BP Logix

American colleges should be applauded for their quick and decisive action to protect the health and safety of their communities when COVID-19 first hit. Now that states and institutions are gradually shedding shelter-in-place policies and allowing the opening of businesses and gatherings, there will be scrutiny on higher education leaders to create a logical, workable plan for the fall semester and the foreseeable future.

In an effort to determine effective plans for reopening in the fall, colleges and universities are currently reviewing guidelines and policies from a variety of private and governing bodies. Because there is no single organization policing these plans, it is up to individual institutions and state-wide systems to evaluate guidelines and policies and ultimately determine what will be most effective for them.

Four areas to focus on when returning to campus

To be judicious and thoughtful in their approach, most schools are taking into consideration the advice of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), state and local guidelines, local laws, and the concerns and needs of their own campus communities. University leaders are rapidly reviewing their own policies, in addition to research from the CDC, the American Health College Association, and insights from a variety of college presidents. From this work, we can see that there are four main areas of focus around which colleges and universities are creating their own set of reopening guidelines:

Student and faculty behavioral strategies

Schools want to reduce the spread of viruses by limiting exposure among students. This includes reducing class sizes for on-campus courses, mandating wearing of face masks, and education around things like hand washing, self-care, and limiting gatherings to small groups. Much of these efforts will require education and instilling behaviors. Some schools will choose to simply not return in the fall to seriously limit any form of exposure. Others will pursue a hybrid plan of online and offline courses. Those that will have students on campus in the fall are preparing for the need to increase staffing and resources at campus health facilities.

Effective management of campus facilities

University facilities, student services, and IT teams are working quickly to adapt the physical environment of their schools to be more conducive to social distancing. This includes upgrading and managing ventilation and water systems, adopting continuous disinfection and cleaning practices, limiting usage of common areas like recreational areas, dining halls, and student unions. The impact of these things will dramatically change the student experience, and schools are being cautious to balance safety with student needs.

Balancing remote learning with student needs

The move to online learning that began in March 2020 won’t go completely away. Some schools are opting for 100% online in the fall, while others will adopt a hybrid model. Schools realize also that most students have access to laptops or tablets, which will enable them to be effective at connecting to online, remote classes. For students who don’t have the technology required, colleges will need to provide these to them or offer an effective way to stay engaged when not in actual classrooms and lecture halls. Most schools are currently developing comprehensive strategies for online learning as a long-term option for college students, so what happens in the fall of 2020 could likely form the foundation of the future of learning in higher education. Doing so requires more than just porting coursework and curriculum to an online format, and will demand the efforts of academic experts, IT leaders, and representatives from student, faculty, and university administration.

Protecting the physical and mental health of students and faculty

The CDC recommends that schools develop protocols for isolating, transporting, and caring for students and faculty who develop symptoms or are diagnosed with COVID-19. These include processes that impact health and safety regulations beyond just the campus; local and state health officials will need to be alerted and cases tracked.

The actual implementation of fall plans will undoubtedly integrate various elements of these four factors. Current scenarios that are being considered include the following:

• Business as usual - some campuses, like Purdue in Indiana, will resume normal campus life and on-campus learning, albeit with precautions and social distancing policies in place. For schools that choose this route, students will be in classes, some recreational activities will resume, and there will be a semblance of normal campus life.
• 100% online - the California State University system has opted to keep all students at home and go completely online for the fall. There will be economic factors that these schools will need to deal with, as some students will opt not to return to college or may take a gap year. Additionally, faculty and IT teams will be working feverishly to ensure that they can deliver all aspects of academics via the Internet.
• Hybrid model - the hybrid model of learning will function with classes being conducted both face-to-face and online. For many schools taking this route, they have established a threshold for the number of students allowed in an on-campus class. Many have chosen to limit the number of students in a face-to-face class to fewer than 20. All other classes will be conducted online.
• Adapted schedules - a common approach is to begin the fall with a mix of online and in-person classes, and to reduce the amount of time the students are on campus. Many will start with their regularly planned beginning of the semester but will close at the start of the Thanksgiving break. That break will last until after the new year, which limits the amount of travel to and from schools, and thus, hopefully reducing exposure to students and faculty.

As colleges figure out their plans, they are factoring in things like feasibility, economic impact, and ensuring they are staying true to their academic missions. Irrespective of the path they take, it will undoubtedly hasten the implementation of certain strategies that some schools had planned for a much later time. But just as universities are leaders in innovation, they may be the best places to see how disruptive changes will impact the face of the new university.

Colleges and universities have received a lot of praise for how they’ve reacted to the COVID-19 crisis. They had to scramble to put courses online, relocate students out of university housing, and deal with a host of student and institutional financial issues.

Now, colleges are looking to the summer, fall, and beyond as they prepare to maintain some level of continuity in the face of uncertainty. The methods they apply to these challenges will define them for the current and next wave of students, and may reshape higher education for the long term.

Higher education faces disruption

Challenges to American higher education were already on the minds of university administrators and IT leaders before COVID-19. Student enrollment has been in decline, new legislation is requiring them to put efforts into technology compliance, and students’ needs are changing with a new generation entering college.

But then came the coronavirus, and the speed required to meet changing needs has meant that new technology solutions are being applied in almost real-time. For schools that use manual processes and workflows, those changes have been slow to come to fruition. But for institutions that have been willing to apply process automation to their workflows, the ability to shift to meet changing demands has helped them prepare for the uncertainty they face.

Maintaining operations with process automation

Here’s why that’s such a major advantage: most tasks, especially repeatable ones, can be automated so users don't waste time and lose focus. Process automation is all about getting stuff done; at best, it gives people the freedom to do what they're good at while automating the things that can bog them down. Basically, it’s an approach that emphasizes speed while providing guardrails so that key measures aren’t missed. In the complex environment of a university, being able to apply speed to rapidly changing issues is critical.

Universities can improve rapid process change and effectively guide participants by doing the following:

• Maintaining focus: Centralize all activity on a project towards a specific goal. Eliminate distractions and extraneous activity, enable people to work where they are, when it’s most convenient for them, and in a way with which they are most comfortable.
• Utilizing status alerts: Use alerts to improve response time for project milestones and timelines.
• Reducing bottlenecks: Waiting for approvals or feedback can be major momentum-killers. Process automation can eliminate the typical delays that usually accompany decision making; waiting for another participant to deliver feedback on your work can cause collateral damage that the entire team feels. Enabling things like mobile channels keeps projects moving forward because it reduces wait times.

Most importantly, organizations that apply process automation are prepared for current needs, and for an uncertain future. With a process and workflow foundation and the ability to do things like apply case management to specific tasks, and use case management capabilities, process automation can support the need to capture data from multiple sources and communicate it to necessary stakeholders. These are critical for colleges to manage information and act on it quickly.

Benefits of process automation in higher education

When outcomes change rapidly, as is happening as state, federal, and institutional mandates are being continuously updated, process automation offers a foundation on which admissions, housing, financial aid, facilities, HR, and other operational elements that a college can build from. Specifically, it allows agile IT teams to do the following:

• Automate processes, integrate apps with existing systems, and easily connect to data from multiple sources so information and functionality render in a single user experience. Each instance of building a connector can cost as much as $25,000 in developer expenses when using traditional methods. Process Director, for example, uses process automation so that even non-developers can pull necessary data into applications.
• Optimizing ROI from legacy applications to rapidly deliver user experiences and increase user adoption. This is especially critical at a time when students and faculty will be engaging with new forms, systems, and experiences that guide them through things they haven’t done previously, such as registering for online courses, purchasing digital textbooks, applying for financial aid in new ways.
• Designing and building best-in-class apps that can be deployed when needed. Provide the ability to iterate and improve as schools learn more.
• Recognizing and delivering solutions for all aspects of the university experience. This includes things like HR management, student recruiting, facilities and operations, and alumni relations.
• Migrating applications from on-premises to the cloud.
• Delivering applications in mobile formats to increase usage for students, faculty, and school staff.

Adaptation to recent changes is a critical priority for innovative university administration and IT leaders, which is dictating new operational approaches. These include a new-found focus on how services are delivered and what that means for student engagement. To facilitate these changes, the effective application of process-related solutions will be critical to have a long-term effect.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

No matter their size, private/public designation, endowment, or geography, all colleges and universities are experiencing major changes due to COVD-19. While large universities have received the most attention for the challenges they’re experiencing, it’s often smaller schools that are hit hardest. 

Faced with limited budgets and fewer resources, small colleges are already dealing with the challenges of meeting enrollment demands, effectively servicing students and being nimble enough to adapt to change. With major disruptions for all schools because of COVID-19, smaller schools have to make moves to be prepared for navigating uncertain territory. 

There is no question that smaller schools are an essential part of higher education. They usually have better student-to-faculty ratios, offer specialized academic tracks and are better options for students who want to be part of a smaller environment. 

Small liberal arts colleges emphasize a broad array of academic disciplines, while some regional schools focus more on training for professional services like fire services, nursing and other service-related professions. 

Higher education workflows address key technology needs

The changes that stem from the coronavirus have thrown everyone for a loop. Schools are having to build solutions immediately to address current needs and they are developing plans for an uncertain future. The major difference between big and small schools in the current education landscape comes down to technology and how it’s applied to solve these problems. 

However, budget restrictions of smaller schools prevent massive student relationship management systems and armies of software developers that spin up solutions as needed. While scale of technology may always be an issue, the approach to problem-solving can be addressed by schools of any size. Workflow can be the defining factor for schools being agile because workflow is foundational to how problems are solved, irrespective of the technology that’s used.

Establishing a workflow & process management foundation

Effective workflow, however, is more than just a series of tactical activities. It aligns with user intent and is applied to the unique technology functionality required of a college’s students, faculty and other stakeholders. 

It also helps to create behaviors that maximize usage and deliver meaning to users. This is especially important when higher education is changing behaviors for things like online learning, applying for financial aid, hiring and offering new types of student services. 

A workflow foundation will also help when even those new solutions change as schools change regulations to adapt to new governmental and health and safety requirements.

The three most critical aspects of aligning workflow, technology and university needs are ease of use, solution context, and communication. Effective workflow ensures that all these elements are met so that users have not just a more efficient experience, but one they can begin to rely on to consistently meet their needs irrespective of the rate and type of change they will experience in the short- and near-term. Let’s look more closely at how these factors can support the needs of smaller schools:

Workflow & process management simplifies digital experiences

Process Director provides a great example of how ease of use can translate into effective solutions. It enables the creation of sophisticated, low-code digital applications that take into account the necessary data and workflow sources on the back-end, and considers how users on the front-end will actually use the app. 

By being able to create simple apps that integrate relevant information, including smart forms and processes, students can get the information they need and take action on things like class scheduling, financial aid, and other relevant events. The teams who build the apps benefit from Process Director’s agile approach to adapt as needed to increase adoption and productivity. 

While Process Director is easy to use for those who need to build applications rapidly and continuously meet changing needs.

Workflow & process management provides context for data

Small college IT teams use Process Director to optimize the use of data so that the applications they create help students engage and complete tasks with limited disruption to their schedules. 

Process Director helps direct the way that organizations surface and orient data through interactive forms and workspaces. Just as human interaction is complex, Process Director looks at the workflows in applications not as a linear phenomenon, but as a continuously shared collection of usable elements that allow for context-based structural changes, last moment decisions, and individualized attention depending on each circumstance.

The case management approach inherent in Process Director also helps greatly when delivering applications that integrate historical data on students (transcripts, payments, scholarships). With navigable data that can be filtered for omission or inclusion depending on the situation, applications can adapt as the students’ situations change and evolve.

This approach supplies students with applications that provide them with what they need when they need it, all without forcing them to search outside the context of the case to find answers.

The Importance of Communication

Students and faculty are being bombarded with emails, texts, direct messages and a host of other types of communication in order to get the information they need. However, that information can go unnoticed if it doesn’t fit with how they are accustomed to consuming news and alerts. Schools need to ensure that students see important messages, but also create ways for students to communicate back with them.

With capabilities that facilitate connecting and communicating across departments, Process Director can help schools collect applications, forms and data sources into a collective portal that delivers all student’s actionable needs into a single interface. That reduces response time and enhances the kind of communication students need in order to adapt to changes, stay on top of opportunities and always be current about how they can interact with their school.

Final thoughts

No school, irrespective of size, can meet the demands of the post-COVID-19 world on an application-by-application basis. Small schools that want to align their goals and processes to student behaviors will need to apply change through the use of smart workflow and processes. 

To serve these needs, Process Director provides digitally transformative and contextual education workflow solutions, facilitates efficient distribution of information and streamlines the monitoring and management of information.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

"There's no good time for a pandemic. But for admissions, this has got to be the worst time.”
- Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University

For millions of current and incoming college students, the financial, health, and social factors surrounding COVID-19 are causing them to change their higher education plans. As a result, college admissions and IT departments are going to have to change their normal processes to adapt to the needs of a whole new wave of college students.

Consider the findings from a recent poll about incoming college freshmen: One in six high-school seniors who expected to attend a four-year college full time before the coronavirus outbreak are now planning to embark on a different path in the fall of 2020. Three out of five students who still plan on attending college are seriously concerned about their ability to afford college.

The reality of all this uncertainty creates a huge workload for college admissions officials and IT leaders who will need to develop new software applications processes to address a variety of admissions issues, including:

• Enrollment deferment 
• Changing admissions requirements
• Communication with students
• Timelines and plans for reopening campuses, which includes facilities and scheduling

These are just some of the issues that schools are dealing with, none of which can be addressed in a simple fashion. For IT departments, the key is agility. Decisions are being made by school leadership on a daily basis which impacts enrollment, admissions for the fall semester and beyond. 

Low-code development starts with data, builds with process

University data and content is currently stored in a wide variety of applications. They range from the basic (spreadsheets and graphics) to complex (some data analytics solutions and massive ERP systems). All of that data serves a purpose, and in a time when colleges are moving quickly to create new and updated admissions and enrollment processes, the data has to be able to be called into use whenever and wherever it can be most applicable. Information is important, but using it in context with other data is where schools stand to be most effective. To do this requires being able to build software apps quickly and for specific purposes.

The best way to bring new applications to productive use is to reduce development time, and when addressing the changing landscape in response to COVID-19, speed is critical. To meet this challenge, low-code development has emerged as an efficient way to create software. It is a methodology and approach that uses reusable, pre-built components of code and applies them in a drag-and-drop fashion that simplifies the coding effort and accelerates the pace at which applications are built.

Rapid application development for the post-COVID university

The promise of low-code development is attained through speed, efficiency, and the democratization of technology. Business needs can be met through rapidly-built applications that can be created by non-programmers. All of a sudden, solutions can be created and put to use by those closest to business problems. At a time when the future is difficult to plan for, this level of agility will give college IT departments their best chance at delivering solutions for these unique times.

It’s easy to think of low-code as a rip-and-replace substitute for all application development, but in this case, it’s more about enabling university administrators to iterate on their changing admissions application requirements.  It also puts people who are closest to problems in a position to create or at least initiate solutions. But much of the ability to do that corresponds to understanding admissions needs, changing academic requirements, and the available data the school can work with. Even though low-code is much easier than complex development, it still demands time, a plan, and trial-and-error. 

There is no one single system of record that can be used when changes are happening so quickly; colleges typically rely on a variety of different student information management and other types of enterprise planning apps. The key becomes, then, the ability to integrate data from those sources into custom-built apps to serve their changing needs. Speed will be critical to developing these new apps. Schools will not have time for traditional software development cycles, which means non-developers will have to be included in the process of scoping and building apps. 

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

Changes happening now in higher education as a result of the coronavirus pandemic are undoubtedly having a major impact on students all across the country. The way they engage with classes and benefit from various services will undergo sweeping changes as social distancing becomes more normalized into every day human behavior. 

There have been hero-like efforts by many who have conceived and delivered short-term solutions; these are the people in IT who have had to integrate systems, build custom apps, and generally drive a completely new face of the university in record time. But their solutions are helping with changes that affect more than just students.

What many may not realize is this: for schools to remain viable and adhere to their mandates, they will need to change their HR practices in order to create a workforce that can deliver the next phase of higher education. To do that will require HR processes that enable them to hire, reassign, and manage the right people to deliver solutions for the new world of higher education.

Agility to meet changing HR needs in higher education

Higher education strategies for HR have typically been built around hiring that’s mapped to long-term growth plans. But in the face of COVID-19, these plans are largely thrown out the window while schools move rapidly to adapt to their new and changing needs. As a result, a new HR playbook must be created.

Some schools have established hiring freezes. Others have reduced staff who were performing outdated functions. Others recognize that they need people who can turn their campuses into innovative engines that can recreate what a university is going to be in the post-COVID world. For some, that means hiring for these roles, while for others, it means reassigning existing staff and faculty. For each of these situations, schools need to develop effective workflows for smooth transitions and ensure they have the staff they need to limit disruption.

All of these situations require some form of organizational orchestration which can be driven by effective workflow automation. At most schools, the goal is to do whatever is necessary to finish out the school year and maintain the effective delivery of classes. But forward-thinking colleges are not only delivering for the short-term. Long-term strategies can wait, but limiting disruption by deploying the right staff is a priority. But it takes more than a checklist to ensure that goals are met. 

Using workflow automation to meet immediate and long-term needs

Staffing changes involve many organizational and personal data. In order to create smooth transitions, these changes must be supported through data from HR information systems and financial applications. This enables a title change or reporting structure to become officially recognized and creates a clear view into an employee’s job description and responsibilities. It means that schools can reallocate employees where they can most be beneficial in meeting new challenges and sets up the college to be agile once a “new normal” begins to take shape. This is clearly important for the college - the HR team is able to quickly adapt as needed. But it also takes into account the issues of privacy of individual staff information.

To make this all happen requires a variety of forms, documents, requests, and decisions to be reviewed and acted on. In a normal environment, the reliance on paper forms and manual intervention for decision-making milestones might be tolerated. But with massive pressure to conserve money and be highly efficient during this time of great change, HR and IT teams have to pull together all these things into an integrated, rapidly moving set of workflows in record time. 

Many BP Logix higher education customers are already using Process Director to handle these types of issues. Schools like the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)  and Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), near Salt Lake City, cite their ability to be flexible and quickly develop new processes as major advantages of using Process Director’s workflow automation capabilities as core to their foundation.

With a limited budget and vague goals, all college HR and IT teams need to be able to innovate to hire, reassign, and perform other essential tasks related to having an efficiently operating workforce. Process Director delivers capabilities like workflow automation and lightweight application development functionality that enable higher education HR teams to do the following:

• Rapidly build processes and create forms to collect new and existing HR information housed in existing applications, and to be able to integrate that with updated information from the employees themselves.
• Create time-dependent milestones that use automated communication and workflow to ensure that the right decision-makers are included.
•  Efficient approval handling.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

Workflow automation can intelligently apply relevant data from various applications and documents into a shareable profile of each employee. This case management approach provides clarity for all workflows that touch each employee so that important decisions that impact their working situation can be achieved faster and with greater context. Process Director also has native integration with popular HR systems like PeopleSoft and other enterprise apps which makes it easy for non-developer to build workflows with the full complement of various application modules that are relevant to employee management.

COVID-19 has clearly changed all aspects of higher education and will test the ability of university leaders to maintain the viability of their schools. When they are able to build the right school with the right people, colleges and universities will be prepared to meet the demands of the new normal. Through the application of workflow automation, colleges will be equipped to meet both the short-term changes and long-term HR demands required in our changing world.

Learn how colleges like Cal State Stanislaus and Ogden-Weber Technical are using process director and preparing for a post-COVID reopening. 

College students face a world that is far more complex than it was even 20 years ago. They must navigate more than only their academic environment; the world they’ve grown up in, and the path for a post-college life present challenges that have left many with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. Without a doubt, this is a massive issue. Many administrators are applying innovative ways of helping students through individualized care, supported through effective approaches like case management.

Student Mental Health Trends

Emotional and mental health issues like depression and anxiety have become far more prevalent among today’s higher education students, with many feeling that these issues are among the biggest barriers to fully engaging and performing well in school. More than 16% of  students reported that depression had a negative impact on how they performed with academic and social issues, with anxiety impacting more than 24% of students. Mental illness is clearly affecting far more young people, so it’s important for schools to provide mental health support for their students and for students to have opportunities to seek the help they need.

The management of mental and behavioral health requires different processes and the coordination of many people. Effectively administering services has become more sophisticated and requires the input of a broader array of medical and university stakeholders, and more data from a variety of sources. The key is to focus these inputs and resources so they can deliver better outcomes for students in the form of treatment, medical care, intervention, or other avenues. The most effective way of achieving positive results is through applying a case management approach. This provides insights and context for each individual student who is receiving services and treatment.

Mental health case management has to incorporate strategies from multiple fields and departments across the institution. It includes social workers, psychology professionals, and medical doctors, and the information they provide about the student must be centrally collected and accessible so they can collaborate. Despite its complicated nature, best practices for behavioral health case management can be summarized by three guiding principles: individualized care, professional responsibility, and a comprehensive approach to treatment. Each of these is an umbrella under which many aspects of effective case management fall. Let’s look at these in more detail:

Individual student care: Case management takes into account that not all situations are the same. Effective case management must take each client’s unique combination of situations and needs into account. This means being able to pull relevant data from different data repositories to get a comprehensive picture of the student’s situation. It might include:

• Background: student demographics and personal information from administrative applications can provide a picture of the student’s family situation and support structure.
• Academic performance: information coming from grades, projects, and reviews may give insight into trends about where, and when, students have been both successful and unsuccessful academically.
• Medical history: university healthcare and insurance information will provide information about substance abuse, medications, or other factors that might contribute to students’ situations.

Professional responsibility: academic organizations are dealing with very sensitive information, so case managers and social workers need a special kind of discipline. The two most important factors in maintaining a disciplined and responsible approach is through, 1) effective documentation, and 2) patient privacy:

• Documentation: higher education health professionals and their support staff must maintain accurate, up-to-date records of their clients that are easily accessible when necessary, and can be used in processes that deliver services. While in the past that meant detailed, hand-written notes kept in a physical folder, the transition to digital patient records has facilitated more diligent documentation along with more streamlined coordination of care.
• Privacy: college and university healthcare providers have to abide by compliance mandates to protect student privacy. A case management approach can ensure guidelines so that patient information is only shared for specific needs and only with student permission. Those guidelines will be used to share information where necessary and permitted, and prevent data from getting into the wrong hands.

Comprehensive approach: successful behavioral health case management requires an understanding of all aspects of a student's life. The right case management solution will connect all relevant providers so as to better integrate clients' medical, social, educational, and vocational information and then apply that information into effective treatment. This treatment may come from university health services, or through contracted arrangements with other providers. But by coordinating through a single case management application, academic organizations have a much better way of achieving the kind of success that’s needed to address very serious problems, and help students become successful.

Case management is a powerful way to enable higher education professionals to be effective contributors to the successful delivery of student health. It also enables integration of relevant data, and timeline-driven workflows that can give professionals visibility into the best courses of action. Case management enables organizations to build and manage digital applications that coordinate the efforts of different groups, yet can connect them all to the same goals. This creates a powerful framework that helps university departments and the power of their IT stack to achieve truly powerful outcomes for students in need.

Process Director can be used to apply a case management approach for student mental health services. It allows schools to integrate data and documents from various applications into a shareable profile of students under care. This provides clarity for all workflows that touch the students during their treatment so that important decisions that impact their mental health can be achieved faster and with greater context.

Knowing all you can about customers gives you insights into how they’re using your product and how you can support them. The best-case scenario for customer intelligence is that you learn predominantly during the prospecting phase and then maintain a close relationship that allows you to continue to build your customer knowledge thereafter. When that happens, you can be strategic about developing products that you know will meet their needs, which will help you continue to sell (and upsell) while you maintain your relationship.

But the reality is that it’s difficult to understand customers and how they think. You may not always know what questions to ask, and they might not even be aware of the benefits they’re receiving (or not receiving) by using your product.

Customer journey mapping, however, can be an effective way to get inside the brains of your customers. And even better, it identifies patterns that will help you understand customer behaviors, which can help predict future actions. This will put you in a position to service the specific needs of customers throughout their entire engagement with you.

Customer journey mapping is applicable across many departments in a company because it’s an exercise that impacts so many customer-driven activities. Sales, marketing, product management, user experience (UX), and IT all benefit from insights into how customers work with their product and company. The results of mapping help you to visualize your customer’s experience from the customer’s point of view, and for all the various touch-points they have with your product and people as they seek to achieve a specific outcome.

Customer Journey Maps Deliver Key Insights

The format for a customer journey map is usually an integrated, visual representation of the customer experience. How do they use your product/service? What information and support do they need from your services and sales teams? These journey maps can take complicated information and analytics about customers and provide a unified set of data about how customers engage with your company.

The customer map is generally built from the customer’s point of view and gives vendors a powerful way to make better decisions that will benefit customers. It is a combination of behavioral data (some of which requires deeper analysis) and anecdotal feedback from customers and provides the following:

• A comprehensive understanding of a customer’s overall experience with the vendor and its product
• Identification of how impactful the vendor’s product has been in helping them address specific goals
• Awareness of potential points of frustration, or where the vendor falls short of expectations

This kind of information is hugely valuable and gives companies far better and more usable insights than the traditional tools, which usually rely on competitive analysis, sales forecasts, and general market trends.

The Dimension of Time in Customer Insights

What if you could predict how your product and service could make your customer more successful, and then use that information in your engagement? This can only be done with predictive capabilities, which is what Process Timeline was designed for.

Process Timeline enables companies to apply business process automation for creating time-aware business processes to help organizations get deeper, and more meaningful insights into customer activity. It uses machine learning to integrate information from multiple applications and data source, and then create processes that can predict actions based on behavioral norms. Applying this in the context of customer usage means that you can create a sense for how customers are using your products, how they engage with your company, and where there are gaps you might want to fill.

When the dimension of time is applied to customer journey mapping, the major advantages are insights into what you’re doing well, and what you could be doing better in order to create an overall better experience. This includes things like:

• The quality of your interactions with customers. What things do you provide that make them most satisfied, and where are they dissatisfied? Gain insight into behavioral patterns so you know what needs to be emphasized and what needs to be fixed. 
• Where are customers prevented from achieving their business goals? Could your product or service do more to support them and relieve them from having to rely on multiple solutions or apps in order to be successful? Having an understanding of the limits of your product (at least, the limits they perceive) will guide you in building a more usable product.
• Customer decision-making. Knowing how your customer is making decisions, and who in the organization is responsible for them will make sure you’re building the right product for the right people.

Process Timeline delivers these and other insights and does it in a future context. In other words, it identifies patterns and gaps and can communicate those to your team so they can refine the processes for product development and customer communication. Armed with this kind of information, you can communicate intelligently to your customers about issues you are taking steps to resolve. You can also involve customers early in the various decisions that will impact how they engage with you in the future.

The element of time offers a strategic advantage when planning for the future. And because your future depends on happy customers, adding Process Timeline into your customer journey mapping processes will keep you tightly engaged with prepared to meet future challenges.

Process Director is an effective, proven, and comprehensive process automation solution for a variety of vertical markets. An additional advantage it delivers to customers is a unique function called Process Timeline™, which is process automation functionality for creating easily modifiable and time-aware business processes to help organizations with their process improvement.

BP Logix developed Process Timeline to help organizations improve planning for business outcomes by addressing the lack of predictability in workflows and processes. While most process automation solutions can only tell you when a particular task is late, Process Timeline uses its knowledge of an organization’s process execution history to automate and predict when each task is likely to complete, no matter how far in the future that task is scheduled to begin.

Process Timeline Features

Process Timeline offers a simple way to compose, manage, and modify business processes. Process-related data and analysis, such as process duration and critical path insights, are delivered in a continuous fashion as processes are running. Organizations recognize significant advantages through features such as:

Low-code Approach

Designed for business users, Process Timeline gives non-developers the ability to build and deploy enterprise-grade, time-aware workflows and processes, with no programming.

• Build rich, complex applications through point-and-click method.
• Intuitive graphical user interface facilitates rapid deployment and time-to-value.

Continuous Improvement

Time is essential to all business activity. Late actions, or actions that Process Timeline predicts will be late—are highlighted and identified while they are running.

• Visual task building interface that lists tasks, dependencies, and highlights potential issues.
• Process Timeline automatically generates and updates a visual interface that identifies, at a glance, how (and for how long) the process will run

Keep Processes On-Track

Process Timeline offers the earliest possible notification that some future task is predicted to be late, and can automatically take direct action, escalating or rerouting activities to account for the predicted delay.

• Process Timeline continuously evaluates processes based on past experience and current status.
• Provides accurate predictions when any future activity is likely to be delayed, offering the earliest possible opportunity for manual or automatic intervention.

Tracking and Measurement

As organizations evolve, performance analysis and awareness are critical for continuous improvement.

• Process Timeline records every action taken by every process participant (human or automated), ensuring total accountability.
• Process Timeline maps users to activities within process that are consuming the most time, so users can quickly focus process improvement efforts where they will have the most impact.
• Drill down to review historical information about any activity, or to see how different actors have performed within a given task.
• Reset analytics at any time to get a fresh perspective.

Today’s colleges and universities require comprehensive data communication to be successful in supporting the needs of students, faculty, and other stakeholders. In an ideal situation, applications connect seamlessly with one another, but in reality, different software solutions were built to solve for different needs. As a result, they weren’t necessarily designed to share data. Yet, for innovative campus IT teams, achieving harmony among all these systems can be achieved with a smart digital integration strategy.

When applications and technology systems operate together as a functioning, cohesive machine, colleges achieve optimal outcomes with their technology investments, and they’re also better equipped to meet their goals as academic institutions. Achieving that level of interoperability requires a focused effort to align tools and strategies. This includes the processes built around those applications, the methodologies for applying them, and systems and the people managing those processes. As digital transformation changes the way that academic organizations stay innovative, it’s important to know how each can advance their enterprise integration management strategies.

Preparing for Higher Education Digital Integration 

Integrating digital systems is an ongoing challenge for colleges and universities because they require such a diverse set of systems, from ERP to SIS to HRIS. Some are centrally-run systems while others are spun up at the departmental level. Campus IT teams are constantly trying to meet new technology needs that come from things like compliance mandates, the creation of new student services, developments in academic departments, and a host of other changes.

The best way to optimize a school’s technology investments and maximize the potential of its systems is to integrate applications so data can be shared. Doing so requires a foundation, one that is process-based, that will provide the framework for building new applications and connectors between and among applications.

To get started with an integration plan, schools must first identify the outcomes they desire and then map the applications that will provide the necessary data and functionality to meet those outcomes. For example, the registrar’s office could schedule classes faster if it could integrate data about facilities availability, enrollment numbers, and course requirements. In many cases, that information has to be retrieved in separate and disparate formats. A single view, delivered through integration, helps expedite scheduling.

Build Process and Workflow into Integration Requirements

Requirements can then be built, and on top of those requirements, teams can start to build processes. These processes must deliver, at a minimum, these things:

• Workflow automation: most applications will have some level of built-in workflow. The goal of processes is to ensure that workflows are connected so that real-time updates in one application are correspondingly made in applications to which it is connected. Consider how convenient it is for financial aid information to automatically populate with a students’ tuition bill so she knows, in real-time, precisely what her financial responsibility is.
• Connector flexibility: applications are upgraded from time to time, and they deploy new functionality. Make sure that processes are flexible enough to adapt to changes in existing systems, and can be applied to new technologies.
• Productivity gains: the whole point to an integration strategy is to be more productive with the technology that’s available to you. Make sure that stakeholders are actually getting better visibility into data and then able to apply that, through automation, to improving performance.

Deploying a Sustainable Digital Integration Strategy

Once goals have been identified and processes begin to be built, IT teams need to perform some important steps as part of their strategy as the initiate integration efforts:

• Develop a set of proven best practices from process thought leaders. Familiarize yourself with case studies of colleges who have done this kind of work.
• Partner with stakeholders (others in IT, department heads, users, executive sponsors, and others) to determine what their specific needs are. Learn their pain points and understand what constitutes “integration nirvana” for them.
• Establish a content governance framework so that processes adhere to a specific, but flexible, set of requirements.
• Ensure compliance for industry and institutional compliance frameworks.

A Continuous Integration Roadmap

At this point, you will have a vision and an actionable roadmap. With a tool like Process Director, you can initiate the integration process. This can be done by identifying which inputs will inform your integrations, and how that data will be incorporated into it. Typical integrations come from applications like these:

• Databases
• LDAP or directory servers
• Standard enterprise applications like CRM, marketing automation, HR systems, and others
• Specific higher education tools like student lifecycle management, financial services apps for financial aid, scheduling and logistics apps, and others
• Document Imaging Software / Scanners
• File System Monitor Application Integration
• Email Servers
• Social BPM Application and Workflow Application Integration
• SharePoint or other file-related applications

With a process-driven approach, campus IT teams will be able to dramatically reduce cost and improve efficiency. Processes allow them to handle connections among the applications and systems listed above, as well as others so there are repeatability and consistency. Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

With integrated applications, the entire student lifecycle can become far more streamlined, and university operations can be more efficient. Academic organizations can realize significant cost savings and better deployment of resources. By sharing data and functionality, colleges and universities will be able to emphasize their strengths to their stakeholders as they provide the best possible college experience for all stakeholders.

Recently, a bipartisan team of members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill that would promote equal access to academic opportunities, services, and materials for students with disabilities. The Accessible Instructional Materials in Higher Education Act, also known as the AIM HIGH Act, would create a commission to develop voluntary accessibility criteria for instructional materials and educational technology.

The AIM HIGH Act is the result of a collaboration between the National Federation of the Blind, the Association of American Publishers, the Software and Information Industry Association, the American Council on Education, and Educause. To successfully implement the provisions of the Act, schools will need to create processes both for implementation and to monitor compliance. Done effectively, these processes will also generate analytical insights that will help schools become better at delivering services and at meeting their institutional goals and legal mandates. The most effective tool to support these efforts is with a business process solution.

Codifying Accessibility with Processes

Accessibility takes on many different forms. As a general rule, information and communication technology is considered accessible and usable if it can be used in a similar fashion, and to the same effective results by people both with and without disabilities. Essentially, comparable access to information must be provided, taking the needs of all users and learners into account. Digital formats can complicate accessibility for not just the sightless and the hearing impaired, but also for those who are color blind, those prone to seizures, and people with physical limitations that require keyboard navigation rather than the use of a mouse. These are only some examples.

Things like what to make accessible, and how to comply with the Act will fall to individual schools to decide. Without specific guidelines, the effort could be complex, but with a process-driven approach, IT teams can frame the scope of the effort to become AIM HIGH compliant and customize to their own needs.

University IT departments can start by developing workflow standards to guide all aspects of development and implementation. Building these standards will be critical for establishing the consistency needed to be accessible in the eyes of the legislative framework, and the agility to manage the specific needs of individual cases.

IT teams can start by identifying specific categories they need to work on, including:

• Testing and data collection tools: this includes things like Web-based tests (open-ended or multiple choice), or data collection that students might employ in the course of doing academic research.
• Academic presentation material: includes electronic document templates used to create coursework-related documents or presentations. This could be a standard PowerPoint template that’s required to establish a common look and feel for presentations or requirements for using and submitting term papers in Google Documents.
• Educational materials: this covers interactive online courses, which are increasingly becoming used in higher education. This includes self-paced training courses; educational webinars; other educational presentation formats; and support materials for such activities, including electronic worksheets, required reading, and tests. It could also include a course syllabus or administrative documents and tools.

Implementing Accessibility with Process Director

Process Director has long been used in higher education to meet all manner of student and institutional needs. It can be a critical tool in helping to codify and manage the necessary processes that will help schools be successful in administering AIM HIGH and other accessibility requirements.  IT teams can use functionality in Process Director to apply a guided approach that includes:

• Discovery: it’s essential for IT teams to understand the unique needs of the issues for which they are solving. A well-prepared team will be better able to incorporate specific milestones, approvals, and decision-making into workflows if can use a process-driven approach to understanding and implementing necessary tasks.
• Awareness: this is about recognizing when to accommodate and when it’s not necessary. This may seem easy to ascertain, but for someone who has never had to consider accessing a website in a way where they have unique physical or mental abilities, it may be difficult to truly understand how to meet the needs of different users.
• UX design: make sure that the design of any digital format is built in an accessible way, and perform UX testing with the audience for which the solution is being developed.
• Visual design: this is different from UX. Visual design is about the actual placement and layout of web pages, forms, and other tools so they can be interpreted and understood.
• Development: your code should be accessible so that, irrespective of ability, it is able to be deployed in different formats.
• Workflow development: ensure that in all workflows, AIM HIGH requirements accounted for.

To successfully meet the needs of higher education inclusion, colleges and universities will need a dedicated effort that includes some level of complexity. In order to make sense of it and roll it out successfully, they will require a process-driven approach. Being compliant with legislation like AIM HIGH will be one goal of these efforts, but of far more importance will be the ability to create an inclusive learning environment for learners of all types of abilities.

Modern institutions are realizing significant advantages from low code development, an approach to building software which allows non-developers to build applications in a visual, drag-and-drop environment with components for different types of functionality. Low-code platforms have enabled the rise of a business analyst support system who can direct application priorities by abstracting the typically complex coding tasks associated with programming by using reusable components. Innovative college and university IT teams are taking advantage of low-code platforms to improve process automation and derive significant ROI from their technology investments, and it’s changing how they build for the future.

By employing low-code capabilities that enable non-developers to connect various stakeholders and implement sophisticated functionality, users and teams realize greater efficiency. Essentially, those closest to the problems can now have the greatest impact at solving those problems. In higher education, solutions are wide-ranging, and low-code allows schools to benefit from:

• Automating processes, integrate apps with existing systems, and easily connect to data from multiple sources so information and functionality render in a single user experience. Each instance of building a connector can cost as much as $25,000 in developer expenses when using traditional methods.
• Optimizing ROI from legacy applications to deliver better user experiences and increase user adoption.
• Designing and building best-in-class apps that can be deployed when needed. Provide the ability to iterate and improve as needed.
• Recognizing and delivering solutions for all aspects of the university experience. This includes things like HR management, student recruiting, facilities and operations, and alumni relations.
• Migrating applications from on-premises to the cloud.
• Delivering applications in mobile formats to increase usage for students, faculty, and school staff.

Low-code solutions like Process Director give users a highly visual dashboard and software components that can be used to create an application without having to use code. The combination of rapid development capabilities along with the low-code approach offers enterprises the ability to build, deploy, and iterate quickly. Additionally, it provides ways to identify deep insights into usage and performance of applications.

Higher Education Technology Transformation

In higher education, using a low-code approach is about much more than just the applications themselves. It can save schools money, improve how IT resources are used, and deliver services to better meet the ever-changing needs of the 21st Century university student, faculty members, and staff. These things, in turn, make schools more competitive and economically viable.

This is important for colleges because they operate according to prescribed schedules — admissions, registration, financial aid, and the routine of the quarter or semester system. It’s difficult to innovate when the next milestone is right around the corner. Having to adhere to the typical application development lifecycle is slow and typically results in solutions that can be obsolete before they even become available. However, by building and delivering quickly, and with reusable components, university stakeholders can not only deliver fast, but IT teams and departmental groups can iterate and update applications continuously.

Low-code process automation provides a foundation for all university processes, and operates as the engine that moves the student through their journey from first point of contact, all the way through graduation.

Process Management and Workflow for Higher Education

In a university environment, admissions, financial aid, HR, and all departments are using Process Director to effectively manage the complex processes involved with operating a school and delivering effective services. Higher education institutions are able to deploy Process Director to help them meet business-level goals for things like student outcomes, effective recruiting, employee management, and facilities-related operations. It also supports IT goals like integration, process efficiency, and repeatability.

Institutions use Process Director to automate services delivered according to a school’s specific requirements. An example is its digital process automation capabilities, which enable the efficient processing and reviewing of applications across all necessary admissions counselors and administrators. As the application process has become more competitive and rigorous, students are required to provide more data points to make their case and stand out from other applicants. Consider that the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) received 102,242 student applications in 2017, each of which required analysis and processing, all within a 3-4 month timeframe. Building the application framework to support this scale of automation cannot be done in normal development timelines. Low-code changes how a school like UCLA would be able to adapt to increased demand through effective process automation.

The Importance of Process Automation for Colleges and Universities

Low-code equips teams to build applications that work in a human-directed work style. Process Director encourages this innovative approach through things like:

Document and forms management: Consider how students submit all manner of documentation in the course of their time on campus. And employees use a variety of forms in order to be hired in the course of their time as employees. Schools like the University of Central Florida Global deliver low-code solutions to ingest and make sense of things like transcripts, test scores, recommendation and letters for students. For employees, it manages applications, personal data, benefits information and a variety of other types of documents. Some of these are submitted and stored digitally, while some are delivered in paper form. Process Director is able to digitize these documents and include them in individual files. This eliminates outdated and inefficient processes like managing files through email attachments and paper-based artifacts. The result is more context about students and other stakeholders, provided through validated documents. Process Director also enables sharing of information with trusted decision-makers so that milestones in the process can be made with greater efficiency.

Application integration: The student and potential employee application submission is the first touch point with the university, and kicks off processes that will lead to admissions or employment. Process Director uses built in connectors for a variety of ERP systems, and allows users to construct forms that can pull and deliver data that can be useful for things like financial aid and scholarships, housing, and registration for students, and things like hiring and benefits administrations for employees.

Decision-making, enhanced with workflow: Process Director uses the following innovations that make it a first choice for many colleges and universities:

• Attractive, web-based, and responsive user interaction;
• Built-in support for multiple languages, locales, and cultures;
• Easy integration with a broad array of databases, web services, and applications;
• Directory synchronization with LDAP, Active Directory, and Windows network security;
• Full integration with federated authentication services, including Oauth and SAML.
• Strong encryption of data at rest, and data in-flight;
• Digital signature of documents;
• Granular permissions structure, with temporary privilege escalation.

Many colleges and universities rely on outdated systems that cannot support schools’ desires to meet the competitive needs of 21st Century organizations. While there is an increasing need to move fast and address specific needs, the low-code capabilities of Process Director can provide digitally transformative education solutions that facilitate efficient management and streamlining of processes.

An article in Educause summed it up nicely, "The digital transformation of higher education is at hand. Leaders must prepare their institutions now to take strategic advantage of the coming shifts in culture, workforce, and technology.”

“A student who is concerned for their personal safety cannot learn.”

- Virginia Smith, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)

Most colleges and universities have made student safety a priority, but campus crime is still an unfortunate reality. Ranging from petty theft to physical violence, crimes on college campuses are far more prevalent than anyone is comfortable with, but thankfully, from 2001 to 2016, the aggregate number of reported crimes committed on college campuses decreased by almost 32%.

Much of this is due to the passage of the Clery Act, which was signed into law in 1990. The act requires all higher education institutions that receive federal financial aid to keep and publicly disclose data about crime on and near their campuses. Adherence with the Act is governed by the U.S. Department of Education, and those who do not comply with its requirements are subject to substantial fines and can be suspended from participating in student financial aid and other federally-funded programs.

In addition to reporting incidents and maintaining statistics, the Clery Act requires that schools also provide warnings and emergency alerts for safety issues, information on victim’s rights, and other important resources that can be used by members of the campus community. In order to comply with all the requirements of the Clery Act, schools need to employ a systematic way of capturing information and deploying it through processes in an effort to effect change. Process automation is the most effective way to support this.

If one were to break down the elements of what’s required to comply with the Clery Act, they would note three main elements:

• Tracking incidents
• Reporting incidents and alerting on safety issues
• Managing data about criminal activity

Solving for all of these needs is best done with a single, comprehensive process automation solution like Process Director. Because it has a process and workflow foundation and uses case management capabilities, Process Director can support the need to capture data from multiple sources and communicate it to necessary stakeholders. These are critical for colleges to manage information and act on it quickly.

It’s important to recognize that inherent in the goals of the Clery Act is not simply data collection. To have a positive impact on reducing crime and keeping students safe, the results of all activity relating to the Clery Act must result in decision making about policies.

University IT departments can initiate a process-based approach to identify and manage massive amounts of data. That data is also coming from a variety of internal and third-party sources, which adds a layer of complexity. Smart processes can identify the right processes to kick-off based on that data. But it can also guide it through streamlined processes that can anticipate future-dependent actions, communicate with necessary stakeholders, reduce errors, and ultimately track all of this activity to demonstrate compliance.

Process Director provides a way to collect that data and immediately apply machine learning to understand the details of incidents (location, time of day, victim information, perpetrator information, and other relevant data), and initiate the necessary processes that will perform the tasks needed to meet the demands of the Clery Act framework. It does this with a variety of critical process automation features, including:

• Access data that can help with decision-making and meeting workflow milestones.
• Efficient approval handling that guides crime-related data and corresponding communication to the right milestones and decision-makers.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.
• Sophisticated reporting that pulls user-identified data points into visual charts.
• Case management to categorize and report on specific incidents and/or individuals.
• Processed-based security capabilities for managing, securing, storing, and ultimately, protecting a massive amount of data including students (student information includes personally identifiable information [PII] like student records, financial aid information, and healthcare data, among other things), staff and faculty HR records, operational data, and records related to government funding.

Additionally, Process Director applies future planning into processes with its time-based process engine— Process Timeline™. This offers a simple way to compose, manage, and modify business processes. Process-related data and analysis, such as process duration and critical path insights, are delivered in a continuous fashion as processes are running. This enables schools to be informed in near real-time and effect necessary changes rapidly.

Process automation is an effective tool for compliance with the Clery Act, but more importantly, it can be a critical ingredient to keeping students safe. Schools that employ a process-focused approach to safety are able to improve response time and awareness about campus crime, which ultimately helps them be better and more effective, caretakers.

A recent study of the threat potential for a comprehensive set of industries called out higher education as one of the most targeted. In the past couple of years, cyberattacks have increased by 68%, and the average cost of each attack is almost $700,000. Colleges stand to lose a great deal when attacked— beyond just the theft of data and financial loss from ransom demands, they also risk reputation damage that can negatively impact student recruiting and potential for advantages such as research grants.

As we know in today’s global, data-rich economy, all organizations face cybersecurity risks. Some are manifested in attacks that go after individuals for their personal information for financial or other types of exploitation. In other cases, the security targets include intellectual property and system-wide information. Organizations that touch large numbers of stakeholders are targeted because of the variety of data and multiple access points they offer.

Higher education institutions fall into this category and have become attractive targets for attack. They serve a disparate audience of constituents, and they store and transact with sensitive data about all of their different stakeholders. Because of this, colleges and universities require a structured security roadmap that enables flexible access to data and records, but protects also students, faculty, employees, and other stakeholders within the higher education ecosystem.

The Security Risks for Higher Education

University IT departments are responsible for the managing, securing, storing, and ultimately, protecting a massive amount of data including students (student information includes personally identifiable information [PII] like student records, financial aid information, and healthcare data, among other things), staff and faculty HR records, operational data, and records related to government grants and research, much of which is sensitive in nature.

Attackers go after private, critical data through a variety of tactics, including:

• Cloud attacks: with more higher education institutions rapidly moving critical workloads to the cloud, hackers are exploiting aspects of the shared responsibility model that leave holes in workloads and cloud environments.
• Phishing: one of the most common types of attacks is phishing, which is done through sending unsolicited and unscrupulous email messages that link to fraudulent websites.
• Device security: most organizations operate with “bring your own device” (BYOD) policies that enable employees and contractors to use personal smartphones, computers, and tablets for business use. Proper security protocols are often not enforced for these devices, which can leave sensitive data vulnerable.
• Malware: malware is software that has maliciously been installed on users’ computers. Various types include ransomware, viruses, worms, and adware. As recent events have shown, these malware threats are often used as a means to steal information and to commit fraud, including extortion.
• Denial of service (DoS): in DoS attacks, individuals who normally have access to systems or networks are suddenly denied the ability to view data or systems. It includes critical, university-specific applications, email, or other digital points of access.

Developing an Effective Security Framework

 University IT security programs require a framework for continuous monitoring and response, one which manages threats to stakeholder data and intellectual property. This would not simply be a monitoring tool that sends alerts when certain security controls are breached. Rather, a foundation of vigilant approach must be embedded into processes and the way that schools conduct their operations.

The risks are ever-present and increasing in regularity. Education IT departments must apply a methodology that enables security regulations to be adapted to meet both the changing needs of their school, and to combat the increasing complexity of cyber-attacks.

Higher education IT departments are using business process management and workflow solutions like Process Director to understand their threat landscape and implement plans and policies that automate attack prevention. To begin the process, colleges and universities have to initiate a strategy that takes into account the data risks of the different populations they serve, as well as the processes employed across all different IT applications in use. While most schools have some set of loosely-defined guidelines, this first step demands mapping a comprehensive plan to a process-driven framework.

Necessary Steps for Higher Education Data Security

This security plan should be developed, implemented, and managed with an approach that takes into account the following elements:

Collaborate and plan effectively: awareness of stakeholder needs in higher education can be tricky; the requirements to operate effectively as a student is much different than how one functions as a faculty member. Consideration for these differences is critical because higher education comprises such a diverse set of needs and user types. Even within academic departments, there are vast differences in how workflow tools and process management is applied. Learning the work, goals, use cases, and language of different teams, and then tapping into their processes and methods, will give IT teams the right perspective into how to secure them.

Understand business patterns: the most effective way to understand security risk is to have an automated way to detect behavioral anomalies within workloads and processes. IT teams should develop a scenario of regular business and data patterns and establish them as baselines. They need to also meet with department leaders to gain an understanding of concern areas or vulnerability areas where behavioral anomalies tend to occur. These can be accounted for when building processes, and will lead to better visibility into what is considered as acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Automate processes: in the course of business transformation efforts, college IT departments should seek ways to give departmental managers flexibility and ownership of their processes. In doing so, they should establish policies that encourage repeatability and automation. Processes should emphasize self-service wherever possible, and facilitate straight-through processing of standard requests and account provisioning.

Integrate tools with processes for better outcomes: colleges have already invested a great deal in their technology stack. It’s imperative that IT teams understand the tools, data, and communication channels that are used across all technology efforts, and then recognize where security vulnerabilities could happen within each of them. Reducing overall ‘application spaghetti’ is an excellent first step toward consistency of process. This can start by collecting the security protocols required of each system, and then finding a way to apply them appropriately to the processes they touch, or whether the systems themselves should be eliminated altogether in favor of a self-build low-code application.

Implementing a security approach to higher education management does not happen overnight. IT teams have to be thoughtful about what they want to achieve, and operate with awareness of stakeholder needs and the intricacies of the technology stack. Additionally, while digital transformation efforts to move workloads into the cloud and use BYOD policies are delivering greater flexibility, they are also opening new threat vectors. With a process-focused approach, colleges and universities can improve their security posture and help to ensure the safety of critical data.

In modern IT environments, compliance and security are highly reliant upon one another, and they share a common goal: responsibility for keeping an organization’s data, users, resources, and intellectual property safe and usable. Some enterprises compartmentalize governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) as a separate function that sits apart from workflows and business processes. This thinking prevents the true integration of GRC principles into all aspects of how IT environments operate, which reduces visibility into a company's security and compliance posture. Innovative enterprises understand that effective compliance and security are tightly coupled, and why it’s critical to use a solution that enables rapid, agile workflow, but does so with GRC embedded into it.

GRC is typically codified as a collection of controls that are applied broadly across the IT landscape, and are designed to ensure that organizations manage their information security risks appropriately. GRC identifies gaps in security controls and provides a framework for prioritizing mitigation and remediation activities. Adhering to internal, industry, and/or governmental frameworks, GRC measures the effectiveness of security controls against relevant security requirements. It’s basically looking for proof that organizations do what they say they do, and then validates that.

Risk and Security Management Protect Company Assets

Requirements for governance and compliance come in many forms, starting with an organization’s internal information security policies. These policies should align with the company's business objectives and reflect its specific infrastructure and services. Compliance with internal security policy can be assessed through internal security reviews and any discovered exceptions should be appropriately managed.

In addition to security requirements defined by internal security policy, enterprises must abide by compliance frameworks established by industry and governmental groups. There is a tacit, although sometimes explicit, understanding that operating in accord with these guidelines is mandatory to conduct business within a specified region or market. These security requirements typically come in the form of audits and assessments performed by external regulatory groups. Some companies elect to be audited in order to demonstrate best-in-class business and security practices; these include things like ISO 27001 and SOC 2. For some companies, these can be competitive differentiators, as they demonstrate a focus and commitment to GRC principles.

The most effective approach to governance and compliance is to align GRC guidelines within an organization’s processes and workflow. This creates consistency and establishes a behavioral mindset for anyone touching processes (which is pretty much everyone in the organization).  This type of solution must be able to collect data from across workloads and data sources which may be used for identification, direction, and reduction of risk. Process Director employs both predictive modeling (which may help a company avoid being out of compliance), and automated reporting and collection that provide insights to how closely processes are adhering to GRC requirements.

In breaking down the value of BPM and workflow for GRC, consider the impact of the following on how teams can improve efficiency and their overall security posture:

Consistency

When an organization develops a framework for GRC, they still have to implement and manage it across disparate groups. If GRC requires anything, it’s consistency. Without it, there’s no way of knowing how well or poorly the company is adhering to its principles. By implementing GRC-based requirements into workflows and processes, teams have immediate visibility to identify where they are out of compliance. If they are using a BPM platform like Process Director, which enables non-programmers to create and modify processes, then issues can be addressed and remediated quickly. BPM is like a continuous insight engine for GRC, and that gives organizations the ability to be consistent in how they approach the work of risk management and compliance.

Automation

Companies get stuck if they have to evaluate every activity that deviates from normalized behavior. Because BPM can help optimize the continuity and consistency of GRC behavior, this becomes a critical way for companies to ensure governance and compliance adherence. Some will choose to do it manually, but this is a time killer and can distract process actors from focusing on outcomes while they fix problems that don’t add value. Effective BPM solutions automate the GRC framework which enables managers to focus on process improvement rather than fixing process shortcomings. They can be set up to deliver alerts that pinpoint where GRC-related issues exist and help managers rapidly address them.

Visibility

With GRC, teams get a broad picture of the organization and its processes -- this includes how data, people, and resources are accessing, being accessed, and transacting among internal and external stakeholders. Because BPM can be set up to apply specific GRC-influenced requirements to various stages of processes, managers have access and control to change processes, if needed. But perhaps more importantly, the deep visibility enables actors to understand where GRC issues are common. This may indicate a vulnerability within internal systems, or it could mean there are teams or data sources that are not in compliance.

Reduce CapEx

With GRC visibility and automation provided by a BPM solution, teams can dramatically reduce the manual work needed to identify issues and manage change. They also become aware of which systems, applications, and data sources might be regularly out of compliance. The attention required to fix these issues is lowered significantly because fewer people are needed to manage GRC, there is less of a trail to unravel to identify the source of problems, and insights gathered over time can help managers make technology purchasing decisions and allocate expenditures that are ultimately more advantageous (and cost effective) for their GRC needs.

Business Culture

When objectives and missions are aligned through a workflow solution, the actual principles by which the business operates can become tightly integrated into the fabric of how the company operates. This is important because it essentially codifies those things that will reduce risk and maintain a healthy level of governance within the business activities of the company.

GRC is intended to give companies better control over their data and intellectual property, but there are no shortcuts to managing it effectively. It is a continuous process, but one that BPM and workflow are optimized to manage.

There were more than 20 million students enrolled in colleges in the United States in 2018, and that number is forecast to increase in the coming decade. More than 2/3 of all college students receive some kind of financial help in the form of grants and scholarships. Just as admissions are critical to an institutions success, ensuring that these same students have access to funding sources is critical to the future of higher education.

Colleges and universities operate to serve their students, and the financial aid they provide reflects this commitment. Unfortunately, however, most of the processes and workflows that support grants and scholarships exist in a combination of paper-based formats and disparate digital repositories, which can make it difficult to identify and utilize the necessary data. Lacking a system for moving this data from intake to funding, colleges are at risk of preventing deserving students from being able to attend and benefit. Fortunately, process automation enables higher education institutions to facilitate the requests of students to help them fund their education.

Is Automation the Future of Education Process Management?

Automation is the foundation of simplifying grant and scholarship management. Just as workflow has enabled human resources in higher education, it is also being used by colleges and universities to facilitate the flow of that data of students, financial institutions, and universities so it can be evaluated and disbursed. Access to this data is only one aspect of the process. Utilizing it and processing it with the right permissions, and with speed, give all parties the best shot at ensuring grants and scholarships are awarded efficiently.

But the process-driven coordination of financing, collection, and student lifecycle management demands an effective workflow framework, one that incorporates activity among government bodies, non-profits (who are often the benefactors who distribute scholarship money), students, parents/guardians, and financial aid departments within the schools. Ensuring your grants and scholarship management solution has the capability to navigate this intricate web of decision-makers and groups in an organized fashion is pivotal in expediting the processes around financing students.

Streamlining all Points in the Financial Aid Process

Managing workflows for grant and scholarship awards with a platform like Process Director helps present a clear picture to scholarship and grant administrators of all aspects of the financial aid process.

Financial aid processes typically require the input of multiple sources, and not all of them exist within the same organization. Process Director can apply a case management approach which is optimized to coordinate the activity of all involved in the process. This includes university departments like the Office of Financial Aid, Admissions, Registration and Academic Records. External groups include banks and other funding sources, government agencies who disburse grant money, and private institutions and individuals who fund private scholarships.

The Tools Necessary for Comprehensive Education Process Management

Pulling all of this together demands a broad assortment of tasks that includes data that includes paper records, approvals, data sharing among applications and databases, and forms management. With so much at stake, it is essential that deadlines are met and that milestones are attained. Procedure Director generates arrangement among, and between, process phases and different information sources. The result is a system that's inclusive of participants, allowing efficiency, compliance, and consistency. The course of action is all about efficiency and speed. Process Director applies abilities for lightweight application creation, workflow automation, forms management, and integration through a process that uses these steps:

Data collection: students submit applications for grants and scholarships from a variety of sources. This data will likely include artifacts such as an essay, high school transcripts, letters of recommendation, and family tax history among others. All of these items are relevant to the deciders of how grant money is distributed.

Case management framework: Every application is tied to a unique student, and can be considered as an individual case. As a case is created, it will likely be stored in a database, LDAP repository, or cloud storage bucket. But the case is very much active as member schools evaluate the application. Process Director uses a case management approach which enables each student’s file to be moved through the processes and milestones required by financial aid committees and departments.

Distribution of funds: Process Director is built with workflow automation as a critical component, which gives those involved with financial aid evaluation the ability to create rules and processes that will distribute applications internally to important decision-makers, and externally as application data is shared among banks and government groups.

Review/Evaluation: decision-makers will not miss data or milestones when the process is managed with automated workflow. This ensures that all available data can be shared and reviewed, but ultimately, it means that all students have an equal opportunity to demonstrate their needs.

As competition among schools becomes fiercer, there is an increasingly need to provide access to all worthy applicants. Process Director provides digitally transformative education workflow solutions that include facilitating scholarships and grants management, so deserving students can benefit from a higher education experience.

The original intent of workflow processes was to create a standardized and accepted way of identifying and solving for issues of efficiency. Eventually, workflow processes were introduced as a component of effective BPM, and today, innovative organizations apply both in a way where they support one another. These organizations realize that a workflow process will help you create repeatable outcomes, and workflow process is the workhorse that maintains consistency among the disparate elements that make up processes. To put it another way, workflow tools give organizations visibility into processes in order to monitor results, reduce inefficiencies and incorporate automation. But let’s look more closely at how workflow and process support outcomes through their own unique attributes.

Workflow Process Evolution: from Coordination to Prediction

Workflow Process serves to align the process management discipline to tasks and to support and work with patterns of business behavior. The technology that drives workflow is all based on coordinating interactions, milestones, and assets. When workflow automation software was first available as a codified technology solution, it was embedded into applications to supercharge their connectivity and operational capability. For the most part, those who benefited were typically just those with access to the specific applications. Over time, workflow became a foundational element to the overall process-driven mindset that smart companies employ. It now operates almost as a middleware technology, and its shared capabilities enable interactions among disparate groups of stakeholders. This includes both internal and third-party users.

But today’s innovative workflow solutions do far more than just coordinate the flow of activity. Platforms like Process Director apply machine learning and time recognition to help users take advantage of predictive insights and understand behavioral patterns. The component of time offers workflow users control they can’t get solely through application analytics and dashboards. With the inclusion of machine learning, Process Director’s workflow automation now allows identifies patterns that can require human intervention if a task isn’t expected to complete on time. In this way, the coordination of activity that a workflow process provides actually considers patterns of behaviors among different work streams to create a more focused model for delivering to specified outcomes.

Clearly, workflow design has evolved to the point that, as opposed to a typical flowchart it can almost drive activity from inception to completion. Rather than just relying on, “what happens next”, workflow is now equipped to identify and ask, “what must be completed before this step can begin, and how long will it take?” It’s in this way that workflow demonstrates its support for BPM, process efficiency improvement and governance. It delivers what’s required to provide oversight over multiple streams of activity, all working towards a common goal.

Business Workflow Process Instills Outcome-Based Discipline

For all of this effort to truly be effective, it must operate within a workflow process management framework, and this is where we find the distinction between workflow and BPM. A comprehensive workflow process approach emphasizes a holistic approach to coordinating everything that contributes to the outcome of business goals. This includes documents, cases, people, tasks, and sub-tasks are completed and executed for quality and/or compliance. Workflow assumes the work involved to connect and communicate among these things but that activity must adhere to the context of BPM.

Effective BPM solutions are foundational, and as a software application, they have to be able to integrate through APIs and other connectors so the right information and assets are available to decision-makers. Today’s knowledge workers — and in this economy, just about everyone is a knowledge worker to at least some degree — require a combination of subjective and analytical criteria in order to make decisions and move activities towards successful outcomes of business goals. BPM is the structure that enables repeatability for those processes and workflows that require consistency, but they also enable flexibility for processes that have to adapt to changing business needs.

Workflow Process and BPM are Foundational 

No business can operate without a foundation of sound, yet flexible, workflow processes. Part of that flexibility comes from being able to do more things with processes that might have been previously intended for more narrow purposes. Take, for example, an experience from the world of retail. Imagine a marketing process intended to deliver email notifications to customers about upcoming sales. While that may appear to be relatively simple, underneath that activity are a series of connected processes that include pulling data from a user database, engaging writers, involving the graphics department, and scheduling the mailing on a calendar. The end result is more contact with customers— contact that is the result of connecting processes and workflows that ultimately involve partnering with stakeholders.

Today’s business users need flexibility and accessibility to influence and participate in business solutions. Working in concert, workflow and BPM can deliver that access where and how they work and live, and engage all different types of users who are relevant to outcomes. For people and companies driving results, the ability to adapt and modify, review and approve in real-time, improves decision-making and keeps things moving forward.

Organizations depend on their business processes for the smooth, orderly flow of all their activities. But as companies evolve, the workflows they have relied on may not necessarily have evolved accordingly, and this can limit an organization’s ability to grow and adapt. The shelf life of most workflows is fairly limited, especially in a business climate that never stops changing. This is where workflow analysis comes in.

Workflow analysis can provide major benefits because it identifies where workflows are either outdated, need to be re-worked, or where a process requires an entirely new approach. The process takes apart the workflow in order to identify where there are issues of inefficiency and where changes within the process demand corresponding changes in the workflow. Going through this exercise of workflow analysis identifies bottlenecks, users who are no longer stakeholders, redundant tasks, and uncovers where improvements can be applied.

Ultimately, a well-performed workflow analysis will provide an organization with three key outcomes:

• Elimination of manual and redundant tasks.
• Application of automation where it is currently not being used.
• Gaps in the workflow that prevent it from being optimal.

Once identified, an organization will be able to use its human and technology resources more efficiently, which reduces costs and speeds the delivery of time-dependent processes. Even small improvements save costs and time, so workflow analysis should be a regularly scheduled activity that businesses create a discipline around. To initiate an effective analysis, an organization should take into account these considerations:

Create the Workflow Analysis Structure

It’s best to have a team of reviewers that is made up of representatives from different groups. This will provide perspectives from those with a stake in certain workflows, as well as independent thinking from others. This team should have a cadence of regular meetings, a communication tool like Slack, and a set of requirements by which they will conduct their analysis. The workflow analysis should consider the impact of a workflow in a variety of ways, including these:

• Is it efficient by impacting the speed and/or efficiency of how tasks are accomplished?
• Are stakeholders able to automate repetitive tasks by using it?
• Is it directly improving business goals?
• Does it improve my organization’s ability to be compliant?

Creating an Inventory of Workflows

Collecting all the workflows you want to review may be harder than you might think. Organizations with good process discipline will have a repository of their workflows, but in many organizations, these are created in an ad hoc fashion and are not necessarily accounted for in any type of orderly way. The discovery process will require input from stakeholders across the company and will initiate the review process, so be prepared to have either an individual or team who leads this effort and can be the key decision maker.

Initial Workflow Review

After having an inventory of workflows, it’s best to start reviewing to determine what you should keep and what is no longer relevant. For some, this may take a deeper analysis of the current and future viability of certain workflows, but for others, you’ll know what can be eliminated when you see it. Those that don’t make the cut should be officially taken out of practice. Stakeholders should be made aware of next steps on these workflows - that usually means alerting about removal for some, while for others, it may mean that a replacement will soon follow.

Workflow Analysis and Data Discovery

Workflows generate all kinds of data, most of which should provide insight into usage and efficacy. A workflow that might appear to be really effective may have not been used in many quarters; this data might help you decide to eliminate it. Or perhaps the data will demonstrate that there is a task within a certain workflow that takes an unusually long period of time to complete — that might be an indicator of where the workflow needs a reformatting.

Consider reviewing for this type of data:

• How many workflows have been initiated over the previous two quarters?
• Of those workflows, how many have been completed, and how many are still in process?
• Average of the time taken to complete tasks.
• Length of time to do reviews.
• How many are currently using forms?

Involve Stakeholders in the Workflow Analysis

Armed with data, you can begin to get a better sense of what you’re dealing with, and it can act as an important filter. But the data may not tell the whole story, which is why you need to now get out of your office and talk to people to determine how workflows are being used. Identify stakeholders from different teams and groups and consider evaluating based on these types of questions:

• Start with getting a general sense of the workflow; ask them to walk you, step-by-step, through the processes they go through.
• Find out where they are frustrated by the process.
• Get a sense for whether or not they are getting things done faster and/or with greater efficiency.
• Ask for their input on how a workflow could be improved with the right workflow tools (it’s usually those closest to the problem that have the best solutions). Encourage them to be specific on this point; is there certain data they need, is there a problem of automation, do they get the notifications they need, etc.
• Consider using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology by asking, “On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being ‘most likely”), how likely are you to recommend this workflow to a colleague?” The answers may give you insight into both the necessity and efficacy of a given workflow.

Regroup and Assess

Now that you’ve collected data and put boots on the ground, the review team needs to go through workflows again and determine their state, which should fall into one of these categories:

• Eliminate the workflow
• Re-design the workflow
• Replace the workflow with a new workflow

Beyond the Workflow Analysis

At this point, you should have the beginnings of a blueprint to start moving forward with the next phase of your workflow design and implementation. With a focused team and the right tool, you will now be equipped to make better decisions about what you want to achieve and how your workflows can help you attain those goals.

Most workflow projects take the approach of addressing an outcome and then working backwards to build an efficient, linear flow of processes and actions. Designing steps to think through workflow design requirements is essential, but it must be done with a methodology that accounts for all manner of variables, and includes the element of time. Every workflow is intended to deliver faster and/or better returns on work, but process agility and the application of predictive capabilities, translates into additional competitive advantages. The true goal of workflow design is getting to a state of continuous innovation, repeatability, and efficiency, and this is best accomplished by using smart, disciplined thinking.

An effective workflow is liberating for users. They can automate decision making and rely on the application to deliver content and assets to the correct stakeholders, which frees them to focus more on analyzing outcomes and coming up with creative solutions. With the component of time built into workflows design, business users get additional control by having a way to predict events that can be automatically built in to processes, all with the flexibility of being able to intervene as necessary. To take advantage of a timeline-influenced workflow, an organization should structure their workflow design with a framework that takes these elements into account:

Workflow Design - Define Your Requirements

This may sound elementary, but to get the right outcomes, you need to be specific about the results you seek. For example, declaring that you want a workflow for “manufacturing optimization” encompasses a wildly broad set of activities. But breaking that down so you understand the various, separate tasks that help you ultimately achieve manufacturing optimization will enable you to be specific about the upcoming workflows design process.

Tasks, Events, Dependencies – Know Your Process

You’ll need a whiteboard, a really big whiteboard. The best way to get started is to actually diagram the logical sequence for a workflow, and then iterate as you factor in decision points, approvals, assets, sub-workflows, and all other factors that will guide a process from beginning to end. This part of your planning is tactical, and is truly foundational, and the way your workflow design is structured will be among the most important factors on whether or not your workflow management software is successful in achieving intended goals. During this part of the planning, you should be looking out for these things:

• Be thorough and include all information and detail so you know precisely what is required to achieve success at each step.
• Know, document, and account for dependencies at every step of the workflow.
• Highlight gaps where more information is needed to ensure effective process flow, and then fill those gaps.
• Simply where you can, reduce steps, if possible, and be rigorous about eliminating the potential for wasted effort.

Account for Continuous Processes

Also, don’t forget to consider the continuous nature of some processes; for these, a true ending point may not necessarily exist. When that is the case, ensure that workflow stakeholders are prepared to continuously adapt their workflows tools as they integrate more inputs and data into the process.

Assign Roles In Your Workflow Design

Know your stakeholders, whether they be inside or external to the company. Identify which tasks and activities they will be part of, and their level of involvement. This might also be applied in terms of groups or teams, rather than just individuals. For example, some decisions may require the approval of any member of a specified team, while others may need approval from anyone who has a “Vice President” title. And in other instances, decisions might be handled by anyone in a specific team or region. Know how roles are going to be used within your workflows so you can design them for best efficiency.

Apply Timeline Dependencies

A typical flowchart lays out “what happens next”, but when you apply timeline approach to your workflow design, it forces you to think, “what must be completed before this step can begin, and how long will it take?” These questions help you to imprint process efficiency improvement and governance with a timeline-focused workflow design, and provide additional control by allowing integrating predictive elements, and allowing for human intervention if a task isn’t expected to complete on time. Typical workflow processes may include an approval step, but usually fail to communicate when the task or full process will complete.

Know What You Need to Integrate - Inputs and Outputs

Today’s workflows can be so powerful because of the amount and type of data available within a typical organization’s IT infrastructure, and through integration of data from partner and customer sources. To get the power of all this data, you need to identify which inputs will inform your workflow, and how that data will be incorporated into it. Typical integrations come from applications like these:

• Database Application Integration
• Document Imaging Software / Scanners
• File System Monitor Application Integration
• Email Servers
• Web Services / REST
• Social BPM Application and Workflow Application Integration
• SharePoint or other file-related applications

After identifying these, you will need to build requirements for the tactical implementation of your integrations. This might come in the form of pre-packed integrations or with vendor-provided APIs. Your team may need to build custom integrations, so you’ll need to account for the resources and time required to do all this work.

Review Your Workflow Design

This isn’t just a “check my work” step; it’s really intended to give all stakeholders an opportunity to provide input and change anything that isn’t supposed to be part of the workflow. Additionally, it allows you to take a step back and evaluate whether or not the structure of your workflow is still capable of meeting your intended goals.

Automate Your Workflows

By automating workflows, organizations will be able to dramatically reduce cost and improve efficiency. Automation allows them to handle every manner of workflows and sub-workflows so there is repeatability and consistency, all while freeing time to focus on more strategic issues of the business. Workflow automation enables teams to do the following:

• Build processes and create forms to meet changing business goals.
• Access data that can help with decision-making and meeting workflow milestones.
• Efficient approval handling.
• Insight and visibility into all aspects of processes.

Business goals involve increasingly complex levels activity and collaboration in order to achieve them. Workflows, however, don’t need to be overly complex, and this is why they provide huge benefits. Developing and codifying workflows removes barriers to speed and alleviates the stop-start cadence that trips up too many organizations.

While there is not a single way to develop and manage workflows, adhering to a smart framework of workflow design can help organizations improve their operational capabilities and achieve better outcomes.