Monash University:
On Becoming a Tech Powerhouse
Experts on transforming the digital capabilities of higher-ed institutions understand that dismantling old silos and outdated ways of thinking, while ramping up a college’s technological power, are essential in creating a digitally advanced environment.
But how do you negotiate the next leap into the future? What are the steps colleges can take to scale up their tech so students have more learning options and institutions can expand their business models?
Monash University, a leader in online education, provides some guideposts. Based in Sydney, Australia, but with campuses in China, Italy, and Malaysia, Monash serves over 80,000 students in 100 countries. As it has focused on reaching students around the globe, it has doubled down on its embrace of high-tech educational tools by developing a strong plan to expand its reach.
After instituting a comprehensive set of online-learning technologies, Monash began creating a growable platform based on making the most of the relationships it has already developed with alumni, current students, government, industry partners, and prospective students. Its goal: to maximize the return it gets from those relationships by stepping up personalized engagement.
To get there, it has employed a tech industry term of art: scalability. Usually defined as a ramping-up process, “scalability” more precisely denotes the ability of a computing process to be used or produced in a range of capabilities. It’s about growth in numbers—and in opportunities.
Forward-thinking colleges--those that IDC, a global market intelligence firm, calls “digitally determined”--have put together detailed plans for change and how to manage it. Then, they scaled it all up. Monash—with the help of Salesforce technology--fits the profile.
Within the past few years, Monash has:
- Developed new tech architecture: Using Salesforce cloud technology, the university has been able to develop data solutions across departments.
- Unified its view of stakeholders: A new platform using Salesforce Sales Cloud allows the college to “see” a student’s life cycle through the lenses of admissions, lead management, marketing, philanthropy, and recruitment. Monash can now personalize student experiences and increase engagement and communications through its complex global preference center, which also helps it maintain data privacy.
- Streamlined its application process: Course application and online acceptance of admission offers are now available, including on mobile devices, thanks in part to Salesforce’s Experience Cloud.
- Personalized support: Post-enrollment, all student service requests, managed through the Salesforce Service Cloud, are handled individually, sometimes by the use of chatbots that answer frequently asked questions across multiple platforms.
- Heightened engagement with alumni: An “alumni portal” serves more than 300,000 Monash alums and manages up to $40 million a year in online donations—with help from Experience Cloud.
- Maintained quality education during a pandemic: During Covid-19, Monash quickly moved its entire operations online so students could keep up with their studies and staffers were able to work from home.
By making a deliberate decision to use a single, multifaceted Salesforce environment across the college for all departments—everything from alumni relations to human resources to student services—Monash made collaboration and data-sharing easy and effective.
Want more results? Dramatic improvements were made in student experiences, as well as in delivering new capabilities and services. Digital operations are faster, more agile, and higher in quality and reliability. Monash has improved its processes for delivering new digital applications and enhancements, resulting in an 85.7 percent increase in university-driven application-releases.
The steps taken by Monash and the digital leaps the university has made can offer higher-ed leaders some direction. It seems they are seeking it out. In an April survey from IDC, higher-ed institutions said that “strengthening software capabilities for digital innovation” was their first priority. Other survey options—on “exploring new business models and growth areas” and “creating new remote office and enterprise-wide collaboration in services”—were also selected as priorities by college leaders.
Now that institutions are turning to digital transformation plans like never before, they’ll need to engage their leaders, faculty, and staff to develop and scale them up, advises Josh Teichman, Group Manager of Digital Transformation at Monash.
“You can build capabilities in-house by empowering your teams to grapple with the problems,” he says. “Give them the opportunity to learn and grow with the new technology.”
For more information, check out The Future of Higher Education: Digital Transformation is Critical to Learner and Institution Success, sponsored by Salesforce.org.
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