Corporate Conversations: Nicole Engelbert from Oracle [video]

Nicole Engelbert
Vice President for Higher Education Development
Oracle

Q: What do you consider the biggest challenges in higher education right now, and how can technology leaders address those challenges?

Nicole Engelbert: Right now, it feels like the house is a bit on fire. Ultimately, I think it really boils down to the idea that Higher Education because of COVID-19 and the cascading implications of it, we're moving from a phase of the industry experiencing, disruption at the margins, essentially. I mean, we will feel nostalgic for the day we talked about disruption and a demographic cliff happening, or some shifts in who our students were or some changes in federal policies because it effected pockets of the institution. There'd be a specific process in recruitment or a specific process in financial aid that we'd have to restructure or kind of re-imagine how it was worked. But we're moved now from disruption at the margins in our industry to more wholesale dislocation of the industry. So the purpose of Higher Education is being reconsidered kind of what the actual service is being re-imagined, who the customers are is being kind of redefined. So it's less about kind of change in pockets and total re-imagining of the industry kind of almost think about what happened to perhaps the media industry three years ago, kind of five years ago with the introduction of Hulu and Netflix and all those types of players were having a similar moment in Higher Education. And so how does an industry then contend with that? How do they grapple with it? How do they ensure, how do individual institutions ensure they don't slip beneath the water and that they kind of move fast in a boat kind of a across this water? And I think it comes down to from a technology perspective that the solutions and the technology that they need to be have to be fundamentally more flexible and have the flexibility needs to be on a scale that is on unprecedented because we don't know what the future is going to be. We don't know what the new normal and I can't believe I just said that is going to be, there may not be kind of a normal who know return to the mean or the median ever again. And it also then means that we had to have far more insight and data than we'd ever had before because you're going to move kind of quickly in new directions with precision. You need to know where you are, where you wanna be, what the kind of implications are of that. So it's an insight and data and predictive kind of peaks around the corner and about the time of decision-making and these systems need to connect together not in just a simple let's integrate the student system, with the learning management system, we've got that, we figured out kind of how to do that. It's more, how do we connect the student system with Zoom so that an advisor can have, clicked a video conference experience with a student who is now in London, as opposed to Pittsburgh to talk about which courses they should take and that course may or may not be kind of within their university. It might be kind of a third party kind of university. So kind of that connection between the systems the availability of data insight and a profoundly different understanding of what flexibility should be with those systems.

Q: How is Oracle assisting higher ed IT to take on the challenges of operating during the pandemic?

Nicole Engelbert: It's a moving target might we say, kind of over the Spring and into the Summer from the very top, from Larry Ellison our founder at Oracle to Steve Miranda who heads up applications, the number one priority and it was communicated to us six ways to Sunday was we need to keep the technology going and on and no bubbles so that our customers can worry about their core mission. We can't have ERP kind of stumbling, we can't have outages, we can't have kind of poor code going out the door because all of these things are so much more important in a crisis environment. We need our customers, we need our customers to have the space to be laser focused on their customers. So let us take care of the technology. Now, we're always worrying about that at a place like Oracle, but kind of under the circumstances we kind of swept away any distractions like that needs to be the number one, but kind of now, we're in a place where we are thinking about how do we build kind of better technology for our customers so that they can find that agility and resilience? How do we give them the tools that they need to do the scenario planning, the scenario budgeting, the ability to deliver kind of a hybrid and high flax kind of courses and handle the administrative elements of it. Now, some of that is new technology, like I said, and some of that is to kind of use silly phrase. I think a meaningful one for everyone kind of out there is how do we help them shop their Oracle closet? Because they have a lot of Oracle technology kind of already in play at their institutions and are there ways that they can use what they have just better? And so we've spent a lot of time with our value realization teams, with our product managers, with our customer support folks to help our customers use what they have just better, because it's a hard time right now financially for Higher Education. So maybe don't need to kind of buy new technology, maybe you can just use what you have or shop your closet.