Where we do it
Education Industry Commercial Clients

Education Industry Focus Areas

For our education industry clients, we have focused our resources in several key areas:

  • Strategic IT Assessment and Planning: We have led engagements with a wide variety of colleges, universities and state higher education systems in helping them understand how to more effectively use IT to achieve their institutional goals. This work has frequently included IT assessments (People/Process/Technology), vendor/package selection, peer benchmarking, institutional visioning, strategy development and strategic initiative selection, prioritization and planning.
  • ERP Transformation, Planning and Implementation: We focus on helping clients plan for the impact that a new ERP system can have on an institution (organization, processes, and culture). We approach these projects as a multi-phased effort: Establish Transformation Guidelines to define how the school wants to run its business processes in the future; Process Transformation to provide the details on how the processes should be performed; Requirement Definition to define the RFP requirements to meet the school's needs and to support the new business processes; RFP Development to help clients write the detailed RFP specification needed to select a vendor; and RFP Support to help clients through the vendor selection and contract negotiations processes.
  • Security Assessment and Remediation: We have worked with a variety of institutions to assess the security of their network, server and workstation infrastructure. Our infrastructure security assessments often include: Network entry point security (Internet, VPN, dial-up, firewall); Server security (user ids, permissions, active services, patch levels); Backup and recovery; Physical security (Card Access, keys); Virus and Spyware protection; and power protection. We have developed and frequently help to execute detailed problem remediation plans.
  • Independent Project Audit/Review (IPA): On highly complex IT projects, large numbers of client and vendor staff are involved in a long term project that involves a large number of inter-related tasks. Even with the best intentions by all parties, projects can get derailed. Derailed projects can cost the institution significant additional money and time. Our Independent Project Audit services provide a holistic review of the project from three perspectives: People (including Change Management and Governance); Process; and Technology (hardware, software, network, etc.). The goals of our Independent Project Audits are: Provide senior management with an unbiased view of the project from both the client and vendor perspectives; Evaluate project progress toward time and cost expectations; and Identify potential project risks and mitigation strategies.
  • Project Management Office (PMO): We have worked with several institutions in establishing Project Management Offices to manage major ERP and Infrastructure projects. PMOÕs are most effective when a school has a large multi-year project or several major projects. We provide consulting support for establishing a project management officeÕs structure, metrics and skills planning. Additionally, we have providing on-going Project Office resources to manage the PMO. This has been particularly effective when institutions don't have the internal resources to effectively manage large projects and external vendors.
  • IT Management and Staff Outsourcing: We have worked with several institutions in providing short and long-term replacements for IT management and staff. In one institution, we have replaced the entire management team, including the CIO and are working to improve the effectiveness of the college's IT staff, who remain employees. In other cases, weÕve provided technical staff for long term assignments to support specific areas of need. These have included: ERP developers, help desk staff, Network Operations Center staff, security support and many other areas.
  • Process Re-design and Change Management: We are involved with several clients in rethinking how they provide student, human resources, financial and IT services to their stakeholders. We have helped streamline functional areas to better support their growing user demands.
  • Strategic Institutional Planning and Governance: We have worked with several major education clients to develop long term plans for transforming their educational and research environments to address long term institutional goals. We supported a major university in defining the skills and capabilities of their graduates for the year 2010 and developed a long-term plan to transform the university so that it can support the required educational outcomes.
  • Organizational Assessment/Re-Alignment: We have worked with a variety of campuses in assessing the IT staff needs of the campus and the IT resources available across the campus. We use this information to realign the roles and responsibilities of the IT staff and have helped to refocus managers and employees to their new roles and, when necessary, to a new organizational culture.
  • Business and Technology Continuity Planning: Given today's uncertain world events, it pays to be prepared for everything from a small, local disruption to a full scale campus or community disaster. We provide a proven methodology to think about the key institutional process priorities, the safety of students, faculty and staff and the communications needed to restore critical IT and IT-enabled services. We can help to define the value of key assets, and assist in developing a plan to address risks associated with business and IT disruptions.
  • Infrastructure Strategy Support: We have worked with both single and multi-campus institutions in helping them design, plan and manage their Server and WAN/LAN environments. We have extensive expertise with network and server security, identity management, voice, video, data, optical switching, firewalls, desktop management and deployment and wireless technologies. Additionally, weÕve helped many institutions plan for the convergence of their various communications technologies.
  • Instructional Technology: We have helped several institutions develop academic IT strategies and plans, focusing on defining and measuring appropriate outcomes. We have also developed other Web based projects for collaborative environments.
  • Sponsored Research Management: We have worked with many schools in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their grants and contract processes, organization and technology. We worked with a major research university to develop a sponsored research management system. Our requirements definition work focused on both the pre-award and post-award processes and included automated contract compliance checking and auditing.
  • Sarbanes-Oxley IT Planning: More and more institutions are finding themselves needing to move toward compliance with many of the components of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Frequently due to Governing Board pressure or campus executive desires, many institutions see that complying with portions with this Act can enhance institutional accountability, responsibility and security. We have worked with several clients to: understand the impact on campus IT systems and services; to select the portions of the act that are most appropriate to the institution; and to develop plans for moving toward compliance. Additionally, we have helped to manage Compliance Remediation Projects.