University of Greenwich Case Study

The University of Greenwich needed to migrate millions of academic marks from a bespoke legacy system to a more robust modern platform to enable more frequent updates and tighter integration among different components. They brought in Higher Digital to analyse and design this transformation, and then work with the university’s on-site team to migrate seven years of academic data in less that 12 months.

Higher Digital SVP Michael Agnew worked closely with the team at Greenwich to evaluate and analyse the project in concert with users and other stakeholders, develop migration scripts, and test the results under different scenarios. He leveraged existing processes and tools to efficiently manage the effort, leading to measurable results with KPIs that can be tracked over time.

Paul Butler, Director of Information & Library Services at the university, explained: “Originally, they were tasked with the evaluation, impact analysis, and the business case. Once we triggered the project in practical terms, Mike (Agnew) still had a hand in everything: designing the migration scripts, spinning up the baseline systems, testing them, running scenarios, working with our users, and so on. Within the next year or so, the University of Greenwich expects to retire its legacy technology, enabling it to more efficiently allocate resources among technology projects, and ultimately improving service and student experience.

“We’ve got projects going on all over the place,” Butler said. “Higher Digital supports us as we take things from ten processes to two and helps us rationalise those processes. Organisations like that are hard to find.” Beyond this assessment system migration, the University of Greenwich is tackling numerous other digital transformation projects, with the ultimate goal of being cloud-first by 2022. And Higher Digital intends to support them every step of the way.