Tom Green, Director of Technology Solutions for AACRAO Consulting, delivered the keynote address at the 15th Annual SITS Conference in Wales, UK, in July. The conference gathered nearly 300 student information system users from the Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom for a two-day meeting on business process improvement and best practices in the use of Tribal Education’s SITS student information systems.
Green’s address highlighted the ways in which technology can improve the student experience. Among the methods, he noted that business process improvement helps contain costs, ultimately paid by students, while improving their ability to easily and ubiquitously complete transactions for enrollment. By streamlining processes and automating functions, the experience on staff who work with these transactions is also improved but requires them to use critical thinking skills to analyze data and look for problems or outliers.
The address also noted the role of technology in student communications. In today’s crowded marketplace, students, parents and others have multiple choices gathering information on higher education options and interacting with universities. These rapid changes have forced higher education to rethink how it provides information and how it communicates with prospective students, particularly.
Tribal Education is the leading provider of student information software in the United Kingdom and has recently implemented its solutions in other English-speaking countries. AACRAO and Tribal have been working together this past year to determine how these solutions might be offered to colleges and universities in the United States.
For more information on how AACRAO Consulting can help your institution assess its use of technology and streamline business practices, contact Nicole Spero at (202) 355-1056 or SperoN@aacrao.org.