At Arizona State, building an environment for digital change
With crisis comes change.
As Covid-19 continues to shift the landscape of higher education, colleges are seeking ways to make themselves more connected, open, and responsive to the students and communities they serve. At the same time, they are working to make sure their faculty and staff have all they need to offer quality education. Colleges do so not merely to fulfill their missions but to survive an existential threat--one that preceded the pandemic but has been magnified by it.
By transforming their campuses into ones that are more comprehensively digital, colleges hope to stick out these tough times—while making themselves relevant and resilient enough to withstand challenges in the long run.
Colleges looking for role models would do well to heed the transformation of Arizona State University, which has spent much of the last 20 years engineering a campus-wide tech makeover. ASU’s experience offers concrete steps a college can take to become a digitally determined institution—one that considers tech an integral part of delivering a high-quality education and connected student experience.
First off, as university leaders, led by President Michael Crow, retooled for a rapidly emerging future, ASU made it a point to build out a solid change management plan. To get there, the university pulled together design teams, encouraged faculty and staff to learn tech skills through on-campus programs, and developed ways to make systems mesh seamlessly with the help of outside partners, including Salesforce.
By embracing an all-encompassing approach to change management, and then applying it to a physical and virtual campus that includes 120,000 students around the world, ASU has become an international exemplar of how best to offer students, many of whom are working or raising families, ways to learn online. The university’s change strategy also gives faculty and staff ways to contribute to the emerging techscape.
Considerable weight was placed on several factors essential to making change work campus-wide. Realizing that a sweeping transformation involves more than upgrading technical skills, ASU included communications and organizational design teams, which help to ensure that its ongoing transformation unfolds in an accessible and transparent way.
The university’s EdPlus program became a particular focal point for change. A popular and user-friendly online alternative to the classroom, EdPlus makes 200 degree programs available to about half of the university’s global students. It includes more flexible enrollment periods and personalized scheduling options, with a goal of increasing student success and reducing barriers to achievement.
The program has been “very intentional” about developing design teams that break down silos between departments, notes Donna Kidwell, Chief Technology Officer at EdPlus. Its change strategy relies upon tech experts, but also includes business staff and faculty working in teams, similar to how software-development teams collaborate in the corporate world.
Finally, to put its digital transformation to work, ASU entered into a comprehensive strategic partnership with Salesforce. The relationship began with ASU’s adoption of Salesforce.org Education Cloud, a platform that integrates systems from 32 ASU colleges and departments.
Other Salesforce products have collated data from a broad swath of the university, helping ASU create a single view for data analytics and student performance tracking. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows the university to better tailor email and other communications to alumni, donors, and students. And other Salesforce technologies have worked to help the university develop and roll out applications, upgrade student services, and process online transactions faster.
With the added boost of new tech, ASU has been able to reduce its email output by 16 percent and increase the amount opened by seven percent. What’s more, the university was able to publish more than 1,000 knowledge articles explaining its services to faculty and students in an easily accessible format.
Such outcomes needn’t be limited to institutions that have been out ahead of the march to transformation—something many colleges are beginning to realize. College leaders, navigating amid the roiling waters of a troubled era, are seeing the need for digital transformation.
Nearly 60 percent of institutions report that their business models will permanently change in the wake of Covid-19, according to an August report by IDC, a global market intelligence firm. What’s more, the need to retool is pressing; half of colleges and universities surveyed say that their revenues would decline anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent.
“The most innovative and future-proof institutions are reinforcing long-term commitments to enterprise-wide change management while investing in digital capabilities and technology,” says Nathalie Mainland, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Education Cloud at Salesforce.org.
To keep their operations up and running with a high degree of quality, many colleges are embracing the challenge. Clearly, the time to commit to a campus-wide digital transformation--and to manage the change to get there—is now.
“Higher education is at a turning point,” says Kidwell. “We simply can’t assume that the traditional models of delivering education are suitable without adaptation. If we’re to thrive and deliver on our mission, we’ll need to innovate.”
For more information, check out The Future of Higher Education: Digital Transformation is Critical to Learner and Institution Success, a whitepaper by IDC and sponsored by Salesforce.org.
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