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Streamlining organizational processes

Each school or department in your institution may have detailed processes that meet individual needs, but if these processes (or parts of them) are paper-based or repeated in other departments, you’re losing valuable time to inefficiency.

Consider some of the ordinary processes that use common information and are often paper based:

• Tracking student enrollment
• Paying faculty
• Entering attendance records
• Managing financial aid accounts
• Requesting time off
• Preparing reports

When you streamline your IT and the processes that underlie your organization and management efforts to eliminate redundant tasks and to automate paper-based processes, you free up valuable staff time. For example, you can replace separate paper-based processes for providing a student’s address to people and departments that need it—such as the registrar, the librarian, the transportation coordinator, and the financial aid office—by having one place to enter the student’s information electronically. You can even make it automatically available to any authorized individual or department. And when the student’s address changes, it only needs to be updated in one place. This is just one example of the many inefficiencies you can eliminate.

We can help you identify opportunities for streamlining. At the center of our strategy is the Microsoft Application Platform with Microsoft BizTalk Server, which integrates everything from legacy systems to Web services, everywhere from the classroom to the Internet.

Not another new platform

You likely do not even need a new platform to make this transformation; you just need more effective ways to use the platform already in place. You have many processes already using legacy and line-of-business (LOB) systems with large amounts of data. When you implement a pragmatic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that uses this existing platform, you organize your services and applications and make them available across multiple channels, including portals, Microsoft Office system applications, Web browsers, packaged applications, and mobile devices. So, when a member of your faculty or staff needs to find information or complete a task, it’s easy for them to access the tools and data they need to perform the task efficiently.

Key benefits

By streamlining your organizational processes, you can realize the benefits of:

• More time. Do you know an educator who doesn’t wish for more time? Provide them with it by way of streamlined processes.
• Improved regulatory compliance. Easily produce more accurate district, state, and federal reports.
• More productive employees. With less busy work, better insight into processes, and improved workflow, personnel can focus on their primary responsibilities.
• Better return on IT investments. There’s no need to throw out your legacy applications and start from scratch. Instead, integrate them and create new composite applications that help to overcome their limitations, so you can get the most from your IT resources.
• Increased agility. Your new, streamlined processes and Service Oriented Architecture provide the flexible foundation you need to adapt quickly to the constant evolution of education and technology.
• Reduced waste. Moving paper-based forms and processes online is an important step toward saving valuable resources and meeting the goals of “going green” initiatives at your institution.

Customer success case studies

The fourth largest public school district in the United States needed a consistent way to deliver information to more than 1 million students, parents, teachers, and administrators. Miami-Dade County Public Schools built a Web-based portal to give all these constituents a single point of access for relevant information, services, and applications. The district has improved learning potential for children, enhanced parents’ ability to participate in the education of their children, and improved the effectiveness and productivity of teachers and school administrators.