The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed strengths and weaknesses of higher education business continuity planning. All institutions have been impacted, with most likely mired in implementing and revising their business continuity plans. An enterprise architect can help map essential business processes, systems, and services necessary to continue operating and serving students, faculty, and staff.

The requirement for data-informed decisions extends across the campus, including academic advising for student success; donor selection for advancement fund-raising campaign; energy conservation and facilities utilization programming; budget allocation and expenditure control. However, each of these examples contains a major assumption—that the underlying data are both trustworthy and the highest quality available.

The novel coronavirus and the resulting disease COVID-19 have disrupted everything and everyone, both across the U.S. and around the world. The campuses of most higher education institutions have been closed, forcing them to move classes online, requiring crash courses for faculty in emergency online teaching. (Updated and expanded, June 12, 2020.)

As part of digital transformation, the business side of your institution and the Information Technology (IT) department will need to fully partner in order to align. Alignment occurs when there is clear understanding of what the institution does or needs to do and how this is addressed by the supporting enterprise architecture.

Higher Digital worked with the University of Greenwich to migrate its academic marks from a custom legacy system to a modern digital platform. We worked with them to analyse, plan, execute, and test the migration of seven years of data in less than 12 months, enabling tighter integration and smoother evolution of assessment systems.

Higher Digital discovers UK and EU Higher Education Institutions’ challenges and priorities, and what Digital Transformation means to them as first-time conference exhibitor at UCISA’s CISG-PCMG19 conference.

AU adopted Higher Digital’s Simplified Enterprise Agile™ process, also known as (SEA)change™, which provided the training and team optimization to enable a more agile, product-focused approach that involved stakeholders throughout the organization. AU created a product management organization to manage product roadmaps, and embraced a more user-centric approach to developing application interfaces.

Higher Education Institutions have an incredible opportunity to increase enrollments and remain viable in today’s uncertain market. The modern workplace is rapidly evolving, so workers need to develop new or enhanced skills—leading to company-subsidized the retraining programs and increasing consumer demand for educational and training programs that help workers change jobs or advance their careers.