Post-secondary institutions face a ton of unique challenges compared to other organizations — even K-12 schools. On the one hand, they are very much businesses; large enterprises with a multitude of working parts. On the other, they're still educational institutions, subject to all the regulatory and reporting requirements that entails.
As you might have guessed, that results in a ton of complexity, made all the worse by some of the technology challenges these organizations face.
At this point, we think it's safe to say that there aren't many post-secondary institutions left that would deny the benefits of digital transformation and cloud computing. But there are plenty of organizations that are still struggling to transition to more modern technology. The problem they face is twofold.
On the one hand, their existing legacy systems don't meet their evolving functional needs. On the other hand, many of their core business processes are still reliant on those older systems. They need a system that grows, changes, and scales with them while also integrating with the systems they can't afford to retire.
Higher education has a serious problem with sprawl simply due to the nature of the industry. Certain departments at a post-secondary institution require specialized IT infrastructure. Computer Science, for instance, is going to have a different setup compared to Engineering or Chemistry.
And that's not even getting into administrative tools and platforms.
Managing the disconnected applications and systems on even a smaller campus can quickly become overwhelming — to say nothing of the other problems caused by an overburdened technology stack, which include:
Software and infrastructure aren't the only areas where higher education struggles with sprawl. Many colleges and universities also have a serious problem with data sprawl. Owing to poor data management, data silos are everywhere in these institutions.
Believe it or not, cloud software can actually aggravate the problem if it's not properly deployed and managed. Now, rather than being stored in multiple databases across campus, data might also be found scattered across the cloud. It's a data governance nightmare, to say the least, and one that makes compliance far more challenging than it needs to be.
Most people don't realize how much work teaching actually involves. Most of your time isn't spent in the classroom with students. It's spent on time-consuming administrative tasks — on paperwork, course preparation, and assessments.
This is something that holds true whether you're K-12 or post-secondary. And in both cases, the sheer volume of work has the potential to impact education quality while contributing to burnout. Now more than ever, instructors need a way to automate time-consuming tasks so they have more time to interact with students and fulfill student-facing responsibilities.
In other words, teachers need tools that let them spend less time on administration and more time actually teaching.
Anyone who's managed payroll for a college or university can tell you how complex it can be. You need to juggle a multitude of different pay types and positions, including hourly, salaried, and contract pay. And you need to do all that while also managing union agreements and fulfilling all relevant federal and regional regulations.
To say that it's challenging to do all this manually would be putting it lightly. Yet that's exactly what many post-secondary institutions end up having to do.
Here's where Sparkrock 365 comes in.
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform designed specifically with the needs of higher education in mind, Sparkrock integrates the various aspects of campus operations into one place. Hosted in the intelligent Microsoft Cloud, our solution breaks down data silos while simplifying purchasing, reporting, budgeting, and scheduling. Here's how we solve the challenges described above:
Want to learn more about how ERP software can bring your higher education facility into the future? Reach out and we'll show you.