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Even for smaller colleges and universities, managing personnel records is often onerous. Now imagine having to do this for thousands of full-time and part-time faculty, sprawled across 17 schools and colleges. This was exactly the situation facing the staff at the University of Southern California (USC) Office of the Provost. By 2005, the Provost’s Office was drowning in mountains of paperwork and struggling to become more efficient.

The workplace shouldn’t feel like a scavenger hunt, where you’re constantly on the prowl trying to locate this document or that contract. And yet many college and university employees spend countless hours doing exactly that. There are better and more cost-effective ways for staff to spend their time. 

This is why many colleges and universities are turning to enterprise content management (ECM), sometimes known as enterprise document management in higher education, to manage and track information, says Linda Ding, education program strategist for Laserfiche.

“Colleges and universities are always looking for ways to be more efficient, and there are lots of strategies they’re employing,” says Bill Dillon, executive vice president of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). The membership organization, based in Washington, D.C., represents more than 2,500 colleges, universities and higher-education service providers.

Campuses today face a challenge in providing seamless delivery and display of media to classrooms, lecture halls, conference rooms and auditoriums. With different devices and media formats all requiring access to network resources, the need for a centralized solution is greater than ever. John Owen talks about how this was accomplished at Wake Forest University’s new business school facility.

JOHN OWEN
Director of Information Technology
Wake Forest University, Schools of Business

Financial aid officer Valerie Patnaude was so dedicated to teaching her Rivier College students how to manage money that she posted financial literacy newsletters in campus bathroom stalls. When the posters started to disappear, she knew the students were desperate for information.

“They may not be getting help at home to learn about credit scores and debt management, or they’re not listening to their parents,” said Patnaude of the students at her Nashua, New Hampshire, liberal arts college. “They leave college not only with high loan debt, but high credit card debt, too.”

This comprehensive white paper outlines the benefits associated with implementing enterprise content management (ECM) systems for individual departments, the IT department and the higher education institution as a whole. ECM allows them to securely manage all their content, while still offering individual departments and locations the flexibility to adapt their work processes to changing conditions. Read>>

 What is SALT^SM?

Experienced partners and best practices ease impact of the growth of international students

Judy Seguy
Vice President, Business Development
Nelnet Business Solutions

Colleges and universities across the country have realized that they can no longer rely on outdated, manual processes that hamper productivity and drive up costs. Changing the way staff works, however, is easier said than done.

According to recent research conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 80% of the organizations that have implemented formal initiatives to improve business processes over the past three years have faced employee resistance. Three major causes of this reluctance to change were:

Colleges and universities—awash in paper and digital documents, forms and files—are increasingly adopting technology to pull it all together, yielding big savings in time and money. The technology, called enterprise content management, or ECM, enables users to capture, manage and securely store all manner of business materials, everything from scanned paper documents, to Web forms, audio files, e-mails and more. Even more significantly, ECM automates the document-driven tasks that keep colleges and universities running.