June 23, 2022

Inside University of Kentucky’s Data Strategy: Stay Ahead of The Education Trend

F For those working in higher education, the start of the new decade has brought with it a slew of unexpected and significant challenges. First, the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we knew it, necessitating mass closures and temporary suspensions of in-person education. Colleges and universities around the world were forced to find new ways to meet their obligations to over 1 billion students while operating remotely.

Higher education leaders must consider a few key questions in order to embrace these challenges and capitalise on these opportunities: What will it take to meet students' needs in the future? How can new technologies be used to build the university of the future? Above all, how will you maintain quality education and excellent student experiences along the way? Leading the way is the University of Kentucky, with its unique data strategy. Let’s have a look at how this university is taking the lead in using data to stay ahead of the game.

…we looked at our operations and tech procurement, and it wasn’t where it needed to be,” said Barry Swanson, chief procurement officer for the University of Kentucky…

The University of Kentucky has long been dedicated to education, research, innovation, healing, and service. But, in a post-COVID world, fulfilling that mission looks very different than it did when the land-grant university was founded over 155 years ago. That is why, in late 2021, university president Eli Capilouto announced Kentucky's Path Forward initiative: to identify and implement new ways to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively, while maintaining the university's tradition of providing high-quality education. University Executive Director of Enterprise Applications Adam Recktenwald, said, “We looked at our operations and tech procurement, and it wasn’t where it needed to be,” said Barry Swanson, chief procurement officer for the University of Kentucky.”

The University of Kentucky team recognised that they would require technology capable of analysing the massive amounts of data they could collect in order to better inform critical, forward-thinking decisions. "Following the leader can be all-too-common in higher education," said Recktenwald. "Knowing our stance and the consequences of our decisions is therefore critical."

As long-time SAP users, the University of Kentucky team understood the importance of technology in addressing its challenges. The university has always taken an iterative approach to digitising processes since deploying its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in 2004.

With analysts predicting a phenomenal 22% CAGR in the higher education cloud computing market from 2020 through 2027, the University of Kentucky found cloud to be the perfect way to leverage data. Systems today really are far more complex, but they’re also far more capable. Even internal custom projects are born in the cloud. At this point, the cloud is just the way of life,” said a source from Kentucky University.

Posted in News and tagged News, University of Kentucky, Higher Education, Quality Education, Cloud, Data
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