Driving Innovation in Higher Ed Through Data
CT: Higher ed of course is notorious for being slow to change, maybe even resistant to change. So how can you break the status quo at a university that's not Maryville and doesn't have that culture of innovation leading its strategic vision?
Komarny: I think it's through clarity. Maryville has done the same type of planning that Salesforce does. It's called V2MOM: vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. Having the university adopt that type of methodology to drive clarity and consistency with what we're doing over the next year — show me another university in the world that's doing that. I don't know of one and I've worked at Salesforce. They've been doing it for 20 years. That's why they're a $30 billion company — because they drive clarity. There's no confusion. Everybody understands what everybody else is doing. It all flows down from the top to everybody, and we all have a concise plan of how we're moving forward. Every university should adopt that type of clarity across their divisions.
Salesforce bought a company called Credential Master back in November of 2021. What they do is allow data to move to the edge through verifiable credentials. That means anybody who's using that CRM can give the data to the customer, and create a relationship with the data through a verifiable credential. That is a trust network. That's extending trust as a value proposition. I think there are going to be a lot of companies that are going to see ways to deploy trust in their business models. Universities should jump all over that, because that is a trusted relationship they have with these students, but it gives them a better way to expose that trust, through these types of new mechanisms and measures like verifiable data or verifiable credentials. That's what I think is next. That's what universities and schools can start to look at.
We're deviating from the way we used to create systems. And we want to put that learner, or that customer, or whatever you want to call them, at the center of it. If that's true, you don't surround them with the data, you give it to them. And let's interact with them through a relationship with their data. We can teach them about their data. We can show them how important it is. We can deliver delights at every moment.
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].