Consolidated Administration: The Key to Delivering a 60-Year Curriculum
Shift the status quo to achieve long-term success and viability for your university.
Therefore, this segment on higher education change is strictly focused on what is likely an outdated procurement process in state-funded or state-related institutions. Today, with the rapid change in technologies around all segments of the higher education enterprise, institutions must find a better procurement process than our current request for proposals (RFP) process. While it is important that we continue to ensure due process to guarantee the proper use of taxpayer funds, we cannot take one, two or sometimes three years to make decisions around technology.
As I mentioned in a recent meeting regarding a current technology, by the time we finish piloting, testing and determining the winning vendor, it will have been a three-year process to implementation. Therefore, we will be making a decision based on where the technology was three years ago, thus making us three years behind on the first day of implementation. So, what are possible solutions to this interesting conundrum we find ourselves in? How can we speed up this cycle while still assuring due process?
While there is likely no single answer to this question, as institution dynamics and practices vary greatly, it is probably safe to say we have to take more of a vendor/client partnership approach to procurement and less of a government procurement approach when it comes to technology systems. As discussed in a recent article by the Forum Corporation, both the vendor and the client need to move to a process where values, opportunities and future needs are identified and discussed.[1] In other words, we could see a movement to an interview process with vendors to find a good business partner instead of simply issuing an RFP based on features and price. Thus, it is not simply about finding a current technology, but about identifying a shared vision around a technological need for the university and its faculty and students. It is more than a learning management system; it is the vision for learning through information and communications technology in the near future.
Further, it is not easy for institutions to move quickly from one platform to another as we must consider the change process for faculty and students, and thus these new vendor/client relationships should be viewed as long term, albeit with an exit strategy that can be exercised at given intervals.
Even if we move to these new relationships, how can we make these decisions quickly so we don’t find ourselves three or more years behind on the first day we implement a system?
How can we shorten the procurement cycle to six to nine months, and be able to move from testing to implementation in a short time window?
Possible strategies and steps include:
If an institution can become comfortable with a new approach that takes them away from the RFP model, it may then be possible to cut the procurement process down to a year or less around new technology platforms.
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References
[1] Michael Collins, 2012, “Point of View Selling: Using thought leadership to sell to senior executives,” The Forum Corporation. Accessed at http://www.forum.com/_assets/download/5b19293a-725b-47f0-a469-87e749eff6a5.pdf
Shift the status quo to achieve long-term success and viability for your university.
Author Perspective: Administrator
Public universities have fallen so far behind their competitors in everything other than teaching and learning it’s actually scary.
They are focusing exclusively on the traditioanl market of students that don’t know and don’t care about everything the university should be doing outside the classroom.
Well, public university leaders will be in for a shock when they realize that even traditional students are starting to gain post-traditional characteristics, and that their learning product is not so different than what students learn at NFPs and for-profits.
Good suggestion for institutions to have a dedicated team for technology procurement. In order to gain trust among institutional stakeholders, the team would have to include student and faculty representatives — likely the end users of any new technology. It would also be useful to have a third party, perhaps a consultant, on the team.