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.

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.

Document Management Helps Johns Hopkins University Admissions Weather Snowmageddon 2010

// February 1st, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Admissions, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom Tennant

With a winter storm revving up to deliver a second blow this evening (the weather cognoscenti are calling it “mammoth,” “massive” and “colossal”), today and tomorrow feels a little like déjà vu for those of us in the Midwest and Northeast.

Almost exactly one year ago today, on Feb. 5, 2010, much of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states were buried under more than 20 inches of snow. The blizzard – designated “Snowmaggedon” by President Barack Obama – left thousands without power and shut down the government.

It stranded a number of Johns Hopkins University’s admissions staff at home. Bad news for the admissions staff, which was facing a looming admissions deadline and the largest applicant pool in the university’s history: nearly 2,000 more than its previous record.

For those of us not in the know, accepting college applicants earlier in the admissions cycle increases a university’s chances of seeing that student accept the offer. It also gives colleges and universities a competitive advantage by allowing them to admit the best-fit students faster than the competition.  

So, you see, a true dilemma. More so, if the university was still operating under its old procedure.

You know, admissions counselors hauling student files home, bulldozing through them like a city snowplow, dragging them back to the office, handing them off to John Hopkins operations team, who would then shovel through each to determine if the student was accepted, and then manually input that info into the computer before slotting the file into a snow bank of filing cabinets.

Too much metaphor? Maybe. But you get my drift.

Under the old process, chances were slim the staff could hit the deadline. They could get the files read – at least the ones they brought home – but they couldn’t get them into the hands of operations while roads remained unnavigable. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, admissions staff safely and securely logged into the university’s system from home and used document management tools to electronically decision files and have those decisions posted directly to the enterprise database. Instead, admissions staff recorded the most productive reading week ever.

As one Johns Hopkins admissions staff member says, “It made life easier for everyone.”

And that’s “snow” joke.