It is snowing heavily and snow everywhere you turn!

While I was at a retreat last week, one of the faculty members was explaining to a trustee how easy it was for her to install and use apps like Uber and Lyft, she has a lot of trouble with software that the College asks her to use, such as Banner and Sakai. I wrote about a similar app that I used in India called Ola cabs. I agreed and gave her some reasons why.

One of the major reasons is that many of the software we use were originally developed very early on and due to a variety of factors, the software companies are simply building on top of older software. The newer “apps” are built using very efficient and modern programming paradigms and have a huge advantage as a result. In other words, if one were to design a brand new learning management system from scratch today, it is likely to be far more in line with the available technologies of today and will look and function very differently. Workday is one such example of an administrative system. It looks very polished, functions very efficiently using technologies such as virtualization in a seamless fashion whereas comparable software like Banner or Peoplesoft have the old look and feel and are monsters in terms of resource requirements. They do use virtualization, but nowhere near to its fullest extent.

That leads us to why is it that these companies are not developing systems using newer technologies as they develop. This is an extremely complicated issue  and the major factors are money and installed base. The pricing structure that was originally developed by these vendors did not recognize the fact that every once in a while systems will benefit from a complete overhaul. In order to attract the customers, they priced it low for just incremental improvements. The Higher Ed market is also very tough one. We have two competing interests – one is resistance to change and the other is wanting more and modern features. Any changes to our systems will create a major discussion on campus as to why are the vendors doing this? “I just invested time to learn this version of the software and here you are, asking me to unlearn it all”.  Yet, you hear “why is the user interface so bad?”. Granted that you may not hear the same thing from every user, but many do complain both ways.

The other issue is customer feedback. We work very closely with the vendors and they therefore have a very different customer relationship model than the Ubers of the world. Uber makes sure to put out a great product and keep updating it based on analytics and many other indirect inferences about the users. Unless there is a groundswell of complaints about features etc, they are a bit too far removed from direct interaction with the end users.  Ellucian does not make drastic changes to the product without major consultation with the higher ed customers and trying to get even a semblance of consensus is such a huge task.

Most of the apps that one uses and downloads are based on a personal need or because of its popularity. It is by personal choice in the end. Higher Ed software are far from personal choice! As an institution, we need to make a choice on a product. Different institutions do this differently, but generally it is a representative body that makes these decisions and they are very long term decisions. It is not like person A likes Uber, so she downloads and uses it and person B likes Lyft and therefore he boasts about it. Higher Ed software choices are seen by the users as the institution imposing a product on them that they generally don’t like! If we say to the users feel free to choose Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard or Sakai, I think there may be certain small groups that are happy about the ability to make choices, but overall, as an institution, it will be a disaster. It will create tremendous confusion overall and there will not be enough resources to support them all – remember that unlike Uber, all of these still need support.

There are many other differences, but you get the point. Ideally, we want modern higher ed software to be mobile first with considerable resources allocated to better user interface design and quality assurance. They should also be agile enough to adopt to newer technologies. And the users in Higher Ed in return should be willing to accept frequent changes.

I think Workday model (for administrative systems) is getting us close to that – it is like the “apps” in many ways. It is mobile first, uses modern technologies, the company makes major changes to their systems and interfaces twice a year that affects all users at the same time (in other words, you can’t postpone the upgrades like we do now). We shall see how this works out.