Edu-leaders

Today every individual in the university education ecosystem is under pressure to measure, analyse and report on the many aspects of their student populations. Many education business managers are being increasingly scrutinised for their ability to demonstrate consistent returns on operational costs like recruiting, course offerings and student administration.

Fragmented data, rising education costs, increasing global competition for students, paucity of quality faculty, staff, and heightened regulatory requirements are driving the need for insight and analysis of the core business of education.

For a university to be world class, its technology policy and infrastructure must, at the very least, align with that status and, where possible, confer a competitive advantage. A strategic IT plan ensures that investments are aligned with the operational priorities of the university and provides a fundamental context for growth and intelligent use of technology. The plan should cover all departments, faculties, support services and all other organisational structures and groupings. With proliferation of computers, emergence of tech-savvy Gen-Y and technology advancements, students now prefer

accessing university information (these could be application forms, attendance and mark sheets, etc.,) on the go. While enrolments and expectations on accountability and transparency are increasing, budgets remain flat or are declining, forcing institutions to make difficult choices on how to leverage existing resources.

The network, infrastructure and applications that form the backbone of educational enterprises have become missioncritical. Getting the most out of their IT investments has, therefore, become an institutional imperative, and no longer a nice-to-have. IT must know how to map its services and solutions to key strategies of the institution so that leadership views them as drivers of success instead of budgets to be managed or reduced. Technologies that can deliver critical institutional insights in a timely and cost-effective manner can lead the way.

Today, machine data represents a largely untapped opportunity for delivering just these types of results. Campus networks, infrastructure, applications, servers, learning management systems and end-user devices generate large volumes of logs, messages, traps and metrics — machine data that can provide tremendous value for IT by mitigating risk, detecting system abuses and improving operations.

The most common oversight observed in universities is the failure of integrating IT with the university’s processes. Universities must adopt complete end-to-end integrated software applications for complete student life cycle management starting from admissions to alumni relations. This will simplify the support process and reduce costs. In addition, software applications should be incorporated into back office processes to provide immediate access to real-time information. This will:

• Increase efficiencies to improve effectiveness

• Obtain insight to better manage the institution

• Secure information access and reduce risk

• Enhance the constituent experience Single end-to-end integrated application has the ability to manage financials, human resource, performance, assets, etc., all in one. Its biggest benefit is offering a single view to faculty about students, whether it is about their academic performance or co-curricular activities or their administrative inputs like attendance or fees submission, etc.

With an increase in higher education institutes in India applying for international accreditations, possessing a defined business process for each business function is a prerequisite. Another challenge faced by education institutes is the lack of efficient IT resources to manage applications and the entire IT infrastructure. Private education institutes are wary of making huge capital expenditure to procure such applications and IT Infrastructure. To address this challenge institutes should consider taking their applications on the cloud.

Automation in higher education is a global trend. It is time to act now!