Brian Parish
President
With the advent of enterprise administrative software on campus, departmental systems lost favor on campus. In recent years, the tide has turned in favor of interoperability. Brian Parish discusses the shift, and offers success stories at Georgetown and Mount Holyoke.
Are departmental administrative solutions being pursued on campuses that have enterprise solutions in place?
The trend over two decades has been to eliminate departmental systems in favor of a single unified enterprise systems. However, universities are creative places, and they often solve problems at the departmental level. Custom or shadow systems are constantly being born to fill gaps in enterprise technology. Today's challenge is to allow for that innovation, but to have the new apps integrate with the enterprise systems. I love my job, because our firm gets to work with very creative schools.
As a result, are niche software companies making a comeback in higher education?
Yes. When a problem exists that campuses will pay money to solve, niche software companies emerge. In addition, today's tools and architectures drive down the cost of developing and delivering new applications. And also, the advent of software-as-a-service makes it much easier for a campus department to use a niche app by eliminating on-site installation and maintenance.
What is 'free-market registration?'
We use the term to describe a process that's inherent in an application developed by Georgetown University for course pre-registration. For next semester's courses, students bid and prioritize their selections. The system records all student bids, and at the same time prioritizes each request based on an algorithm that associates 'academic need' with it. Academic need can be calibrated by each of Georgetown's schools based on a student's nearness to graduation, course requirements, and other school-defined factors.
What has Georgetown accomplished in free-market registration?
It was designed to help assure that the maximum number of students graduate in four years. It was also designed to optimize equity in student access to highly desirable faculty members. The concept has been in use throughout the university for thirty years. This latest software is considered a success.
What costly tedium is involved in managing endowed scholarships?
They are great resources these days. But they come with strict award rules. Recording, knowing and complying with all the rules is time-consuming, and the tedious detail invites mistakes.
What successes have Mount Holyoke College's financial aid and IT departments accomplished with endowed scholarships?
They wanted a departmental solution that would eliminate spreadsheets and be interoperable with Datatel Colleague. Employing yet another algorithm in a new solution, student attributes are matched to scholarship requirements. As a result, award processes that used to take days and weeks now takes minutes.
Are the Georgetown and Holyoke solutions long-term or short-term solutions?
Our objective was to help both schools develop robust solutions that will operate effectively through multiple upgrades of their current ERP system with minimal maintenance.
Do you see a killer app on the near horizon?
Everyone who works with software is always checking the radar. Right now I don't see a distinct new killer app. From my experience, I think the next killer app may very well be written from home or in a dorm by a freshman.