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Sneak Peek: Datamonitor Analyst Previews Upcoming Report on Shared Services for Higher Education
Independent analyst firm Datamonitor is currently preparing a report on the ways alternative models of software delivery, including hosted, shared services, and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, have the ability to benefit higher education institutions in what Nicole Engelbert, senior analyst, education technology, Datamonitor, calls "unique and powerful ways."
Engelbert took time out to provide a preview of Datamonitor’s report, which is slated for publication in September 2008.
Can you share any surprising results you have found in your research so far?
After years of being vehemently opposed to the adoption of on-demand delivery models, it is as if a 70s dimmer switch has been installed and is gradually changing higher education’s orientation to these models. Few would have predicted the considerable institutional interest in hosted e-mail, and fewer still would have identified Google as one of the most popular providers.
What business pressures do higher education institutions currently face that make the implementation of shared services a good solution?
Colleges and universities are increasingly finding themselves in the difficult position of having to do more with the same or less. Institutions are struggling to find a way to satisfy the growing demands of students, faculty, and staff for better, more ubiquitous, and personalized service while keeping costs constant. Technology has the potential to be a powerful tool in balancing these almost contradictory requirements. And when the costs, both in terms of monetary and human resources, are shared across multiple institutions, the value of the technology increases dramatically.
Give us a couple of examples of the way a higher education institution might successfully benefit from implementing shared services.
Employing a shared services model significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for many enterprise applications. For example, applications such as a student information system (SIS) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution often require IT staff to have specialized or highly sought-after skills in order to administer ongoing maintenance and to manage regular upgrades. Distributing this need across multiple campuses lessens the burden of recruiting and retaining these types of individuals for any single institution. And in the end, as a one-to-one correlation between adding institutions and adding staff does not exist, there are attractive economies of scale from which everyone benefits.
Is there anything unique or particular to higher education institutions that make them especially able to benefit from shared services?
The fundamental mission of higher education is the creation and sharing of knowledge—in other words, teaching, learning, and research. As a result, institutions have a history of collaborating with one another in order to most effectively conduct these activities. There are many examples of researchers from multiple universities working together on a single study or students traveling to other campuses for term-abroad programs. The leap, therefore, to sharing an ERP or SIS solution is relatively easy and limited only by how quickly institutions can sort out fairly basic logistical questions.
Is outsourcing of either the business process or information technology a strategy that higher ed uses to accelerate deployment or improve the results of their transformation to shared services?
Absolutely. Using a third-party vendor to manage the “sharing” of applications across participating institutions is often not only a cost-effective strategy but a performance-enhancing one as well. Institutional performance is improved, as this approach enables colleges and universities to focus resources on executing their primary mission—teaching, learning, and research—instead of managing technology. And technology performance is improved because the primary mission of technology vendors is building and maintaining software solutions. A shared services model leveraging outsourced IT enables everyone to focus on what they are best at doing.
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