Mobility, flexibility, portability and going global are all current themes in higher education and in the HEUG community. Just recently the HEUG Board met with a number of our key Oracle applications strategists and liaisons in San Francisco to discuss these evolving trends and what this means for the future of enterprise applications.
As many of our institutions have a steadily growing worldwide presence, there is a need for our students, faculty, staff and university affiliates to conduct business transactions from a growing number of locations with every device imaginable (as well as many that we haven’t thought of yet). Whether we are registering for a class, paying tuition, looking at our paycheck or making a purchase, we have an increasing need to do these things at anytime and from most anywhere. As the HEUG board relayed examples of some of the recent higher education trends, the emerging theme was the need for significant changes in the core infrastructure that supports our teaching and learning environment as well as our business applications.
Reinventing higher education and increasing innovation through research initiatives is requiring integrated, highly-available systems. We are asking Oracle to partner with our industry in developing the future of higher education applications – we are no longer asking for back-office, stand alone administrative systems. With constituents across multiple time zones and very flexible schedules, system down-time is less tolerable and a robust infrastructure is key. Our community, the education and research community, is looking for third party vendor relationships to host and manage large components of these complex infrastructures.
And maybe the most important part is focusing on making sense of the data to empower executive decision-making. Real-time business analytics designed to help us assist a student who is struggling, target a particular city or a high school for recruitment, offer the right class at the right time, or track student success is increasingly becoming part of our integrated business model. I believe that Oracle is well positioned, as one of our strategic partners, to provide the technology infrastructure as well as many of the applications to meet these demands.