The effects of declining enrollments, rising costs, increasing public scrutiny, diminishing financial and energy resources, and emerging environmental impact considerations will be felt by all institutions of higher education, regardless of institutional type. To cope with these threatening issues, a strategic planning process must be developed which places significant emphasis on the resources to be integrated and coordinated. Such a process must include a pre-planning phase, a needs assessment mechanism, a mission statement, achievable institutional goals, comprehensiveness in scope, a key planning officer, executive management commitment, involvement of staff on all levels, short- and long-range goals, a cyclical structure, use of information as the basis for planning, data collection and coordination of information linkages, flexibility, a priority-setting mechanism, a tie between planning and budgeting, institutional research, synchronization with state planning processes, and a routinely updated master plan. A second major management component over which institutions must gain better control in the future, is information resource management. Extending beyond the traditional scope of computing services, information processing in the future should also include text management and computer/communications networks, in order to bridge the information gap between data processing and the management decision-making process. (AYC)