Efficiency

The financial pressures on institutions and the scrutiny on spending continue. But campus administrative offices also continue to find new ways to change their practices for the better.

As the stories of our Summer 2010 Models of Efficiency honorees demonstrate, there are a multitude of good ideas being implemented that streamline processes without reducing the quality of service that campus constituents deserve, and in many cases expect.

Summer is typically a time for relaxing—for most people. In higher education, no one rests for long. Running an institution is often just as time-consuming and intense as at any time of the year, and this summer seems to be more turbulent than ever. As many institutions continue to face the dual problems of booming enrollments and deeper cuts, they must also contend with myriad other issues brought on by new federal regulations in student aid, institutional funding, and health care.

As a reader of this magazine, you were probably not surprised--much less chagrined--by the 2009 publication of a three-volume set of books entitled, The Business of Higher Education (Praeger Publishers, 2009). Nor, I would wager, do you find University Business an unusual magazine title. As the CEO of a college, neither do I.

But we need to recognize that, for many constituencies of the academy not among University Business readers, the phrase "university business" may sound odd, if not oxymoronic. And that is true for at least two reasons.

Change in academia tends to occur gradually, but the University of Missouri- Columbia turned that conventional wisdom on its head when it implemented a lecture capture system that students and faculty alike embraced with unprecedented speed.

The search for a lecture capture system began in the spring of 2009, after several faculty members approached the technology department saying they wanted to implement lecture capture for their classes, said Danna Vessell, the university's director of educational technologies.

We asked what makes your administrative department an efficiency model, and you delivered. Everyone in higher education is being forced to do more with less. Stellar campus administrative departments are continually working to also do it all better than ever before.

We're starting the new year by announcing a new recognition program here at University Business, a program that honors those administrative departments that have found a way to work smarter and better. We call it Models of Efficiency, and it gets to the heart of what University Business is all about, a message that is reflected in our tag line, "Solutions for Higher Education Management."

At Abilene Christian University in West Texas, technology managers were struggling with an outdated email system. While providing basic service, it lacked advanced functionality and was time-consuming and expensive to maintain. in addition, the full-time email administrator’s position had recently become vacant.

Kevin Roberts, chief information officer at ACU, knew it was time for a change. “We were disenchanted with our current email system,” he says, adding that the system servers were outdated, expensive to maintain, and were running out of space.

The 53-campus system includes seven state universities and 25 community and technical colleges offering more than 3,500 programs to 374,000 students and 140,000 continuing career education enrollees. With campuses five to six hours apart, Karen Bergmeier, ITS project lead- er and Cisco WebExTM solution liaison, found herself traveling four to five hours two to three times each week to conduct training on the system’s proprietary software.

The College of Western Idaho was still more than a year away from holding its first class. A thousand details needed to be resolved. Not least among them was the installation of a computer network that would serve the fledgling college’s seven campuses.