Collegiate Project Services
Higher education isn’t our business…it’s our passion.
Latest posts by Collegiate Project Services (see all)
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- 5 Ingredients for Project Success - April 14, 2016
- 4 Common Barriers to Systems Change - February 9, 2016
A great number of institutions are currently asking: are our enterprise systems meeting the needs of our students, our faculty, and our institution as a whole? As higher education continues to evolve with modern advancements and pressures, technology and its ability to serve the institution is at the forefront of strategic conversations on campus. Here are 6 leading challenges that schools are facing, all of which are directly impacting and influencing how schools are looking at their enterprise administrative systems.
Analytics
With nearly every institution facing increased competition coupled with funding pressures, the ability to access and analyze institutional data in a way that delivers real value has never been more important. Institutions need timely and accurate insights into student outcomes, program effectiveness, and a number of other student success measures that ultimately help schools better serve their students (and have a direct impact on revenues with higher student retention).
Stabilize and Strategize IT
For the many institutions still running an ‘on-premise’ ERP, there are inherent risks to maintaining those systems and the environment that supports them. If IT is nearly fully dedicated to the ‘care and feeding’ of campus-hosted systems, there may be limited bandwidth to provide more strategic services to campus. Add to that the challenges to recruit and retain qualified staff needed to support those systems, and inherent risks with disaster recovery, and there are many schools facing potentially unstable conditions in IT.
Standardization
For those schools running a highly customized ERP system, which is more probable with an older implementation, maintaining those customizations can be a tremendous burden on IT and present potential inefficiencies in the business units. Moving towards a more standardized / ‘vanilla’ solution is a significant challenge, and motivation, for many schools.
Integration
Most schools implemented an ERP system years ago because it represented a step forward in terms of an integrated solution. But for many, as institutional needs may have outpaced available functionality in their core ERP, ‘bolt-ons’ and shadow systems to extend functionality have compromised the integrated ERP.
Efficiencies
Every institution is under pressure to be more efficient – both in their internal processes and in their services to students. And with state and federal funding declining overall with shifting models to performance based funding, schools are under increased pressure to demonstrate the value of their investments, including their significant investments in enterprise systems.
Reference: http://www.cbpp.org/blog/mapping-state-funding-cuts-for-higher-education
Cloud
“The cloud” has introduced tremendous opportunity for institutions to leverage scalable services for technology solutions. There are still many questions about what ‘the cloud’ means in terms of enterprise systems – and whether an institution should consider hosting their ERP in the cloud, or migrate to a truly cloud-native ERP like an SaaS solution.
What additional challenges are causing schools to look more closely at their enterprise administrative systems?
Hi everyone,
These are good points and I would like to add one.
I think it’s important to discuss the issues related to data governance. With so many offices now using niche information systems and with there being so many data elements that are shared between systems, the opportunity for there to be shared data elements that are defined somewhat differently across systems has been multiplied. The awareness of these shared data elements, and the various translations of data definitions and values requires constant attention. Couple that with how busy all offices are these days, campuses need an intentional strategy for keeping data in sync. This does not happen organically.
Additional complexity is added when we engage in peer review and benchmarking. So, it is critical that the data stewards develop an understanding of how information from external data sets do and don’t compare.
IR Offices play a critical role in this arena and this needs to be acknowledged as a crucial element of making the ecosystem of decision support whole and more effective.