Improving Business Processes: Corporate Voices [video]

Clint Davies, Principal, BerryDunn
Kate Hazen, Higher Ed Practice Director, M&S Consulting
David Hemingson, Partner, ISG
Rebecca Weaver, President and CEO, Fox & Weaver Consulting Inc.

Kate Hazen: The first and foremost I would point out is that you need to build a strong information strategy. So, many institutions concentrate on an integration strategy. They think about how do I gonna get information from point A to point B? However, if you think about it, and turn that on its head a little bit, and say "I'm gonna build an information strategy, "or a data-sharing strategy.", now you start to think about that data through its whole life cycle, and it causes a discussion, or enables a discussion with both the business, and the technology providers on how data moves through the system, thus enabling business.

Clint Davies: So, when it comes to business process, institutions really need to be thinking about where the opportunities are that they can take advantage of improvements and streamlining their operations. So for example, one of the areas that is a good area to find those opportunities is systems that were developed years ago oftentimes automating manual processes. For example, we worked with a client this past year that was a large institution that had processes and operation systems designed around their graduate admissions program that had been largely automated manual processes from years ago, and we had a small team working with a client team that actually was able to access those current processes, redesign those, save over 60% of the time and effort in tasks in addressing those same graduate admission processes using current technology capabilities, using more streamlined principles for how they minged information, produced reports, and worked with people across the campus, and it was a significant savings right there. And, it all stemmed from looking at systems and processes that really had become out of date.

Rebecca Weaver: It's gonna sound very simplistic, but you start out with identifying the pain points, and this can actually be really difficult for institutions not because they don't know what they are, but because it's typical, and to some extent human nature, to play the blame game. So, the last thing anybody working in a business unit in the trenches wants to do is be the person who identified a pain point, or perhaps because they identified it, maybe be blamed for being the pain point, right? The next thing is that often folks who are working in the trenches, and they're very comfortable with their jobs, they know exactly what they're doing, and how they're doing it, they don't want anybody to touch that because then, you know, that disrupts their daily work-life balance at times. So, you really have to challenge when somebody says it's fine, because fine isn't always fine at all. So, challenge fine by asking how long things take. You gotta ask these key questions. What, you know, how many of these things are we dealing with? What's the 80, 20? What's the low-hanging fruit? Where are we spending a lot of time where we don't necessarily need to be spending a lot of time? You also need to make sure that you're aligning your changes with your goals, with the goals of the institution. So, that can also be very difficult, but you gotta do that, or you may be spending time and effort where it doesn't benefit the institution as much as it needs to.

David Hemingson: I would suggest that they look at, I think, four areas. One, situations where they have multiple systems involved, and they're really having difficulty identifying as a single source of truth. We deal with a lot of research institutions, and you have academic departments and auxiliaries that maintain their own systems. Second, I think there're situations where you have multiple people involved that need a comprehensive perspective. For example, in dealing with a student, sometimes you have individuals who have only a partial glimpse of a student's background, or information about that student, and you might need to bring that together. Where you have transactions or processes that people perform infrequently, they often forget how to do those, and so they have to go back and relearn that process. Examples of that might be onboarding students, you know, student workers, might be travel for a faculty member. And then finally, there's those situations where you have repetitive tasks that need to be done fairly frequently, and those tasks don't change. And, in those situations like allocations or reconciliations, there may be opportunities for automation and process improvement.