A Technology Roadmap for Regis College

When Regis College, a private university in greater Boston, sought to create a technology plan to support their performance goals, they turned to Systems Flow.

Like many higher education institutions, Regis was grappling with a series of questions regarding the ability of its technology environment to manage data and information flow. How well was data being shared, if at all, between admissions, student services, and alumni relations? Was the school’s procurement system meeting the needs of its stakeholders? And, which of these challenges should Regis address first?

By listening to and mapping the needs of multiple stakeholders across the campus, we helped Regis identify gaps and align technology solutions to business goals.

Identifying Business Drivers for Technology Decisions

First, it was crucial to understand, document, and socialize the key business goals and challenges surrounding the college’s technology infrastructure. We actively elicited business strategy from groups representing every business function at the college to identify key business drivers that inform IT investment decisions. Our analysis outlined challenges and recommendations, and identified several immediate solutions to ongoing technology problems.

Making an Informed Technology Investment

The culmination of our analysis of Regis’ business strategy and current-state technology environment was a 5-year Technology Roadmap. This plan detailed recommended technology approaches to realize institutional strategic objectives, and:

• provided a complete view of Regis’ current technology architecture, including metrics on users and hosting disposition (cloud or on-premise)
• identified relationships between business challenges and IT challenges
• analyzed trends in the technology application landscape
• identified gaps in automation capabilities, information management and business intelligence, ERP functions, and process, governance, and training
• involved facilitation of several onsite elicitation worksessions, that not only settled long-standing disagreements on how data was defined, but also formulated a baseline for future data transformation
• created an Enterprise Data Dictionary to better ensure cross-functional understanding and data consistency; defining over 150 business terms spread throughout multiple disparate databases across the institution
• proposed actionable recommendations and a roadmap to achieve them

“What Systems Flow produced was a succinct and actionable set of recommendations that, when realized over the next 3-5 years, will ensure that technology is a valuable contributor to reaching our strategic goals,” said Kate Korzendorfer, Regis CIO.

With this business-aligned technology roadmap in hand, Regis College is able to strategically focus its technology investments in areas such as data intelligence and information management, student engagement through mobile technology, process automation, and lean IT process and governance.

You, too, can achieve visible value and sustainable results.
Systems Flow can help.
Strategic thinking. Put into action.

Comments