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When school’s out, IT is in–A checklist before fall

3 must-considers for IT before the fall rush is in full swing to save time and aggravation.

By Steve Stover
VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, Samanage August 23rd, 2017

School may be out during the summertime, but IT is in and they are expected to hustle.

The buildup to the start of a new school year is a critical time for IT leaders in higher education. Not only are they charged with supporting an entire campus that has varying needs across departments, they are also delivering cutting-edge customer service to students and implementing new technologies to streamline processes and budgets.

At Samanage we regularly talk to campus IT leaders about how to use the summer to prepare for fall.

With new technology innovations readily available, there’s a checklist of tools and steps for campus IT teams to consider.

Automation through cloud technologies is the key to driving exceptional IT services throughout the course of the school year.

1. Have You Considered Moving to the Cloud?

Compared to other industries, higher education has been hesitant to adopt cloud technologies due to misconceptions about security, and pre-existing investments in large on-premise solutions. Increasingly, however, education institutions are making the switch to cloud to tap into the cost efficiencies of outsourcing infrastructure and applications to drive greater efficiencies, and to reduce capital investments in the face of budget cuts.

Campuses that are still using on-premise solutions should carefully consider how a move to the cloud can free the IT team from managing infrastructure and applications and allow them to focus more on service.

For example, many of Samanage’s education customers have migrated to Google for school email accounts, storage and file sharing. Service management across the campus can also be moved to the cloud, simplifying everything from IT tickets to the onboarding of new faculty and students, to facilities requests.

2. Can You Centralize Your IT Services?

With the proliferation of mobile technology, IT campuses are now challenged with managing hundreds of different mobile and desktop devices running on multiple platforms that require software upgrades and warranty updates at different times. Tracking and managing different devices from one central location is imperative in the quest for efficiency.

Today’s modern IT service management solutions include asset management extensions that can track and manage the entire lifecycle of devices, including historical context on service requests and hardware incidents.

Beyond centralizing service and asset requests, campus IT is starting to take on a more strategic role to alleviate the disconnection between campus departments, and encourage transparency in areas such as project and classroom management and student services. Centralized cloud services are helping to drive this cross-department integration and cooperation, which benefits students, faculty and staff alike.

3. Are You Automating to Streamline Processes?

The campus IT staff is traditionally flooded with requests that leave little room for doing anything other than putting out fires.

Today, new advances in IT service management can automate tasks like new-student workflows, tuition payment and asset management – thereby increasing productivity, communication and service levels.

However, there is no reason for automation to stop with IT. One university shared that they are streamlining processes across their campus by using Samanage to manage assets and automate student tasks like grade submissions and transcript requests as well as employee tasks like requesting pay stubs, submitting timesheets and more.

Now You’re Ready — Bring on the New Students!

New innovations in the classroom and the challenges of managing technology across a campus make it imperative that IT administrators continuously go through a review process and analyze new solutions to help power a school’s IT operations and service delivery.

As the days get shorter and summer comes to an end, the pressure is on for campus IT. Teams that continue to keep an eye out for new technology can be confident that they are starting a school year with smarter and more streamlined processes in place that students and faculty need to thrive.

About the Author:

Steve Stover has more than 20 years of experience in systems management, cloud and big data at market-leaders like Dell, Red Hat and Teradata. Stover is VP of product management and product marketing at Samanage, where he oversees the product roadmap and strategy.

 

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