They still have a responsibility to make money for their companies. I expect that. What separates the best from everyone else is that they understand how to do it by building trust.
Some of the strongest vendor relationships I have had were with people who understood what my institution could realistically afford, what problem I was actually trying to solve, and where there was real value for both sides. They did not win my trust by selling me everything they could. They won it by helping me make better decisions, including sometimes telling me when something was not right for us.
I have followed some of the same account representatives from company to company because I trust them that much. They solve problems. They understand higher education. They know that a relationship can be worth more over ten years than a transaction is worth this quarter.
Tevin is a good example of that. He did not become valuable to this community because of a title or a contract. He became valuable because when the network needed him, he showed up.
I wish I could name every one of those people here. I cannot. But you know who you are. We see you, and you are part of this community too.
The same is true for our people
One part of KANE that I value more than I expected is what it can do for professional development. A person working in a specialized role at one institution may have no true peer on their own campus. Through KANE, suddenly they do.
They can compare approaches, ask questions, share work, lead discussions, and build relationships with people doing similar jobs elsewhere. That creates opportunity without requiring someone to leave their institution to find a larger professional community.
For organizations that struggle to recruit and retain specialized technology talent, that matters.
Shared services should start with shared problems
I think we sometimes make shared services more complicated than they need to be by starting with the service instead of the problem.
I would rather ask: Where are institutions repeatedly spending money on the same thing? Where are we duplicating work? Where is specialized expertise difficult to find? Where is better information valuable? Where would working together actually make the participating institutions stronger?
And just as important: where would it not?
That is the standard I would use. KANE does not need to become one giant centralized IT organization, and that is not the point. The point is to recognize that every institution has strengths, every institution has gaps, and there are problems we can solve more effectively when we stop pretending organizational boundaries have to be barriers.
That is why I believe in the shared-services consortium model: not because collaboration sounds good, but because higher education has finite resources, difficult problems, and a remarkable amount of expertise already distributed across our institutions.
We should use it.
