 I'm Leah Lang, Senior IT Metrics and Benchmarking Analyst at EDUCAUSE. I lead the Association's efforts on the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service, also known as CDS. CDS is a benchmarking service that colleges and universities have been using since 2002 to inform their IT strategic planning and management. If you haven't participated in CDS, you probably know someone who has. Roughly 750 to 1,000 institutions contribute data each year. More than 1,600 institutions have participated in at least one year. Participating in CDS is a year-round process with two phases, data collection and data access. In the data collection phase, your institution completes a survey with questions about IT financials, staffing and services. In the data access phase, you can access identifiable survey data to compare your institution to your peer institutions on key IT financials, staffing and service metrics. CDS data is used to produce reports and publications such as an annual summary report and the popular CDS Almanacs. Almanacs summarize and analyze the annual CDS survey data for groups including Carnegie class and consortia, such as the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges. CDS data is also used for e-card research and can be seen most recently in reports on the enterprise application marketplace, IT services in community colleges, and evaluating service quality. These resources are valuable to the community, but this isn't why institutions participate. The number one reason for participation in CDS is to gain access to data from peer institutions. Institutions use CDS data to compare and contrast IT resource allocation and to inform the development of IT support models. CDS data can also be used to benchmark specific IT service areas such as IT security, teaching and learning, and enterprise applications. For example, through CDS, we know that information security lead is a part-time role at most institutions. Only 29% dedicate a full FTE to the role, and 22% devote less than 10% of an FTE. Public institutions generally allocate more of an FTE to the lead information security role than private institutions. We also learned that community colleges generally outpace other institutions in the areas of distance education and online learning. The enterprise application module gave us insight into the market share for open source versus vendor products. Open source is most widespread in two application areas, learning management and content management. 26% of institutions use open source options for these application systems. Moodle and Sakai are among the top five LMS solutions being used today. These are only a few examples of important metrics from CDS 2012. For CDS 2013, keep an eye out for a new focus on key IT financial staffing and service metrics and additional improvements to the data collection user interface. Launching in 2012, the biggest and most exciting recent improvement is our new reporting tool, Core Data Reporting. The new tool is a feature of the data access phase of CDS and is accessible only to CDS participants. Core Data Reporting provides dashboards that enable you to visually navigate the data and benchmark your data against your peers. The tool restores the functionality that was once a part of the original Core Data service, and we've also built a foundation that will enable us to do more in the future. EDUCAUSE is committed to maintaining and improving CDS each year. Your feedback is invaluable to our strategic planning. If you have ideas for how we might improve CDS, we want to hear from you. Participation in the annual survey is the key to gaining access to Core Data Reporting and the IT metrics it contains. The next survey will launch in the summer of 2013. We encourage you to visit our tools and tutorials page on the CDS website. We offer tips and a checklist to help you get started. If you are already a CDS contributor, thank you. If not, we encourage you to take part in this valuable community service. Participating in CDS benefits you, your peers, and the entire community.