Meeting workforce needs through shared technology

Key takeaways

• Institutions need to recruit and graduate students more effectively to meet workforce needs
• Students react more quickly when administrative services are delivered to mobile devices
• Shared technology creates efficiencies by standardizing workflows and business practices

Joe Tolisano, CIO, Connecticut State Colleges and Universities

We have 85,000 students. We're the largest public higher ed set of institutions in Connecticut. About 90% of our graduates stay in Connecticut and run our economy that is very vital, obviously, to the state. Our goal is to recruit as effectively as possible and to graduate as quickly as possible and retain those students to enter that workforce.

The shared technology allows us to standardize workflows, standardize applications, standardize business practices. That creates efficiencies across the 17 campuses that we use. So when we do that, our processes are more efficient. It takes less money to maintain them. They're not siloed. They're all the same, so we need less staff to do it. And the students, whether they're at a two-year school or four-year school, see the same set of processes. So they're familiar with it, our staff are familiar with it, and our faculty are familiar with it.

We can't afford to continue to do stuff in a late 90’s model. We need to modernize. We need to change the paradigm. We need to change how we deliver services. We need to put them in the students' hands. We need to put them in the faculty's hands.

Shared technology provides us an opportunity to push administrative technologies all the way to the student's mobile device. The quicker we can deliver services to a platform that students are used to using on a daily basis, the more efficient that process is, the quicker the student reacts. We're using those technologies to create efficiencies for our students. It helps us retain them, and it helps us graduate them more quickly for our economy.