The Enterprise IT Program is focusing in 2017 on integrations and partnerships. You can read about our plan for the year in this blog. As new resources for integrations and partnerships become available, they will be published on the Enterprise IT Program web page. For our third focus of the year, we turn our attention to the challenge of redesigning institutional business processes as part of enterprise system migrations, highlighting the importance of cross-enterprise partnerships in that redesign effort.
Next generation enterprise IT is characterized by an expanding set of services, systems, and sourcing strategies as institutions move away from monolithic ERP solutions in an effort to increase agility and scalability and meet stakeholder demands for new functionality and services. The migration to new systems or the adoption of a new service creates an opportunity to review business processes. Different institutional departments often use different business processes to manage the same function or reach the same outcome. Or an institution may have developed an idiosyncratic business process that requires ongoing system customization to maintain. Constant maintenance and system customization can come at a heavy price in IT staff time and resources. A migration to a new system can provide the opportunity to reassess that expense and potentially reduce it or reallocate those resources to something with a greater strategic impact.
It's not quick work. But taking the time and spending the resources to redesign business processes to fit more closely into existing systems across departments and functions can pay off in the long run by decreasing eventual ongoing costs and freeing up time and resources that can be spent in other areas that advance strategic goals. Redesigning business processes requires careful planning, support from executive leadership, a cross-enterprise approach, and attention to change management.
The Enterprise IT Program has compiled resources that can help. A new web page devoted to Redesigning Business Processes provides access to a set of relevant materials, including research studies, working group papers, benchmarking information, and recent articles from thought leaders within the EDUCAUSE community. Because it's important to understand the impact of these efforts beyond the IT unit, you will find links to resources from other professional associations such as the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) as well as the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). The new resources also include case studies that describe the efforts of IT leaders at five institutions to redesign and improve their business processes as part of system migration activities. These case studies emphasize the important and positive impact business process redesign can have on the institution.
We hope you find these new resources helpful. Send us your questions and your suggestions by contacting [email protected].
If you have a story to tell about your own institution's work in the area of integrations and partnerships, or if you have suggestions or questions about the Enterprise IT Program, please contact Betsy Tippens Reinitz at [email protected].
Betsy Tippens Reinitz is the director of the enterprise IT program for EDUCAUSE.
© 2017 Betsy Tippens Reinitz. This EDUCAUSE Review blog is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.