Distance education must and will improve to become more immersive and engaging for faculty and students alike; C-suite executives should not allow any pushback against last spring’s COVID-induced emergency remote teaching to stall this strategic imperative.

The murder of George Floyd happened on May 25th. Since that time many companies have published statements condemning the incident and calling for change. It was hard to avoid publishing a quick response, but we know full well the hazard of being reactive.

I am thrilled to be joining Higher Digital in the role of President and I’d like to tell you why. This company is at the cutting edge of aligning Strategy, Agile Change Management and DevOps to rewrite the rules and best practices for 21st century leadership.

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.