Institutional Change: The Key to Digital Transformation [video]

Nicole Engelbert: Institutions are really struggling with how to realize true change. There's a lot of discussion in the industry about digital transformation and how do we deliver new types of teaching and learning. How do we support research in different ways. The will is there, the recognition of the requirement to transform what higher education is.

Link Alander: We started this journey a long long time ago, business process re-engineering, total quality management, everything we could think of to align technology and business practices to provide a rich experience or better workplace, more efficiency. Now you've got leadership who are used to consumerized IT and their expectations for our students, for our faculty, are much higher, but they also see a strategic advantage to technology. While they may have thought they had a strategic advantage to begin with, now they realize that to be competitive in the marketplace we have really got to focus on all areas of technology. That means everything from what you're doing to student success through pathways, all the way into how do students come into the institution.

Deborah Gelch: Traditionally admissions would provide this wonderful experience for a student. There would be lots of communication and it would be very easy and it would be wonderful and then the student would arrive and they would enroll and they'd have this very clunky registration system and then they'd try to pay and it would be even clunkier and not connected and they'd have to fill out a form to change majors on piece of paper, where we provided this initial very easy frictionless experience before they became a student, then they arrive and they're our customer and we don't provide the same experience. So what we've been trying to do is take that experience from the very beginning and the information and the data that we have about them from the very beginning and then allow that and help that to inform them throughout their whole experience at Curry.

Robert Stalder: You start to think about how do I fundamentally do admissions differently? How do I do recruitment differently? How do I do advising differently? How do I do alumni relations differently? Differently and better, from a true blank sheet perspective, I think it's probably gonna take some people that are not in our organizations today, or you're gonna have to grow those people within our existing organizations, to be a new product development kind of mindset that thinks that way.

Nicole Engelbert: Because the technology today is so much more, kind of accessible, configurable, flexible, that it opens the door for more time and resources being spent on what's the vision, what's the strategy, and we can bend the technology in much more sustainable, efficient, quite frankly cheaper, cheaper ways to support those visions.

Vince Kellen: You know digital transformation now, typically people mean it to mean that we can change our business models, we can do everything digitally so it's gonna have some big impact. I actually look at it as this inside out approach to strategy which to me is a little bit faulty. I actually think an outside in approach to strategy, in terms of what are our market's saying, what are our students saying, what are citizens saying, and reasoning inward from there is more appropriate but that said it's actually a dialectic between the two. Reasoning about the technology and what it can be used for, as well as reasoning about the business space and how to adapt the technology to it. The two of those actually comprise of digital strategy.

Link Alander: Student success is a critical factor nowadays as you know, from all layers of government, they're looking closely at what are the success rates of students and how can we help them to move forward. How can we keep them from taking 160 hours versus 120 hours as they complete? All of these initiatives are critical to a digital transformation but probably the most important that drives an institution comes down to, one, how do you get students in there seamlessly, how do you pass them through all those obstacles of entry, and two, how do you get them out of there in the right amount of time with a degree that matters, that they can earn a livable wage after they complete?

Sukhwant Jhaj: So we have about 20 million students in this country, about 160 million workers. If half of those workers will see change in their job as a result of automation and artificial intelligence, and are going to be retrained in some way, from small sort of chunks of learning to going out and getting a new degree, educational institutions have a role to play in that case and we are thinking our way through, what would a university look like that is as much an institution as it is a platform?

Matthew Rascoff: The methods by which digital products are designed are as important as increasing the uptake of technology in our environments. By which I mean really good products are built with the needs of users first and there's an iterative process by which a product creator tries to understand and match those needs. It's a deeply empathetic process of trying to get inside the shoes of somebody else and making something that is useful for them that accomplishes their goals and that's a pretty big pivot for traditional IT.

Nicole Engelbert: Affecting that kind of change and doing it in a sustainable and scalable way is incredibly difficult. It's part of the DNA of higher education, change is difficult, but, institutions often don't have the tools and the resources and the support in order to make it happen and keep making it happen.

Edmund Clark: The leadership model is a shared leadership model, and that's so hard to achieve at universities, and what that means is this silo has this data, this silo has that data and they work together, but they're sort of like they might collaborate now and then on a project but shared leadership is being so focused on the student experience, that journey from the time they come in to the time they graduate and then get a job, and then they might need to re-skill. If you're focused on that student journey in all of the units, the administrative units are working together on that and they're not worried about taking credit for academic affairs or for the libraries or whatever but are all focused together on that journey and the win is a shared win. That is what is required for a true digital transformation.