Beyond Spreadsheets: It’s Time to Rethink Budget and Planning Tools
Over the last three years, pandemic-induced stresses on higher education have uncovered the impacts of an outdated budget planning process that’s still prevalent throughout higher education. While most colleges and universities quickly pivoted to offer new learning modalities and ensure the continuation of operations remotely in response to COVID-19, financial planning analysts had a more […]
Remove the Taboo from Centrally Managed Visualization Tools – Free the Data!
Do institutions provide centrally supported visualization platforms? Our work with higher education tells us that most institutions that have been successful in democratizing data analysis have made this move by using modern toolsets. (What are the modern toolsets? Check out our research!) Even as recently as five years ago, visualization tools that were easy to […]
Women in Tech: Melanie Boynton, Director of Enterprise Systems and Data Intelligence, J Sargeant Reynolds Community College
Melanie Boynton knew she had always wanted to work in government. When her supervisor asked her to work on a data project for the state of Virginia, it surprised her how much she enjoyed it, and from that one small step, a career in IT began. Hear more about Melanie’s excitement for data and analytics […]
EDUCAUSE 2022—Back Together Again
As the higher ed community descended upon Denver for the last week of October, many wondered what the experience would be like. Would it be eerily quiet, like in 2021? Or would it be back to normal? How many would come? These were questions I heard often on the first day. EDUCAUSE Is Back The […]
Why Strategic Alignment Matters More Than Budget Size
An Interview with Karen Boudreau-Shea, Vice President, Advisory Services The impact of financial strains is top of mind for higher education technology stakeholders: Respondents to Campus Technology’s 2022 Digital Transformation Survey cited “budget restrictions” as the top obstacle thwarting their progress toward digital transformation, and 41 percent of respondents to Educause’s 2021 Dx QuickPoll cited […]
Simple Data Governance – 3 Do’s and 3 Don’ts
Data governance is a subject that comes up in our conversations with institutions every day. Many institutions suffer from the effects of issues like data silos, varying data definitions for similar fields, inconsistent data access criteria and processes, and poor data quality. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some ways to get started with data […]
Promoting Student Success With Digital Transformation
Digital transformation (Dx) is a relatively new and somewhat fraught concept for higher education. Dx in higher education leverages technological innovation to produce shifts in the institutional culture and workforce to generate operational efficiencies, realize cost savings, and improve the institutional value proposition. Despite the potential benefits, higher education institutions are finding it difficult to […]
Tech Trends for Student Mental Health and Wellness Support in Higher Ed
Mental health is top of mind at many higher education institutions right now. A recent survey of 1,700 college students found that 88 percent believe there is a mental health crisis in higher education, with 70 percent of them personally reporting pandemic-related distress or anxiety. The concerns are not limited to students. Nearly one-third of […]
Watermark Acquires Aviso Retention
Last week Watermark announced its latest acquisition, Aviso Retention, a student success solution that supports case management, predictive analytics, early alerts, and student notifications to mitigate risks to retention. At first glance, this announcement does not indicate a new strategy for Watermark. The company has consistently grown through acquisition. It began as the merger of […]
How Higher Ed CIOs Can Leverage Cloud Service Providers for Strategic Gain
For some time, we have been talking about the trend of developing new commercial applications almost entirely in the cloud. Companies either host their older application code in the cloud or build cloud-native SaaS applications (or both in some cases). Higher education institutions have begun migrating to these new cloud applications, as have most industries, […]
