Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Performance-Based Funding: It’s About Getting Students In and Out the Door

// December 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Admissions, Enterprise content management, Higher Education, Uncategorized // Tom von Gunden

For programs I administered back in my faculty days (not so long ago), I had to respond to increasing pressure to measure and report on student success. The buzzword then was assessment (i.e., identifying which specific learning outcomes were actually being achieved), and the accreditation agencies were the ones primarily applying the pressure.

Since then, the source of the pressure has shifted to legislators and other stakeholders involved in allocating funding for higher education. The key buzzword now is performance, as in “performance-based funding,” a concept which is supplanting “assessment-based learning” in public debates about the so-called crisis in higher education. In this context, the word performance connotes more of an institution-wide responsibility for success. As a result, the targets of scrutiny on college campuses have broadened significantly to now include the administrative as well as academic sides of the house.

This evolution in terms of who is responsible for student success has accelerated, in large part because of federal government initiatives and other mandates for ensuring student retention and fostering on-time graduations. In many states, policies for overtly tying funding to retention and graduation rates are underway, if not already in place.  

What this means for administrative offices, particularly in enrollment management (admissions, financial aid, registrar), is a heightened expectation for responsiveness to students and prospective students. Addressing that expectation requires, among other things, getting new students matriculated as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Once they are enrolled, it also requires providing an accurate and appropriately paced roadmap to degree completion.  

With competition for students heating up, responsiveness – at a level which will ensure degree completion at your institution — calls for increased speed, accuracy and efficiency in terms of administrative processing and decision-making at every stage in a student’s academic career. Poor performance at the front end – the pre-enrollment stage – can mean losing students, often to formerly non-competing local or regional options. Poor performance in the post-matriculation stages can lead to dropouts, drift-offs and outright transfers to other schools.

Given that funding, when it does come, may not deliver additional administrative resources, the demand often must be met with existing staff resources. More than ever, staff can’t do it alone, no matter how dedicated or how much overtime is logged. Staff needs tools – tools that automate many of the time-intensive, manual elements of administrative processing:  capturing, filing, retrieving, and routing documents. Reducing the reliance on paper offloads the operational burden of these critical components to automated systems. The entire process of administering student entrance can be dramatically enhanced, be it admissions application processing, financial aid processing and verification, student advising, course registration, graduation petition processing, etc.

Perhaps the most illustrative example of the connection between funding and performance comes in the area of transfer credit evaluation. In a recent post, I referenced the partnership between Parchment, which offers electronic transcript delivery services, and Hyland, with its ECM (enterprise content management) offerings. As I described there, the ability to quickly ingest transcripts and course data – whether arriving electronically or originating in paper – is key making timely decisions for degree audit purposes. Slowdowns in evaluating transfer credits can lead to losing students at the pre-enrollment stage and, in post-matriculation stages, can cause degree-threatening, money-wasting mistakes such as students unnecessarily repeating similar coursework.

Neither of those scenarios in any way helps institutions get students in the door or keep them advancing steadily and appropriately toward degree completion. If performance indicators for your institution include goals and rates for matriculation, retention and graduation – as they increasingly will – the time for process acceleration is now.

Mobile ECM: Well Within Your Grasp

// December 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT, Mobile // Lindsay McCune

Put mobile ECM into your employees' pockets

The concerns people have about ‘The Future of Work,’ with regard to mobile technologies, was top of mind for Vice President and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler. Schadler was speaking to Fortune 2000 organizations at Forrester’s Content and Collaboration Forum. Questions came pouring in:

• How are professionals using mobile devices?
• What about bring your own (BYO) versus corporate provisioning?
• What kinds of applications are available? Are they task-specific? Role-specific?
• How do I know which vendors are spending time on security and efficiency around development?
• How do I manage licensing?
• What about security?

To my surprise, some organizations anticipate it will take five years to get comfortable with mobile devices and all that goes into managing them. And while mobile will mature over the next few years, you shouldn’t stand still and try to catch up later.

It’s time for organizations to take small steps, and move out from under the blanket of consumer mobile enablement. It’s time to empower the worker. They have valuable needs that can be addressed today.

Enable your workforce

It is all about enablement – not just about devices or applications, but rather overall empowerment. Sure there are lots to things to consider – security and licensing, for example – but you don’t have to eat the whole apple. Just bite off what you can chew.

Start with roles or departments, like human resources or managers, rather than the diverse enterprise. Baby steps! Consider your goals and which employees would benefit most.

Maybe you are thinking you have much bigger fish to fry and that mobile business solutions are low on your priority list. I would argue that bringing your mobile devices into play with even your most basic business processes will reap immediate rewards and have a dramatic impact on your business.

How about an example

So, let’s imagine you are a human resources manager hiring new employees. Let’s also imagine you are on vacation in Hawaii. Your company is competitive and needs to act quickly to get offer letters and other documentation to your soon-to-be colleagues. But you are hanging out by the ocean and won’t be back for a week. Those irreplaceable new hires now take the offer of your competitor. Think of the now wasted time spent interviewing, completing reference checks and all.

Now, imagine you are in Hawaii and getting ready for the day, checking the weather on your smartphone and you notice that you also have notifications from your mobile enterprise content management (ECM) application to approve. Through your mobile device, you can push these offer letters through workflow. With a few taps, you’re done.

It’s time to look beyond mobile’s soft consumer side and empower the devices to make your organization more efficient and more competitive. Are you ready?

At EDUCAUSE – and Everywhere – It’s About Partnerships

// November 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

Because I’ve been married for at least my share of years, maybe more (I won’t confess how many), I believe I know the importance of partnerships. What struck me at the recent EDUCAUSE annual conference in Philadelphia was that the benefits of partnerships extend well beyond the parties directly involved.

My wife and I (primarily because we don’t have kids of our own) benefit from the “perks” that our respective siblings’ partnerships have provided us: our nieces and nephews. While their parents benefit from no-cost childcare, our nieces and nephews benefit from their association with us: weekends away from the monitoring eyes of mom and dad, additional dollars spent on their behalf, etc.(We embrace a “spoil them, then send them home” strategy, securing affection yet sidestepping any real responsibility.)

For those attending EDUCAUSE, the perks of seamlessly integrated solutions leveraging offerings from partnering providers were featured in the panel discussion featuring Vince DiStasi, Chief Information Officer at Grove City College (GCC) in Pennsylvania. While presenting the business case for implementing enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, Mr. DiStasi referenced the convenience of having ECM-integrated functionality available on multi-function devices.

Currently at Grove City, staff can walk up to any scanner/printer/copier device on campus to scan and index documents directly and securely into the ECM repository. And, as DiStasi noted, in a second phase of the implementation, many of the documents scanned into the repository will also immediately be added to automated business workflows for various review, approval and decision-making processes. This ease-of-use and efficiency is made possible by the partnership and technology integration of HP, the providers of the multi-function hardware, and Hyland Software, the developer of the ECM platform installed at GCC.

Another example comes in the area of transfer credit evaluation (TCE).  As many of you know (and as I had commented on in a previous post), speed and accuracy in this arena is critical to matriculating students ahead of the competition, enrolling them in the right courses and retaining them through graduation in a timely fashion. Because transfer transcripts often in exist in electronic, not paper, formats, it’s important for the ECM platform capturing the documents and data to seamlessly handle the import of electronic data feeds, such as transcripts arriving in XML or EDI formats.

That’s an integral component of an end-to-end TCE process, ensuring that course data is captured quickly, automatically uploaded and efficiently routed for evaluation and degree audit purposes. As was revealed at EDUCAUSE, the partnership between Hyland, with its transcript capture and TCE solution, and Parchment, a provider of electronic transcript services, allows for seamless import at the front end of the process.

Such partnerships should be reassuring – as much for the users of the solutions, as they are for me. Why me? Well, all that extra cash the parents of my nieces and nephews save by offloading their kids to me and my wife on the weekends will, no doubt, be redirected to their respective college tuition funds. Do I want to see that money wasted on administrative inefficiencies when they submit their admissions applications and transcripts to the colleges of their choice?  Of course not. So, here’s my thanks, in advance, for the kinds of partnerships that will eliminate cost-wasting processing hitches on campuses everywhere.

The Evolution of ECM and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011

// October 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // AJ Hyland

While the stand-out fact in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011, was the 7.6 percent growth in the ECM industry, even in a down economy and as organizations tighten their tech investment belts, what’s more remarkable is the rapid evolution of enterprise content management as a strategic business solution. 

Gone are the days when ECM was little more than a means by which companies transformed paper documentation into electronic information and then organized and disseminated that information to employees and staff. That still occurs, but it is really now only a foundational piece to a much larger solution.

Or, truly, solutions, because every organization is as different as the business content and process challenges they face. You see, it’s about more than knowing where your information is and how to quickly access it. It’s about leveraging that information in a meaningful way so that you can achieve your specific organizational goals, all the while taking care to achieve just the right balance of focus and flexibility in that endeavor.

What do I mean by this?

I’m saying think of your ECM solution holistically – beyond what you want to capture and how you want to capture it. Consider who will access this information. When will they do it and why? Is your audience an admissions staff? Or a business decision maker whose office is in the air or on the road? Is that information critical to keeping your business moving forward, to beating the competition or better serve a constituent?

In other words, are you leveraging your information in a meaningful way? Do you have a protocol in place should your admissions staff get snowed in during the busiest time of year? Can your managers and executives make decisions via their mobile phones whether they’re in Boston or Bermuda?

A strategic ECM solution must have the flexibility to help answer those questions. It must work in concert with other software solutions, to accurately capture, process and quickly distribute information to staff when and where they need it, and connect the content dots that allow organizations to gain the competitive advantage, better serve their constituents – or both.

Strategic ECM vendors will help organizations elevate their game by focusing on speed of deployment, getting organizations up and running faster, putting them ahead of the competition sooner or offering improved services to constituents faster.

After all, the strategic use of ECM is a differentiator for today’s organizations. And there is ample opportunity to become even more competitive using ECM technology.

Two Key IT Trends for EDUCAUSE and Beyond

// October 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Admissions, Higher Education, IT // Tom von Gunden

As we head toward EDUCAUSE week and the calendar turns to 2012, two IT trends are front of mind for me and, no doubt, for many of you: user mobility and real-time information exchange. The advantages of both are summed up with one word ─ speed. 

Speed helps higher education leadership, staff and faculty become ever more nimble and responsive. Speed bolsters institutional agility, allowing schools to succeed in an increasingly competitive landscape for students, funding, and tuition revenue. And, ultimately, it helps achieve fiscal stability.

Mobility isn’t about having remote access anymore; it’s about mobile access. With smartphones, iPads and the like attached to the hip or tucked under the arm of most university leaders, staff and faculty, there’s a rapidly increasing expectation that staff can complete work anytime and from anywhere. As a result, there’s a good chance the school around the corner wants to lure away your top prospects and current students. And there’s a good chance they are doing as well as – or better than –you are at attracting and retaining students.

Why? Because with mobile platforms in easy reach, representatives can act decisively and communicate in a timely fashion, accomplishing formerly desk-bound tasks from anywhere. Need to evaluate a transcript for transfer credit purposes? Bring it up on your iPad. Need to make a decision on an admissions or financial aid application? Review the complete file and respond from your smartphone.

Remember, students and prospective students carry these devices as well and are accustomed to the instant gratification such devices bring. For that reason, they are increasingly unforgiving when it comes to delays, especially when other schools consistently respond more quickly. Mobility means staying out in front.

Real-time information is just that: real-time. Not so long ago, organizations could get away with having slightly stale information in a line-of-business application. After all, LOB apps — especially large, enterprise-supporting ones — were thought to be somewhat unwieldy, with a tendency to operate in isolation, as an information “silo” of sorts. Batch processing with a turnaround time of a day or more  was common and accepted.

The pressure is on to move faster. Critical to gaining speed are tighter integrations between mission-critical business apps. One fundamental example would be real-time feeds between the student information system (SIS), and the complementary enterprise content management (ECM) platform driving files and actions to and through SIS-reliant business processes.

Want to know when an admissions application file is complete and ready for review? Have the ECM system update the SIS document checklist in real-time, then trigger the review process when all application-related docs are received.

Want to make sure your top prospects have admissions letters in hand before the competition gets its letters out to them? Have the ECM system manage the review process, then update the decision in SIS in real-time in order for that early action decision letter to be generated right away.

As we travel full-steam ahead to Philadelphia for EDUCAUSE and into another year of increasing demands for ease-of-access and greater speed and efficiency, it’s clear that the race is on.

Mobile ECM: Your Content In Your Pocket

// October 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // Glenn Gibson

Put mobile ECM into the pocket of your employees

The world of computing has changed. Forever.

These days it seems archaic to have to wait until you get home or to the office just to check your email, because now your email is in your pocket. The idea of printing off maps before heading out on a journey seems crazy because GPS on our phone gives us turn-by-turn directions. Lively pop-culture debates over a pint are now a thing of the past, because we can look up the answers on the internet immediately.

Yes, mobile computing devices have changed the world and changed us.  We expect instant access to information from wherever we are. The iPhone and the iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Blackberry give us this access like never before.

So what does the explosion in mobile computing have to do with ECM?  Everything. 

Think about it. What is one of the primary driving factors behind an organization developing an ECM strategy? The need to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time. That’s what ECM is all about. 

But what if the right people are in the wrong place at the wrong time? What I mean is, what if the people who are responsible for making important decisions, from approving a critical business expense to agreeing to hire the perfect candidate, can’t physically get access to the information and systems they need in order to execute business decisions, simply because they are travelling or not in the office?   

The reality is that these individuals spend a lot of time on the road and out of the office. This lack of real-time access causes bottlenecks in your processes as the decisions have to wait until they get back online. This causes on-the-fly workarounds with emails and phone calls to get someone, anyone, with authority to make the decision. And once that decision has finally been made, it is very difficult to track all the activity that supports it. 

Yup, bottlenecks and workarounds caused when people who play a critical role in business decisions are out of the office have come to be expected as a normal part of business because, until recently, that’s just how it was. There was no other choice.

But, the world of computing has changed. If the ability to access email from anywhere in the world is not only a reality, but expected in today’s world, why is it any different when thinking about your other important business content and processes?

It shouldn’t be. And when you partner with an ECM vendor who understands this, it is not.

Today you can put your ECM content in your pocket. With mobile ECM applications you are able to not only able access your important content, but also participate in business processes, reviewing, approving and denying requests from wherever you are, directly from your mobile device. 

Now it is likely, for many good reasons that you may not want to make ALL your business information available via mobile devices. If mobile access to your information is part of your requirements when you are choosing an ECM vendor, you should look for a vendor which allows you to control what type of content and processes to make available via these mobile devices. You should choose an ECM system that can truly deliver on the promise to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time, wherever they happen to be.

For your business this is both simple and profound. No more waiting to get back to the office. No more driving to coffee shops just to get access to your system to approve a request. No more bottlenecks caused by business travel. No more un-documented workarounds.  

It is that simple. It is that revolutionary. Because now your content is right there in your pocket.

The Datatel and SunGard Higher Education SIS marriage: It’s about more than the SIS

// August 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Higher Education, IT // Tom von Gunden

Though seldom witnessed these days, it was once common practice for the minister or magistrate presiding over a wedding to ask if anyone objected to the unification at hand. Except in rare cases (and perhaps only in the movies), the offer to speak up was generally met with silence. By contrast, the recently announced marriage – er, merger – of Datatel and SunGard Higher Education is already resonating in commentaries and conversations across industry trade magazines, blogs and even Twitter.

While not necessarily negative, the responses indicate a certain degree of anxiety about the long-term implications of what some are calling an “arranged marriage.”  Speculation or even a bit of hand-wringing is to be expected, especially from users of the various SIS products now in the same fold. After all, as I commented on in a recent post on IT funding and core enterprise applications, the SIS is no small investment for any institution.  Oftentimes, it consumes the largest slice of a school’s IT budget pie – a pie that, at many places, is filled with much less fruit than in years past. For that reason, the news of the Datatel/SunGard merger merely enters the ongoing conversation in higher ed about strategies and options for maintaining these mission-critical systems. The news and resulting industry response should, in fact, trigger more colleges and universities to reevaluate their entire technology ecosystems, especially asking this question: Are we really leveraging our SIS to its fullest potential?

To answer that question, I suggest not just sitting around, waiting to see what happens next in an evolving SIS marketplace. Rather, consider the rest of the solutions you have – or could bring on in a cost-effective way – that can augment your SIS. In another blog post a few months ago, I wrote about this notion of SIS augmentation as it specifically relates to SIS and ECM integrations. My point then and reiterated here is that, no matter which SIS you use and how much you spend on it, it’s not going to do everything. Whether improvements to a SIS come from SIS vendor providers (including via mergers and acquisitions) or from your own in-house efforts, your ultimate goal is to have it optimally tuned for its most important function – student service.

So, look for ways to enhance SIS performance and ROI without necessarily making improvements to the SIS itself – and certainly without waiting for the dust to settle in the SIS vendor landscape. Remember, potential students aren’t going to give you a pass when you can’t find a piece of their application file just because your current SIS was acquired or because market flux has you hesitant to undertake a SIS conversion or expansion project. There are other ways that you can take control of the situation to maintain – and even improve – your student service.

The Best Way to Review Admissions Applications? “Screen” Them

// July 28th, 2011 // No Comments » // Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

A recent front-page article in The New York Times provides a glimpse into the working world of those responsible for making undergraduate admissions decisions at selective institutions. In a verbal snapshot of the committee review stage at Rice University, the article captures a scene in which committee members are collectively viewing and discussing applicant files presented on a large plasma screen.                                             

The description is brief, yet highly illuminating for anyone familiar or tasked with application review. The insight here is that the committee at Rice is not poring through piles of paper documents strewn across a table and covered with handwritten sticky notes. Instead, committee members are quickly, conveniently pulling up on-screen what are no doubt complete student application files. Clearly, these files are being stored, managed and accessed electronically.

For institutions at which admissions processing and application review still move through cumbersome, paper-laden steps, this glimpse into the electronic environment at Rice will no doubt be a source of envy. For Enrollment VPs and Admissions directors at those schools, it should also be cause for alarm.

Why “alarm”? Simple: Paper-reliant schools face a significant competitive disadvantage in the race to admit the cream of the applicant crop. The mere fact that application files can be viewed electronically suggests that an entire admissions process can be driven in an automated manner – from front-end document processing through checklist updating of the student information system (SIS) to assigning and routing files for review. When schools use automation to eliminate manual slowdowns and reduce process bottlenecks, they outshine their peers in timely response and faster decision-making during pressure-filled admissions cycles.

And, it’s not only about speed. It’s about speed with quality. As more and more colleges and universities look to bolster their competitive profiles, they must target increasingly granular demographic breakdowns in order to identify best-fit incoming applicants. The Times article’s focus on the key review criterion of ethnicity underscores the reality that the emerging admit pool at any selective school is steadily being shaped, sorted and reshaped based on a broad range of factors. These include ethnicity, of course, but also commonly scrutinized data points such as high school profile, test scores, scholarship eligibility, athletics, legacy considerations, geographic origin (local, state, regional, international), and so on.

Schools still mired in paper-based processing and reporting will struggle to gain comprehensive visibility into the applicant pool – the kind necessary for true knowledge-based decision-making. That’s because typical approaches include maintaining demographic data in spreadsheets separate from the application files or periodically exporting the data elements from the SIS in the form of paper summary sheets. In neither case is the data conveniently presented in quickly sorted, easily compared fashion within the real-time context of reviewing multiple, competing applications.

Meanwhile, those schools already “screening” their application files – i.e., transforming the documents, the data and the processes surrounding them into a single, seamless electronic view – are setting the pace.