Managing Educational Information Technology (IT) Transformation

Private universities are emerging rapidly in Egypt and are facing a number of critical challenges. Educational Information Technology (IT) is considered one of the most important factors for competition, survival, and sustainability in the education industry. Any change in technology consecutively affects other factors and vice versa. With the move of the American University in Cairo (AUC) from the downtown strategic location to one of the suburbs, many constraints and challenges were imposed coupled with the implications associated with Egypt’s uprising. To guarantee sustainability, there is a need to manage properly educational IT performance. However, as Hoerner (2008) stated, “indicators are needed for sustainability because you cannot manage what you do not measure”. To identify the indicators of sustainability and the factors that affect them, satisfaction was used as surrogate measure for educational IT performance. This paper demonstrates the experience of the American University in Cairo in deploying IT in education while going through school and university transformation and a nations’ uprising with a number of lessons learned, and opportunities created for different stakeholders in the national educational ecosystem.