Posts Tagged ‘Brandeis’
Inspired by Greatness
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling
One of the things I love about working in higher education is the community of sharing. This week, MICA had the good fortune to host visitors from Brandeis University who shared their experiences around on-line admission applications and course evaluations. Brandeis and MICA are very different in how we manage our enterprise systems. At MICA we’re very lightly staffed and therefore must follow a very vanilla, low customization model. Brandeis a larger investment in ERP technology staffing and utilizes these resources to extend functionality of their systems in ways that, well, make some of us at MICA drool.
We also attended the University System of Maryland Oracle PeopleSoft conference where Gettysburg College did a terrific presentation about connecting technology projects with institutional strategy through a student leadership initiative. During his introduction, Steve Lewis commented on one of my favorite themes of 2008 — aligning technology goals with organizational planning. I’ve participated in many conversations where technologists wonder about how we can get leadership buy-in for technology projects. The Gettysburg approach was to focus on the goals set by the leadership in the college’s long term plan and use this is as the basis for technology iniatives.
Brandeis, Gettysburg and MICA couldn’t be more different in terms of our staffing, acadmic programs and approach to technology. But at the end of the day, we’re all trying to accomplish the same things: support the education of our students. While it’s not likely that MICA will be able to implement the exact solutions that work so successfully at these institutions, our dialog and learning will lead us to providing better services for our students in our own great MICA way.
