Sustaining Student-Centric Innovation

Living in the shadow of today’s consumer economy, higher education is on the hook for delivering seamless, personalized experiences while staying true to its educational mission. As institutions grapple with this new reality, uncertainties are quick to confront them: Who will our students be in the coming decade? How do we optimize support across an extended student lifecycle? How can we overcome pervasive integration and data-quality issues to create an agile technology ecosystem that adapts as student needs change?

Across three sections, this white paper explores the mandate for student-centric innovation and offers a roadmap for higher education leaders to develop a sustainable digital strategy for the years ahead. Download the white paper as a PDF, or explore the three sections below to start building a student-centric and forward-looking digital strategy.

Confront the Mandate for Change

Fast-Paced, Student-Centric Innovation in the Spotlight

In the ongoing turmoil of a global pandemic, the higher education community has surprised itself with nimble adaptation. Faculty shifted classes online almost overnight, virtual advising and committees played a crucial role in supporting students and keeping campuses connected during the lockdown, and administrators and staff moved mountains to create hybrid experiences that balanced student needs with increasingly grave financial realities.

As a new normal continues to emerge, the growing consensus is that we can’t go back—institutions of all shapes and sizes are being forced to reckon with their strategic priorities and their readiness for the decade ahead. Keeping one eye on the looming demographic cliff and the other on budget constraints made ever tighter by the pandemic, institutions are battling on a third front with waning public perceptions of the value of a degree.

In the other direction, conceptions of the student experience continue to extend across decades into an individual’s career. Beyond learning and credentialing, successful transition of students into the workforce plays a growing role in every institution’s finances and operations—whether in service to outcomes-based recruitment, state-based funding applications, or alumni prospects. Increasingly, graduates represent an ongoing prospecting community for both the development and enrollment offices, with graduate work and lifelong learning accelerating adult learner recruitment strategies in every segment.

As with high school engagement, the drive to engage adult learners is well supported by shifting economic and labor demand contexts. With accelerating technology disruption consistently shortening the shelf life of skills and the tenure of jobs, and the pandemic precipitating a historic and ongoing shedding of jobs in the US workforce, the necessity of formalized, lifelong learning is gaining traction among employers and academics alike.

Where is Technology Stifling Innovation?

Legacy Tech Hampers Campus Agility

For institutions looking to build adaptive and engaging student experiences, every idea and every investment counts. On most campuses, technologies acquired over decades of innovation and campus operation—often by leadership that has long since moved on from the institution—sit side by side in an incoherent portfolio. Often there are overlapping functionalities across different platforms, and the sediment of solutions past creates a headache for management and drastically reduces efficiency. As one IT leader expressed, a CIO’s job is often like running a technology museum.

“We’re running a technology museum. We have one of everything that’s been released since 1980. Actually, no. We have more. I wish we had just one of everything…”

VP for IT, Large Public Research University in the South

As with any museum, different collections require different maintenance—and for campus technology, the most laborious maintenance is often the most integral to the day-to-day operations of the institution. Oftentimes, at the very bottom of the tech pile there are aging enterprise systems adopted to support the digitization of core campus processes. Student Information Systems (SIS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems ushered in a new era of digital record management at the tail end of the twentieth century. In Canada, the average age of a homegrown information system sits at 21 years. In the United States, at least two large research institutions are running critical campus applications on mainframe technologies that are more than four decades old. At one institution, replacement parts can be found only on eBay. Though cutting-edge at the time of adoption, these systems have stagnated, even as they served as the backbone for sprawling digital operations. Through that process, they’ve calcified at the center of a labyrinth of technical interdependencies—and with the pace of change accelerating, they present serious challenges for innovation and campus agility.

By absorbing disproportionate amounts of staff time and institutional dollars—especially relative to student-facing value—legacy operational technologies play a huge role in limiting campus agility in delivering on the total student experience.

Yet, while student information systems and resource planning tools are the easiest targets, the reality that many campuses are confronting is the ever-shortening half-life of technology investments. As the revolving door of new technologies continues to spin faster and faster, the speed with which rationally acquired, thoroughly evaluated purchases are obsolescing is also accelerating. As of 2020, the Eduventures higher education technology landscape includes over 300 vendors across 40 separate market segments working with university and colleges to address existing and emerging challenges—with new products and iterations constantly introducing capabilities to the market. And beyond the 600+ individual products already built for higher education, broader technology innovations in fields such as artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics continue apace, each with an opportunity to inform new processes and student experiences optimized for the digital age.

For leadership teams with a relentless focus on adapting and improving the student experience, having an outsize proportion of staff and dollars tied up in behind-the-scenes operational technologies is an impediment to this future-focused investment—and in the world of continuous innovation, that’s a heavy and growing burden to bear.

“We have 400 servers on campus, and Banner takes up 100 of them. I could defend that number, maybe, if we were using Banner for everything—but we’re also using Workday for HR and Finance, Blackbaud for Financial Aid, and other systems for other pieces. So, we’re only using Banner for student data—and even then it’s only certain aspects of students, because we’ve done all this customization over the years. Given our institution’s mission, that ratio is indefensible.”

VP of IT and CIO, Small Liberal Arts College

Digital Sprawl Undermines Innovation

Although many of higher education’s core transactional systems have aged in place, new technologies have been put in place around them. Efforts to improve specific functions and institutional processes have resulted in the adoption of tailored solutions in almost every corner of campus, with most institutions amassing hundreds of applications over three decades of digital growth. In the classroom, learning management systems and engagement technologies support digital pedagogy; in enrollment and advancement, customer relationship management (CRM) tools optimize the processes of prospecting and outreach; and in the world of student success, advising and case management tools promote retention efforts. There are mobile apps for campus engagement and exploration, digital signage and smart technologies to enhance the campus experience, dashboards and analytics suites to promote operational efficiencies, and digital document management software to smooth out wonky, paper-based processes. The list is long—and it’s growing.

For each individual application in isolation, the value is obvious. Usually, applications are selected, vetted, and implemented by campus groups working toward their own mandates: recruiting more students, improving retention, delivering engaging courses, or even growing the institutional endowment. But faced with the grand challenges of improving access, outcomes, and sustainability, institutions are turning to the connected campus. By managing a student’s intersections with the institution across the full (and shifting) learner lifecycle, colleges and universities can bring to light any hidden undercurrents that are holding their students back and reduce friction in their processes to empower learners on their individual paths to success.

Value in Synergy Across the Student Lifecycle

While every function has seen accelerated digital maturity through new capabilities and workflow optimization in the tools built specifically to enable their strategies, focusing on the individual way stations in the student experience has come at the expense of the holistic view. Though technology is powering pockets of innovation in services, these fragmented technologies have calcified a data disconnect, leaving campuses unable to look across and respond effectively to long-term, multidimensional student needs. Each system has its own data structures and versions of truth, leading to friction and mistrust in cabinet-level conversations and collaborations. In the age of experience, information is the common currency—but most campuses are mired in a web of cross-talk and misunderstanding brought about by the digital ecosystem. When it comes to the total student experience, optimizing for links has weakened the chain.

Bad Data Leads to Bad Experiences

While looking across and understanding the various touchpoints between the institution and its communities is made hard enough by the complex web of systems that support it, cobbled-together and unevenly adopted processes have wreaked havoc on the quality of data collected. As the total student experience and more personalized lifecycle engagement come into focus, the insights that will drive our innovations—and automations—can only ever be as accurate as the data that supports them.

While some data-quality issues are the result of low levels of data literacy and limited appreciation for the afterlives of locally collected data among frontline staff, our technologies themselves are also key culprits in the deterioration of data integrity. Where software is not well suited to its task and the processes it enables, frustrated staff will often build workarounds or customize applications in ways that drive up costs and grow IT’s maintenance burden. In the process, the data ends up being untrustworthy and fragmented even further.

Whether used by back-office staff or directly by the student community, the plethora of systems on campus may generate and capture data (such as student preferences, applications, or website activity) or simply function as an engine to put data into action by automating processes (for example, by delivering text messages or opening up registration options by releasing student holds). Oftentimes, they do both. In either case, if the quality of the data concerned is not well maintained, the value of the tool is diminished—or even undermined entirely. Using poor-quality or unreliable data, institutions risk learning the wrong lessons, automating the wrong things, and ultimately doing a disservice to our students and broader communities.

“We’ve been surrounded by different systems doing their unique things for quite a long time. We’re finding out that we don’t have one truth—and that realization up to the highest levels. When my Provost can’t trust the data she’s looking at, the technology we have isn’t working well for us.”

Financial Aid Analyst, Regional Public University

Specifically, poor data collection and its proliferation slow institutions down when it comes time to leverage their data assets—which people do every single day. Frontline staff, managers, leaders, analysts, and student support services are constantly turning to their technologies and data to enable processes and interactions. Where there’s incomplete or faulty data, poor decision-making and mistakes will follow. In turn, mistakes force staff and faculty to spend time focusing on interrogating or correcting them—or even, in the case of one campus, issuing apologies.

Case in Point

Where the collection and transmission of quality data is central to the delivery of service, experiences suffer. As campuses scrambled through 2020 to deliver new services in the wake of disruptions, many were forced to apologize publicly to their students for errors along the way, including one institution whose quarantine meal delivery service fell below student expectations.

The responsiveness of the service’s capacity and demand management, in addition to communications errors with the institution’s third-party vendor, were blamed for the snafu.

• 2,600 students being quarantined at the university
• 3 meals/day (often delivered all at once or skipped)
• 20% of meals are specialty in some way
• 1.8M views of a student’s Tiktok revealing their chicken Caesar salad meal contained neither chicken nor salad

Risk Aversion Stifles Innovation

Not only do these missteps take already limited staffing resources away from higher-value, human- and learning-centric interactions—such as engaging directly with students or spending time on ideation, collaboration, and strategy implementation—but they foster deep mistrust in data-enabled and data-informed processes. Where institutional leaders have made difficult decisions or taken unwelcome actions, campus community backlash has often focused on the unreliability of the data underpinning their efforts. As a result, risk aversion and unwillingness to fail continue to morph into an unwieldy cultural obstacle in innovation efforts.

With more data and more automation on the horizon, campuses must turn the corner on data quality to reduce the risks associated with any bold and digital innovations. Emerging technologies such as Internet of Things and processes driven by artificial intelligence have the power to transform the student experience, from guiding students to quiet study zones and empty parking spots with smart campus censors to providing personalized digital concierges on students’ smartphones. For institutions looking to leverage these technologies, the need to improve the quality and integrity of data across different systems and sources takes on greater, more urgent importance.

“You can’t try new things where there isn’t an appetite for change and trust in the tools you have. When you have a culture which, for years and years, has made mistakes with bad data, and penalized failure—it’s difficult to then tell those people we’ve got a good foundation for innovation.”

Chief Innovation Officer, R1 University

The opportunities for digital innovation are out there for the campuses able to grasp them. Predictive models managing chatbots, streamlined and automated digital processes, and smart campus operations all have the capacity to allow campuses to deliver seamless, integrated, and omnichannel experiences to their students—all while shifting the attention of their faculty, students, and staff to improvements in the core missions of the institution: teaching, learning, and holistic student development. Until campuses resolve their internal data-quality issues—and with them, the organizational anxiety around data-informed and automated actions—they will struggle to fully activate the power of the technologies they adopt.

Wherever poor data quality amplifies the perception and the reality of risk, innovation will continue to be stifled.

“The quality demands of machine learning are steep, and bad data can rear its ugly head twice—first in the historical data used to train the predictive model and second in the new data used by that model to make future decisions.”

Thomas C. Redman | Harvard Business Review

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Build Agility and Stamina for Continuous Innovation

Every Leader is a Digital Leader–with a Mandate for Continuous Innovation

Student-centric service innovation means pulling in the right technology at the right time to deliver the most impactful experiences, touchpoints, and supports to guide our students on their journeys—no matter the students, and no matter their individual goals. For campus leadership, that means putting in place a comprehensive technology strategy that aligns with the need to support agile decision-making and service pivots. Once technology is out of the box, underpinning every corner of campus, digital strategy must in turn move from being backstage to being in the spotlight, and leaders across campus must pick up this collective mandate. Today, every leader is a digital leader.

In a digital ecosystem within a changing world, coordination and collaboration are key to success. Though CIOs and other IT executives tasked with building cohesion among the institution’s technology investments can take the lead in organizing strategy, it is no longer acceptable for their peers in the cabinet to claim ignorance of digital imperatives—or take no responsibility for the opportunities and consequences of doing digital business.

“In higher education, we have a long history of leadership taking pride in their ignorance of technology—as if it’s a distraction, with very little bearing on strategy.

Looking forward, it’s not okay for leadership not to understand our digital strategy: it’s a liability.”

VP for IT, Large Research University

Presidents, provosts and their cabinets must take an active role in ushering in new investment priorities and governance processes fit for the digital age. For many campus leaders, the learning curve will be steep. But without appropriate strategies and processes to support their institutions in modernizing infrastructure while managing the constant change of an evolving technology landscape, change fatigue will quickly set in.

In a tight budget environment with competing priorities, prudent leaders are moved to scrutinize every purchase and adopt rational and methodical investment processes that weigh the pros and cons of every option on the table. Often, technology evaluations bring together expansive cross sections of the campus community to support needs assessment and product scalability conversations, and hundreds of person-hours are poured into comparing features and fit across multiple potential vendors.

Once a campus partner has been selected, then comes the process of implementation which, depending on the product, could require a matter of weeks, months, or even years. In this context, it’s hard to say goodbye and turn over a new leaf when a technology no longer meets institutional needs, but faster-paced technology turnover is exactly what campuses should be preparing for. In spite of careful deliberations and thoughtful implementations, the shelf life of technologies is waning. A new enterprise system is no longer a 25-year investment. In a world where cloud-based technologies enable constant development and innovation, newer tools and applications will continue to be optimized to support emerging best practices in student success, financial operations, and other institutional priorities (or even crises).

Given such high levels of digital innovation and technology flux, even the most rational and exhaustively considered investment decisions made today will seem redundant or irrational as the world changes around us. Today’s best-in-class application will always fall behind the innovators leading change tomorrow—and higher education’s slow pace of change has left many institutions dealing with the ongoing pains of technology stagnation. Unless a broader strategy for integration and coordination is put in place and upheld by campus executives moving forward, the outcomes of fast-paced innovation and technology adoption will only exacerbate current growing pains while escalating campus costs.

“Software is ephemeral, and the business model might last for 15 years—but data is yours forever.”

CIO, Regional Master’s University

As all leaders become digital leaders, balancing rational investment with the institution’s innovation strategy requires campus leadership to recognize three principles of student-centric digital change.

With software demoted, data integration elevated, and strategy at the helm, institutional leaders have a new framework to deliver on the mandate of student-centric innovation: individual purchases must together build a flexible technology ecosystem that empowers leaders to deliver on bold new strategies while retaining the coherence of coordinated services and student experiences.

“Technology should not lead you to transformation. Transformation should lead you to the technology.”

Higher Ed Futurist Matt Alex

Acknowledge Data and Innovation Trade-Offs in Vendor Considerations

As leaders step up to the challenge of supporting technology strategy, their commitment to collaboration and sustainability must translate into the process of selecting and investing in technology systems. While institutions may plan to develop integrated, high-quality data to provide right-size building blocks for experience-oriented innovation, the current vendor landscape makes it difficult for campuses to deliver on both simultaneously. Instead, campuses are forced to make trade-offs between integrated campus-wide solutions and best-in-class process alignment for individual service-oriented functions—and whether a system offers benefits in either direction, a campus investment will have significant impacts on the institution’s technology and data strategy.

In one camp, established vendors and new entrants tout integrated platforms and technology suites to drive campus unity through an ecosystem approach. Far-reaching tools provide aggregated data and seamless process integration in service to the broad spectrum of institutional priorities. Whether with suites of back-end tools (student information and enterprise resource planning systems) or enterprise-wide constituent relationship management (CRM) platforms, the promise of platform solutions is in their ability to unify campus data and promote a full, service-oriented lifecycle approach within a single tool or suite.

Taking a different approach to partnership, bespoke solutions are continually emerging to address the challenges and needs of specific higher education business functions and those of members of the campus community. From prospecting and admissions CRMs and financial aid administration, through advising and degree auditing, and on to fundraising, the vendor landscape is strewn with hundreds of tools to accelerate campus innovation and deliver on the promises of institutional strategies.

Though it may seem like an either/or decision with every purchase, the reality that today’s leaders face is that choices in either direction present significant hurdles to overcome in the pursuit of student-centric innovation. A platform technology or ecosystem vendor may account for 70–80% of campus needs within a given domain but cause barriers to integration with mission-critical tools that lie outside the provider’s purview. Similarly, a patchwork of innovative, targeted solutions very quickly becomes unsustainable for maintenance and data integration without an effective strategy for managing scale, leaving students and staff to do the tedious and time-consuming work of manual integration across their own experiences and workflows. In each case, a technology purchase must be evaluated for its broader contributions to the campus portfolio—with a particular focus on whether a given investment is rate-limiting the total technology ROI.

Despite wide-ranging vendor promises, the reality of effective digital strategy in higher education today is that the dichotomy of “integrated platform” or “best-of-breed patchwork” is false: leaders must pursue strategies to deliver on integration and innovation within the technology portfolio, because neither 360-degree integration nor process innovation can be sacrificed in a market sensitive to the delivery of personalized and adaptive student experiences. Institutions must instead find a pathway to deliver on both simultaneously: a third way that enables fast-pace innovation and process transformation while providing a holistic view of students and campus communities across the learner lifecycle.

“When we think of vendor management, we forget to look at the big picture. Every contract negotiation is important, but what we ultimately care about is the ROI of our entire vendor portfolio. A good deal means nothing if the product doesn’t add value, or no one uses it.”

CIO, Public Research University

Future-Proof Investments with Integrated Innovation

For leaders looking to take a portfolio approach to the technology ecosystem, uncertainty in the coming decade creates two imperatives: empowering innovation to meet the needs of students today while building long-term agility to meet the needs of students in years to come. With innovation and integration often at odds, accounting for both relies on two separate technology investment strategies simultaneously.

Technology Investment Strategies for Digital Agility

Ongoing Investments Fall Into Three Main Categories

1. Targeted innovation: Best-of-breed tools enable mission-critical campus service
2. Building agility: Data management investments build vendor-agnostic integration capabilities
3. All-in gamble: High-stakes system modernization efforts are expensive and labor intensive

At this inflection point, and with limited budget, innovation and agility must take priority.

Strategy 1: Optimize for Today with Service-Oriented Innovation

Though the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic have left higher education reeling, institutions’ herculean technology implementation efforts were an inspiring lesson in student-centric investment. The billions of dollars in federal funding that were allocated to the higher education sector by Congress limited any technology spending to hardware and services to support students through a period of remote learning, with a particular emphasis on investments with “clear nexus to significant changes to the delivery of instruction.” In turn, institutions invested in scaling access to educational content via the learning management system, in extending access to Wi-Fi on campus and beyond, and in student success technologies to help students stay on track to graduation despite significant disruptions in their academic and personal lives. In each case, the question campuses asked—and answered—was both acute and student-centric: What do our students need now to provide the best experience possible as they progress through the current reality of their learning journey?

As the pandemic subsides, the same focus and energy should be brought to technology investments, with a focus on the areas with greatest impact in the day-to-day of students’ experiences across the learner lifecycle. Targeted products and development should concentrate on enabling the missions of the institution, focusing on providing a seamless experience and limiting friction.