I constantly refer to EDUCAUSE in my blog, which is the organization that fosters the professional relationship amongst Higher Ed IT leaders. Prior to EDUCAUSE, there were two organizations, one called EDUCOM and the other called CAUSE. EDUCOM was primarily the gathering place for academic computing and CAUSE was for administrative computing. In 1998, the two merged to form EDUCAUSE. If you look at what is happening at EDUCAUSE conferences lately, they tend to be light on administrative systems because administrative systems professionals gather more at the meetings organized by the major ERP vendors – Ellucian Live, PeopleSoft HEUG and Jenzabar JAM. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a collaborative effort between EDUCAUSE and NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) to bring together CIOs and CBOs (Chief Business Officers) of about 150 institutions for an Administrative IT summit in Chicago in June.

A report was produced based on the proceedings in the summit, which I have found to be very informative and easy reading. One of the most important things, while obvious, is not stated often enough, can be found in this report:

“Although administrative IT systems and services are essential to the operations of our institutions, most of them do not significantly differentiate one institution from another. For example, hiring and paying employees, handling procurements, and managing budgets are all important—even mission-critical—functions, but they don’t influence a student’s decision to attend an institution.”

I thought it would be nice to review the recommendations from this report and see how we are doing with respect to these.

“Keep an eye on the changing landscape of sourcing options. Alternatives to an on-premise administrative system are growing. Develop an institutional sourcing strategy that may include a mix of cloud services, shared services, and on-premise services. The use of alternative sourcing options may result in cost reduction or cost avoidance, allowing funds to be reallocated to activities with a greater impact on institutional mission.”

I think we are in great shape here. Our strategy, as outlined in our strategic plan , calls for moving to the cloud where possible and we have done that extremely well. In comparison to the others, as depicted in the graphic at the top, we are way ahead. We have moved faculty, students and staff to Google Apps for Education, and most recently, our alumnae. Our learning management systems and multimedia repository (Kaltura) are in the cloud. We just moved our entire web server infrastructure to Acquia. We are in the process of provisioning some disk space on Amazon S3. In every one of these cases, we have examined the solution carefully, consulted the community and have saved money. So where did all the savings go? We returned the some of the savings back to the College during the recent budget reductions and have reallocated the other funds to support the academic support areas. Whereas we can do a lot more to support the computing and big data generated by our faculty and students, we are doing a lot more than what we used to!

“Examine business processes to decrease the need for customization of administrative IT systems and increase alignment between business processes and institutional strategy. Redesigning business processes may be another way to reduce or avoid costs. This is particularly important in the earliest stages of planning for a major costly system upgrade or change.”

Again, I think we are doing reasonably well here. Whereas we do not customize the core IT systems such as Banner (which I believe is what is being referred to here), we develop custom solutions for the community which is in line with the business process redesign. It is also the case that there is a need for the apps we develop and there are no viable solutions that exist. Thanks to a GREAT group of functional office staff, we collaborate well and have produced a whole list of applications. Many apps for the registrar (such as classroom scheduling and transfer credit app), paperless admissions for Admissions, student checklist and summer pre registration for student life, open enrollment for HR, seamless integration between Banner forms and Nolij document imaging system for Resources are some of the examples of such systems. I am proud to say that we have developed an infrastructure to do this using the data in Banner and other systems but not customizing Banner itself. As a result, though we have done major upgrades, the time and effort needed to make these apps work after the upgrade has been minimal.

“Use data from administrative systems to provide business intelligence to support institutional strategy. An analytics strategy will increase the degree to which administrative systems and the data they contain can inform institutional decisions, making analytics an important factor in maximizing the value of administrative IT systems.”

We launched a Business Intelligence (BI) project two years ago, so again, we are in a very good shape here. The student module is being rolled out more widely as we speak, though it has been used by selected offices in very interesting ways. Our plan is to exploit the infrastructure we have to build BI for other important data. We have plans to do that for a calendar system we are developing as well as for alumnae data. I am excited that our finance and budget BI will be put to use soon!

“Develop collaborative relationships between IT and business and between institutions and corporate partners to increase the benefits of administrative IT. 

Have a cross-institutional focus. Efforts to collaborate across the enterprise result in more successful administrative IT operations.”

We have strong relationships with other liberal arts colleges and vendors whose products we use. LTS staff attend gatherings of their colleagues from many New England College administrative systems technologists annually, called NEDAC. We host an annual gathering of about 100 technologists at Wellesley, called NETech. We collaborate in terms of sharing ideas about appropriate uses of Banner and other software. Can more be done? Absolutely.

“Communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more. Presenters and attendees stressed the importance of communicating early and often about administrative IT issues as a way to increase transparency, get buy-in, increase the success of change management efforts, educate others, provide updates, and so on.”

Absolutely. We are constantly finding ways to improve effective communications. I can guarantee that we are in a much better place than ever before, but this will continue to be a challenge. The reason is, communication is a two way street and there is an implicit agreement that both sides are paying attention to each others’ communications. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Recently, we have created an administrative oversight structure that includes senior managers from each division. This has vastly improved communication and more importantly, bring institutional focus to the projects we are launching.

“Remember that success factors are cultural. It important to understand the institutional culture and make decisions appropriate to that culture.”

We constantly remind ourselves about this. Campus culture is elusive, non-uniform and dynamic. Recognizing all of these aspects is a key to what we do. For example, something we do may resonate well with one group and not with the others and what was acceptable yesterday may not be today (well, things don’t change overnight in Higher Ed, but you got the point). Our “mantra” is that our primary obligation is to serve the community and be the best service organization that we can be. We cannot succeed in this if we cannot recognize and accommodate the culture of the institution.

As you can see, we are doing pretty good overall. There is always room for improvement and we will strive to improve constantly. In this line of business we cannot be complacent!