Enterprise architecture is transforming the way universities manage and access student information. The movement is toward flexible, SOA-based services that result in more adaptable business processes, better collaboration and more manageable systems. Universities are competing more than ever to admit students that meet specific criteria. Expedient access to the right information during the enrollment cycle and beyond is crucial.
The Oracle WebCenter team includes some of the best minds in the industry. In its WebCenter newsletter, Oracle is featuring a series of articles introducing readers to some of the team’s key players.
In this edition, the spotlight is on Loren Weinberg, who joined the Oracle WebCenter team last September, following Oracle’s acquisition of FatWire. As vice president of product management and strategy, Weinberg drives product strategy, direction, messaging, and go-to-market execution for Oracle WebCenter, always with a focus on delivering real-world success for customers.
Oracle WebCenter — from Web experience management, to portal, enterprise content management and social collaboration, the technologies can truly deliver unique value for customers and help them drive customer engagement across online channels.
Read the full story at Oracle WebCenter newsletter.
The ability to gather information and evaluate a potential student in a timely manner is critical for a university to effectively recruit and enroll the most qualified students. When a high school or transfer student identifies a list of universities and colleges they may be interested in attending, so begins the accumulation of information about the student; their identity, academic record and preferences.
This information is coveted and schools that can quickly identify it and use it have a considerable advantage in recruiting.
Alakh Verma, Director, Platform Technology Solutions at Oracle, explores the transition to Web 3.0, which was first defined by Dakota Reese Brown as “The Contextual Web.” Verma states, “It is estimated that by 2020, there would be 4 billion people online; 31 billion connected devices, 25 million applications, 1.3 trillion sensors/tags and 50 trillion gigabytes of content created in networked society.” He believes the focus on the Web experience will grow, and having a portal framework enabling contextual access to content from a unified repository will be at the center of importance during the next decade.
Read the full story at Oracle WebCenter blog.
Your university may or may not have a strategy for managing content, the unstructured information streaming in and out of all areas of your campus on a daily basis. It’s likely you at least have a partial strategy where one or more of your departments is capturing and storing some type of unstructured information for later retrieval.
In a world where the use of digital channels is enabling organizations to synthesize large amounts of information in seconds, universities are making it a top priority to gain control of that rogue 80%, which is the approximate amount of unstructured information slipping through the cracks. This information is not easily accessible because it is scattered and isolated in departmental or personal file systems. This is the information employees need to do their jobs.
University structured v. unstructured content
Content management services and software technologies have adapted to changing business environments so quickly over the past ten years, it is difficult to keep up with where the capabilities lie today. The following are five mistaken beliefs about content management and the facts that dispel those beliefs.
5. Content management is mostly beneficial for scanning and archiving documents.
Content management covers the lifecycle of information from creation and publication to archival and eventual disposal. One of the largest benefits of content management is enabling workflow automation. A perfect example is when someone in your organization wants to buy something. The individual begins to create documentation such as pricing research, correspondence, a requisition, purchase order, invoice and a contract to name a few. With workflow automation, these supporting documents are captured, routed and accessed interdepartmentally for approval, payment and auditing. Transactions are processed in hours or days instead of weeks.
Whether you are dealing with student records, registration forms, accounting files, financial aid or any other departmental processes, the most efficient way to use the information and get it to your main system is to scan the documents at the time they are created or received.
If you wait until the end of the process, many people across your organization will have photocopied, faxed, emailed, sorted, filed and re-filed, creating massive amounts of unnecessary work, expense and wasted resources.
The sky has not fallen — but pieces of it could soon be hitting a campus near you.
That is one way of summing up the findings of Inside Higher Ed’s first-ever Survey of College and University Business Officers, released today in advance of the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
The survey, the second of a series in which Inside Higher Ed is gauging the views of key higher education constituents, reveals a surprisingly upbeat assessment about the financial state of American college campuses (especially private nonprofit ones), as seen through the eyes of their chief finance and business officials, 606 of whom responded to the survey.
About one in six business officers at both public and private nonprofit colleges described the financial health of their respective institutions as “excellent,” and another 57 percent of public-college CFOs and 47 percent of private-college CFOs characterized their respective institutions’ financial health as “good.” Business officers at public and private institutions alike also generally rebuffed the notion that the budget cuts their institutions have suffered so far have damaged the quality of their academic programs or academic support for students — opinions that many other people on their campuses are unlikely to share.
Read the full story at Inside Higher Ed News.
Attend Nexus 2011 and learn how to maximize student success using ECM integrated with your student information systems. Find out more information and register here.
AN INVITATION FROM TERRY SUTHERLAND, IMAGESOURCE CEO
If there was ever a year to attend an Enterprise Content Management Solutions Conference, this is it! Higher education institutions are being challenged financially now more than ever before. Becoming operationally efficient and serving student populations more effectively are critical imperatives.
Nexus is a forum that has matured into one of the most valuable information technology conferences anywhere. Our goal is to help you understand how your students, faculty and administrative staff across the campus can benefit from an enterprise class content management platform. [Read more...]
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