SPEAKER_00
Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today, you're going to hear about digital transformation, which is one of those catchphrases that sounds like it originated in a TED talk and kept getting repeated by people who wanted to sound like they were smart and tech savvy. Our guests today are going to dig into the meaning behind the catchphrase and explain what digital transformation actually means for colleges and universities.

They're also going to share tips on how to begin charting a path forward and bring order to the digital chaos of IT systems, data centers, and applications that currently hold your university together. Thank you for listening and enjoy.

SPEAKER_02
Hello, everyone. My name is Danielle Yardy and this is Office Hours with EAB. I'm excited to join the podcast today to talk about a problem that plagues nearly every college campus in America.

Namely, they all tend to suffer from digital sprawl, meaning they've accumulated hundreds of purpose-built applications, data centers, and IT systems that don't talk to one another very effectively and that aren't inclined to give up their precious nuggets of useful information to university leaders without a fight. I'm joined today by my colleague Anushka Mehta who is going to help me get to the root of the problem and together we're going to share a set of recommendations and next steps that we hope will allow you all to usher forward your campus' digital transformation and bring forth a more unified, coherent technology strategy moving forward. Welcome to the podcast, Anushka.

SPEAKER_01
Thanks, Danielle. Excited to be here after a year of having conversations like this on Zoom. I think it's about time to actually have conversations about digital change.

So I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_02
Fantastic. And so before we get sort of into the weeds of this, I've used a phrase here to get us started that I think will have some folks rolling their eyes back in their heads and that is the phrase digital transformation. So it has some folks getting their hackles up.

They get very defensive when you start to think about digital transformation in their education setting. So I just wanted to set some boundaries really, really around what we're talking about. So what are we talking about when we talk about digital transformation?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's interesting because it's definitely one of those fuzzy buzz words that everyone keeps talking about but no one really has an agreed definition for. And I just want to focus in on the idea that this phrase can really, you know, there are lots of different terms that we could be using. People talk about agility.

People talk about digital transformation. People talk about digital change. But these are all really catch-all terms for the same core issue or the same core challenge that institutions are facing.

So typically when we talk to people and we say the words digital transformation, often university leaders will pull out their laundry list of all their recent tech acquisitions to say, look what we've done. We've bought all of these tools and we think we're doing great. And while tech is definitely a piece of the puzzle, digital transformation is really about the process of using those tools and the data that sits behind it to deliver value and drive change.

So that's often what makes it actually a harder conversation to have because we're really talking about cultural change and not just tech change. And increasingly digital transformation or these digital agility and changes to the business model are no longer a differentiator. But during the past year, they've become really a core requirement for universities to be thinking about, which is another challenge we've been hearing.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think that's such a fascinating point, the process side of things. And it even makes me want to take issue with the nomenclature, calling it digital transformation to me that it sounds like there's an end point, there's an end goal. And really it's more of an evolution, I think in my experience.

People want to treat this as a project. They want to transform their institution as if they're going from this caterpillar to

SPEAKER_00
a butterfly and then that's the end of it.

SPEAKER_02
But the reality is that the technology will continue to change the needs of the students and the faculty that we serve are going to continue to change as the world changes around us. And so I think maybe that terminology around evolution is potentially something that we can think about. And I sort of started moving us there into this idea of the needs of different folks.

And I know that from my experience, that's always something that is driving some of this change. I don't know if you've come across anything in particular that you think is driving the need now. I mean, you mentioned COVID.

Obviously that was something that everyone had to wake up and pivot around. But is there anything else that you think is really sort of forcing institutions to pay attention to this issue, either sort of pre-COVID or post?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I'd be curious to hear your take on this as well. But from my perspective about 10 years ago, if you talk to university leaders about digital change, there was sort of this happy work working in different and we like to stay embedded in our, you know, in our archaic solutions. They might not have used the word archaic.

I think generally speaking, there was this appetite for staying in these analog modes because that's just where higher education has been for so long and a little bit of pride in that quickness and that quirky reality about universities. But there's no longer a willingness from the different consumers that our universities are really serving to embrace that digital change will end at the campus door. We're living in a world where students, academics, administrators, staff, they all live in the same world.

They either waking up, they realize they need more coffee and they place an order on Amazon fresh on their phones and then they continue listening to last night's podcast as they get ready for their workday and they're not expecting to then get to the office and for all of that to suddenly end anymore. So our consumers are bringing with them a demand for digital first omnipresent hyper-personalized experiences because that's now their baseline in everyday life. And so they want that to be a seamless transition between their work life and their personal life.

And I'm curious to hear a little bit from your perspective as well. I think there's a lot of conversation about all of the new technology that we have, but there's also this idea of digital poverty and the digital divide. So I'm curious, how do universities start grappling with this idea of serving consumers but also meeting some of our different consumer groups where they are and with the technology tools that they have access to?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I think it's a really great question. And I think that for me is just something that really differentiates the conversation that we need to have in education.

I feel very strongly coming from academia that the academy is not Amazon, it is not Netflix, it's not any of these big global giants that we can point to and say that we just want to be a streaming service. That's not the mission of our organizations, but if you need to be coalescing around a real purpose in order to drive change, and I really do think that's a key part of the cultural side of this, that has to be a purpose driving what you're doing. We can't center around profit in higher education.

It just does not sit well with what we're looking to serve for our students, for our faculty, for our staff. And so for me, we need to start thinking, then, well, what do we do as an industry, as a set of organizations? And that's actually a really difficult question, depending on the type of institution that folks are sitting within. Student service is obviously going to be a core part of that, but some of these institutions, they are quasi-governmental organizations.

The administrative side of what an institution does is absolutely vast. Then there's the research side of things, and our one institution is going to be primarily focused on how do we improve grant writing? How do we bring in more revenue to help support the boundary pushing innovation that we're doing in our research? That makes it very, very difficult to optimize for transformation, to get everybody's energy pushing in one single direction. And then even when you start to peel back the layers there and you start to think, well, OK, something that most higher ed institutions have in common is the need to be student-centric.

Well, who are our students? That's changing. And I think that gets to some of what you were saying about the need to think about the diversity that we're serving there. Our institutions are increasingly serving non-traditional, quote, unquote, learners, these folks who don't look like your average post-high school degree seeker.

They're looking for different things, and the things that they are looking for from your institution to serve that are very different. So it puts us in a difficult spot. And I would encourage certainly anyone listening to the podcast today who is thinking about how do they push their institution forward and build consensus for change, for driving towards something that is a little bit more digital first, which goes, you were saying, they might want to think about what is key to the mission of their institution? How is their institution different? And what's important for them as an organization to really distill and deliver to their constituents because that's going to really help them come together around things that they actually need to invest in, things that they actually want to drive forward.

And so, I mean, if we think about things that are driving forward, I know that you have had just hundreds of conversations and international conversations as well around where institutions are actually spending their pennies right here. Where are they actually putting their money into investing in efforts towards change? What have you seen come up as something that's been prioritized?

SPEAKER_01
And in response to that, I kind of want to latch onto that term purpose that you used earlier in this conversation as well. I think a lot of people, as I mentioned, at the top of this conversation, a lot of people are starting to think about technologies for the sake of technologies because they want to respond to this digital mandate. But really, at its core, transformation is about responding to the changing consumer expectations, but also only when it's serving the core institutional challenges.

Every student wants their life to be easier. Every student would love to be able to walk into a university door and leave with a degree. And if all they had to do was enter the classroom and sit there and listen to their instructor speak.

But really, that's not what the university has set up to achieve. And so we need to start thinking about the larger business of the university overall, as you were saying. There are all of these different parts of the organization where digital transformation and digital tools can really drive change.

But at the end of the day, students and academic staff should be thinking about protecting the core of their educational experiences. Whether we're talking about a class that's delivered online or in-person or hybrid, I know these are conversations that universities are actively having right now, especially on the heels of COVID. The content and the pedagogy are still expected to be challenging.

So we want everything else outside of the classroom experience to become easier and more seamless. We want that students support ecosystem, the student services, the campus experience to be easier so that students aren't walking into the bursar's office to pay off a bill and then finding out that they actually have to travel to four or five other offices before they can manage that one little library fee just to register for their classes next semester. That needs to become a lot easier, but they need to be entering their classrooms and continuing to be challenged in those spaces.

So where we've seen digital transformation actually take off is not where most universities think. People's minds often go to tools like AR and VR and how that could completely change pedagogy and the classroom experience. And there are some campuses that are definitely using this to great effect, but it's usually a siloed one-off effort, maybe led by a teaching fellow who's really passionate about it or trying to change the way students can travel the world, so to speak, in one single classroom setting.

But if that teaching fellow leaves, that technology leaves, it's not really a transformative change to the way a specific university is approaching teaching and learning. So really where we're seeing digital transformation is in these non-academic domains where there are business problems or challenges to solve, like in enrollment, in helping students think about career exploration, student services, business processes and facilities operations and space management. So that's really where we're seeing a lot more of the innovation that's actually driving change and hoping our professional staff and our administrative staff do their jobs and serve students better because they're not caught up in some of these over-complicated paper-based processes.

SPEAKER_02
No, the paper-based piece is an important part, I think, of that conversation. It's interesting to me that you're mentioning all of these non-academic parts of the institution. I do think that's a place where change is more like what happens outside of higher education, but I think the tendency to shy away from those academic pieces, right, you mentioned augmented reality and virtual reality, the ability to bring things to life within the classroom with new technology that allows us to do things that we had never been able to do before.

Those really are difficult to scale. They're costly, they're not necessarily sort of something that can save the institution money, save the institution time. It's really a sort of deep investment in being able to do more of that kind of work.

And so when you think about those non-academic domains, what you're actually doing is focusing folks' attention on places where you can lift investment out of things that have otherwise been costly and labor-intensive and, to your point, paper-based, right? So you went through this whole process, I think, in the 1990s. Every institution must have bought about 15 different platforms to digitize some of their processes, but inevitably you had these processes that got left by the wayside and they're still Sammy in the registrar's office who has to print things out and cross things out with a red pen and then feed them into a fax machine to do XYZ before they go to the next cabinet meeting. But you still hear a lot of that in higher education and it's pulling people's attention away from, as you were saying, the things that matter, the things where we want to be focusing our people power and that's in the service and the pedagogy that we want to be delivering for our students.

So it's interesting, you have this sort of two-sided view of what it means to transform the institution. And now, I was just going to say, it goes back to this idea of what is the problem or the

SPEAKER_01
challenge that you're trying to solve if you are in a classroom-based environment where you are bringing AR or VR into the classroom just for the sake of it. You're not really doing anything, you're not really changing the way students are engaging with the content, but if you're doing it in order to help students who can typically study archaeology because they can't afford that required summer trip to some foreign country in order to go on a day with all of their classmates and their faculty members, and if you're enabling the students to suddenly major in something that wouldn't have been possible before because they can do a VR dig, then that's when we're talking about something a little bit different. We're talking about something about a way to solve for an institutional challenge or frankly an access problem where higher education has been inaccessible to students of different backgrounds for a long time and digital really does have the opportunity to increase that accessibility and make the university a space for everyone.

SPEAKER_02
Now, I think that's a great point, improving access, using the tools available to us to scale, right? I think that's just one way that many folks would think about what it means to be transformative. And I just, I want to loop us back a little bit to something that you had mentioned before when we were talking about just the different ways that folks think about that processes, they think about delivering things in a new way. We're talking a lot here about different technologies.

We've mentioned AR and VR, people will want to think about, you know, artificial intelligence, people think about buying CRMs, they think about, you know, how to do relationship management across all of the different functions that you mentioned to try and make that experience a little bit more seamless. And I think one thing that for me is really important to try and take away in some of these conversations that we have is that while we might look to technology as the future of the transformation that we're trying to drive, very few folks think about the ways in which technology is actually preventing them from doing some of that work. So if we think back to your earlier point about this being an issue of change management, about, you know, thinking about the way that things are today and then looking for ways to make them better in the future and thinking about, you know, how we can deliver different services to our students.

The technology that's in place today is actually a hindrance for many folks. Everyone is looking at what's on the market, looking at the next tool to buy and to bring in and how that's going to help them change everything they do and fundamentally shift the way that they serve their institutions. But when you look underneath the hood of an institution, it is a mess, right? We came in here talking about digital sprawl, talking about the ways that those investments have been connected in such a haphazard way.

When it comes to deciding how you want to move forward, thinking about what makes sense for your institution or which pieces of your institutional processes are actually most complicated for your students right now, right? We hear talk of pain points, what's difficult for students and faculty and staff to do today. It's really hard to understand that because of the way that things are connected. So, you know, I would really be encouraging folks to not just be thinking about what new things can we bring in and how will that help us transform, but how can we look at what we've got and reconfigure that or, you know, change things in a little way or take things away even, right? Sometimes it's actually sunsetting things that we have on our campus to make things more seamless, to make things less fragmented.

Thinking about technology as a hindrance in addition to technology as an enabler, I think is just something that is not necessarily a conversation that most campuses are having. I'm curious if, you know, in your conversations, if you've seen anyone not just making investments in the future, but really thinking about how they have to tidy out the past in order to make space for some of that innovation. That's a great question,

SPEAKER_01
Danielle. And the way I've been thinking about it and hearing partners think about it as well is in terms of having a larger digital strategy. There isn't any point in having individual conversations over every specific tech vendor acquisition decision when you don't have a larger mission-based strategy that you're working towards.

So a little cheat that I've heard from a couple of partners that I find really valuable is if you're looking at your overall digital strategy once you have one and you take out all mentions of specific vendors and technologies, does it still make sense or does it suddenly start looking very cloudy and unclear? And if your strategy suddenly doesn't make sense anymore because the vendors and the technologies that you're thinking about are a cheat or critical to its success, then you're not really thinking about digital transformation in a holistic way and you are starting to fall into the trap of thinking about technology for technology's sake and maybe falling a little bit for those latest greatest vendor pitches rather than thinking more critically about where that technology is going to fit into your campus and

SPEAKER_02
what's problems it's solving. And I think digital strategy is a great direction for us to take it because I think that no matter who is listening to us talking today, everybody has a role to play in that. And I find myself evangelizing this day in, day out when I'm talking to our partners.

It's that this is not an IT issue, this is not a data officer issue, this is something that really has to be lifted up by everybody on campus to make sure that everyone understands one, their part in the broader strategy and then two, their role in ensuring that those technology pieces, the data pieces are all fitting together to drive folks forward in that holistic way as you were saying. So I mean, I know that leadership plays a key role, but I'm curious, especially because I hear so often that change is difficult and not everybody is digitally literate on a campus. Have you seen anything that you know folks can do to try and help their institution rise up to this challenge at every level, not just the leadership and not just the front lines?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the way that I think about this as well is there's no point in having a digital strategy and buying all this technology if three years later nobody is using it and no one's willing to consider it. So it is definitely a campus-wide conversation and you do need to think about faculty, staff and even students and all of the people who will be interacting with and engaging with the technology or the digital change that you're thinking about or that your institution is embracing. So the way that I've typically thought about the split of digital stakeholders on campus is that there are these three broad personas and every campus has them.

Every campus has a digital skeptic, every campus has someone who's digitally curious, they're interested, but they don't know that much or they don't trust themselves and they don't think that they have the skills to engage with the technology and then there are those who are digital champions. They're really the ones who are probably raising their hand to trial and pilot new innovations and new technologies and they're the ones who are sometimes possibly even pushing leadership for change proactively. And so there are different ways you can engage each of these stakeholders, but the key thing to keep in mind is you're not ever going to get to a point where your whole campus is full of digital champions.

The point is really to just bring everyone along on this journey to get to a point where you have a baseline digital literacy and by that I mean a baseline understanding of where the university is going and the digital change they're seeking to implement so that people actually have the tools and understanding to engage with that. So there are different ways to think about this one. The easiest is making it required.

You can just link it to professional development schemes if faculty and staff have to do this in order to get recognition, to get a certificate, to get a badge, they're going to do it. And then the other thing is to make it easy. Everyone has so much on their plates especially right now and they have busy schedules and you really want to start thinking about how can you create training to get people who are interested but feel like they don't have the time to engage to start engaging.

And it could be as simple as just creating five-minute podcast episodes like you know this is obviously not five minutes but an educational tool that people can plug into their busy schedules and listen to on the metro or on the subway on their way to work for for a few minutes every day just to start thinking about that. But the other thing that I wanted to really talk about here to your point about digital strategy is needing to be campus-wide and a whole campus approach is that sometimes I have seen leaders use that as an excuse to not drive digital change. Oh everyone is not on board so now is not the time let's delay this conversation five to ten years.

And my piece of advice from my my guiding star here is you can always start somewhere make it part of your core planning if you can't do that partner with that one department in the middle of campus that's excited about innovating and transforming their practice but doesn't have any support and doesn't know how to do it. You can always start with one unit or one department and that also becomes a proof of concept. When one department or unit is actually doing this and doing it well it has results and outcomes that they can share with the wider campus community that's how you slowly start sowing the seeds for change so to speak.

SPEAKER_02
Now I feel like I'm seeing a theme emerge here which is that simplicity and ease of use is something that not only ties together the broad conversation that we're having around digital transformation and the reasons that that has to come into being but if you want to actually move your campus forward and you want folks to be coming together and then moving forward in this way then ease of inclusion right pushing folks towards things that are actually going to make their lives easier make sure that all of the change that you're working towards is something that is additive to the lives of the people that you're looking to serve and not not just you know change for the sake of change technology for the sake of technology. I think it really is just symptomatic of the world that we live in today right we will hold in that comes become accustomed to to something that is a little bit simpler a little bit more seamless in our experience and and I think that really is right the the pathway towards transformation. We've been talking still as well around around technology I know there is one thing that I really wanted to pull forward today in our conversation and that is a conversation around data so I know that you've mentioned in the past that it always seems like data and technology are used interchangeably you know those are those are terms that folks throughout there that aren't necessarily broadly understood as separable and I think it is it's a complicated thing to be dealing with but are there any you know specific questions you hear coming up around that where do you see that confusion

SPEAKER_01
sort of surging most? Yeah I think the perspective I hear from a lot of people especially those who are less comfortable with tech or less tech savvy is this idea of oh I don't know really how to implement this tech solution or I need to have good data to do this and there is always this question about what is good data how much data do you need for some of these technology technological solutions that we're thinking about and they're often used interchangeably and they're obviously very interlinked for one to for a technology solution to work really well on campus there is a certain level of good clean data you want to be putting into it but as someone who myself uses these terms interchangeably I think throughout this conversation I've said oh and data a couple of times but I want to get from you the data for Demi's version on how and why I should care about data like shouldn't the tech just be running on the in the background on its own why do I need to be concerned with that and what impact could that data have on my everyday life why is it something

SPEAKER_02
I should be caring about? Yeah well for me I think it is it ties back to experience and so if you think about that Amazon experience that you start our conversation on today if you think about the Netflix experience and the recommendation engines that sit behind some of our some of our favorite technology tools that seem to know us inside out and can personalize their recommendations to us at the drop of a hat they are fueled by data but they are not in and of themselves sort of able to do that without the quality of the information that we've put in so if you think about something like a CRM if you think about something like any kind of experience that you're looking to build for your for your students on campus if you put bad data in you're going to get bad experiences out that is just the you know the true tried and tested truism of working with with information so we can use systems to collect information I think it's something like 50% of new data that is created has some kind of error and so as you start to think about transforming your institution and you think that data is going to drive that strategy it's going to underpin the nuance that outreach the personalization of everything that you want to do to connect with your campus campus partners if the data is bad it's all going to go wrong and to your to your point about the mechanisms of change the way that we get people to be interested in some of this work if you if you step wrong you can lose people's trust you know you can increase the power of the skeptics on your campus rather than helping yourself with those champions that you mentioned you might want to be your coalition of the willing to drive some of these things forward and so for me it's again just another one of those areas that really touches every aspect of the institution everybody in a digital institution is inputting information everybody in a digital institution is using data and information in whatever tool they use to do their work and so it's a sort of collective good to be able to start thinking about the quality of that information and how you can look after that information as a campus so for me it's one of the core core assets right it's a core tenet of transformation not just which tools which technologies are going to help us deliver experiences but how are we going to ensure that they are fed with information that is relevant that is timely that is appropriate to the experiences that we're looking to build but the two the two core pieces to building a solution when you put it underneath the broad umbrella of what is the problem that we're trying to solve hopefully that wasn't too for dummies for you Anishka but I'm hoping it shed a little bit of light there on on what we were thinking and talking about it's a great way to actually

SPEAKER_01
visualize it because I do get those personalized Amazon recommendations every day and it's helpful to actually put it in perspective and think about the data that I'm putting into that that even allows that to be possible and what possibilities that opens up for higher education another thing that I wanted to to touch on though is you know clean data good data technology all of these things that we're talking about are really expensive and they're also going to require a lot of time intensity from staff putting in the effort to start getting all of this off the ground so I wanted to get your perspective on what you would tell a campus leader on why this investment is worth it why you know today there are so many different directions that we can go in with the the few dollars that we have at our disposal why should we put it be putting them here and in this conversation

SPEAKER_02
yeah well I would probably sort of ask folks to think about whether they do have dollars at their disposal right I'm sure you know folks are feeling pretty flush right now with the injection of funds that we've seen through the various acts that are supporting at least institutions here in in the US but the general truth of technology has been that it's a cost center right we think prior to these conversations around transformation that technology is an area where we want to reduce our spend we want to make it as as cheap as possible so that we can liberate those funds and spend them on things that matter directly for our students and the work of digital transformation really blurs the line that sits there is it a cost center or is it a strategic enabler and I think it's that duality that leaders have to really try and sit within and to say which pieces of our technology infrastructure are part of a cost center which are non-negotiable fundamental requirements of operating and business in the 21st century and then which are the strategic enablers which are the ones to your point about augmented reality that will help us deliver a differentiated pedagogical experience which are the ones that will help us be more personalized in our course recommendations or in our course pathways or in the way that our students experience the physical presence of our campus those are very different buckets of thinking about technology spend and it's very very difficult to balance them right now given the amount that is being spent on the purely infrastructural so I would really push leaders to be thinking about where they can start making shifts where can we start divesting from things that don't differentiate us that aren't transformative that aren't tied to our mission and keep our costs down in that domain and then use that money to spend into things that are going to make people excited to come to our institution that's going to make us stand out among you know the hundreds of liberal arts colleges that are out there or all of the different colleges in our region what's special about us and how do we spend into a digital version of what that looks like and by digital version I don't mean online I just mean augmented with all of the capabilities that have advanced in the last decade when we look at the technology ecosystem around us so absolutely worth spending into but I think you know the main point there is you've got to find the funds first in an ongoing operational model you've got to look at

SPEAKER_01
of what's important and what's not I actually think that's a great summary of the conversation here we're talking about cultural change and we've mentioned that a lot in this conversation but really what that comes down to is institutions all have something that they're proud of that makes them different there's a specific identity that universities really care about and that's usually their selling point to students that come to us and not only because we want more students but because we are better serving our communities we are better achieving our role as a university by doing x y z and I think that that identity that institutions have is where they should be capitalizing when it comes to digital transformation and tech change they want to further that identity not become like any other university that is buying this technological tool in order to attract students for x reason or to enable research in this particular domain if it has nothing to do with with where your faculty interests are so yeah I think that's a great note that's a great point

SPEAKER_02
Anushka and so I think with that we have covered a lot of ground and I know that you and I can talk about this for hours or even days if we had the time but I think I will leave it there and we can come back another day to have more conversations with office hours at EAP

SPEAKER_00
Thanks for listening please join us next week when our experts share their thoughts on how to reverse enrollment declines in one of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic community colleges Until then thanks for listening to office hours with EAB