Edu-leaders

To start with an IT strategy when setting up a new institution you have to first identify the pain points and see how technology can help. Then get a specialist to decipher what you could adopt at least cost to match your need and scale. It’s a challenge to find a full-time expert in technology as the best talents do not want to join an educational institution. So, this specialist could be supported from outside. For ISB’s Mohali campus, we sought help from CIOs of the Bharti Group and the Munjals, our supporters at Mohali, to finalise service contracts with IBM, Wipro and others. We needed them as we neither had the expertise to negotiate on price, nor to understand what was required.

If you are putting in the capital yourself, technology cost would be 15-20 per cent of your project cost. At Mohali, we took the opex route, which is to find a service provider who invest in equipment, manage the service, upgrade it regularly and charge an annual fee.

Exciting technologies may be risky if you are an early adopter. If the benefit is not huge, you will have to step back and say, “It is a nice to have technology but I will wait for it to mature and also become less expensive.”

Buying a standard application and then asking the solution provider to keep customising it for your processes is inefficient and expensive. It is better to modify your processes to suit the standard solutions. Customising works for small applications. ISB was the first in the country to introduce the concept of bidding for courses and there was no application available here at that time. The ones in the US cost half a million dollars, so we got a vendor to design it.

Data integrity is technology’s most remarkable benefit. Maintaining common database for all information is vital and one should plan for it from day one. A basic CRM integrated along the life cycle of a student is a must.

It is useful to keep a central database, and not recapture the data from the point an applicant submits the data, to getting admitted, going through the cycle, graduating and then becoming an alumni. If your departments maintain  independent databases their answers for the same information could be different. For instance if you ask : “How many students graduated in ‘X’ year? The admission folks will give you the number of admitted students expecting all of them to have graduated. They don’t account for students who left in between, or did not complete some requirement for graduation. If you ask the programme or the career folks, this number would have changed. It also becomes easier to track faculty’s work in terms of working papers published in a research, or participation in conferences etc. This is handy at the time of appraisals. Large universities in the US use solutions where a single net access works for both internal and external stakeholders. For their size the price of these solutions is justified, but for ISB’s size we have found it prohibitive. We settled for home grown solutions, in spite of their challenges.

Even for a function like placements you have to rely on a solution which permits recruiters to post jobs online, students to view and apply for these jobs online and lets the recruiters shortlist on line. A scheduling software helps in ensuring that a student who is shortlisted for multiple companies does not land up getting all the interviews at the same time. It is impossible to manually coordinate placements for around 600 students and 300 odd recruiters. We now track attendance and also provide access to reading materials online. Faculty uploads the reading material and students can view and download it. Most of the faculty also insist on online assignment submission and also grade it online.

Marketing is simpler now and we are adopting online outreach more than ever, but it’s sensible to use existing platforms like Facebook or Google plus. To develop our own technology would be foolish, but you must have an online presence.