Driving Innovation in Higher Ed Through Data
I think it's an educational moment right now. It's not, "Hey, you need to have all these badges and all this crap in your wallet. All of that, all that wording, all that language is wrong. If it was right, it would have already happened. There are so many people who need upskilling and reskilling and constant skilling, because our world is constantly changing — how can we put in a system that allows that to happen? Data is the biggest part.
When I was at Salesforce, we had something called Voice of the Customer, where you really understand how your customers are interacting with the system or this company that you've created. Maryville is really looking at that with a very deep lens, doing experience analysis design to understand how students, how our faculty, how our constituents see our enterprise. Then once we have that, that is our North Star. You know what our jobs are at Maryville? Everybody at Maryville, we do two things: recruit and retain students. That's it. Doesn't matter what we do, we recruit and retain students. Because everybody is starting to understand that departments and divisions have only got us to this point in education. Maryville, everybody, we've got to this level of education with our current model. If we start to think about people and their information differently, and how we can inspire them through learning, we can take it to the next level through that information, through data. And first you've got to understand their journey and understand what works and what doesn't. So I commend Maryville for doing that deep work. That's not easy.
But once that's there, it's not done. That's an active map that you're constantly delivering delight to. These are our customers; we're constantly delighting them. What do they want next? That becomes a way that the university can move forward, through engagement around learning — not just through degree learning, but through lifelong learning. How can we open up a relationship with our alumni that's around learning, not around donations? We want them to come in back into our community and inspire the next group of Saints to go on their learning journey.
CT: When you say something like, "Our only job is to recruit and retain students," what do you say to people who would challenge that with, "Well, what about teach students?"
Komarny: Their job is to teach. But as they're teaching, they're recruiting and retaining students, because it's part of our community. It's not like you're here to do this one thing. You might be cutting the grass in the quad — your job is to recruit and retain students. What you're doing is helping with that.
We have these so-called divisions and departments — you've heard it all, like admissions, enrollment, all this stuff. And what happens is the student gets passed between those departments, and it wastes their time constantly. If you look at really great business models like Amazon's, when you look at their customer obsession, they'll talk about treating your customer's time as sacred. Talk to a bunch of administrators at a college and ask them how sacred they think students' time is. That's something no one ever has brought up to anybody. But if we start to think of it that way, everybody recruits and retains students, it doesn't matter what department you're in, you might be cutting the grass or might be the college president, you're all doing the same job. How do we work together to get this to happen?
I think Information Technology needs to be destroyed first. And it needs to change to something like Collective Technology, not Information Technology. You want the organization to own the technological vision — you don't want it to be delivered from the basement of the library. Nine times out of 10, that's where IT is located. So if you think of it that way, you engage the business differently around data, because we're all going to share it, we're all going to see it, and we're all going to use it to drive the business forward to recruit and retain students.