Evolving the Enterprise

Digital Transformation in Higher Education With Stacy Pennington, Director of Infrastructure and Enterprise Applications at Rhodes College

• SnapLogic • Season 3 • Episode 7

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In this episode of the "Evolving the Enterprise Podcast," host Dayle Hall, CMO of SnapLogic, sits down with Stacy Pennington, Director of Infrastructure and Enterprise Applications at Rhodes College. They delve into the digital transformation journey of Rhodes College, particularly in the realm of higher education. From leveraging technology to enhance educational experiences to streamlining operations and decision-making processes, Stacy shares insights into how the college is adapting to the evolving technological landscape. The conversation also touches on the challenges and opportunities presented by generative AI, data privacy, and the importance of keeping students at the forefront of every technological advancement.

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Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Dayle Hall:
Hi, and welcome to another of our episodes of Evolving the Enterprise Podcast. I'm your host, Dayle Hall, CMO of SnapLogic. This podcast is where we delve into this amazing transformative world of technology and data across the business landscape. Today, we have a special guest who's at the forefront of some of this digital transformation, particularly in the area of higher education. Joining us today, Stacy Pennington, director of infrastructure and enterprise applications at Rhodes College. He's here to share his insights on how the college is leveraging technology and data to enhance educational experiences and streamline operations. Obviously, clearly important to differentiate as an institution these days. But from digital transformation to data-driven decision-making, we'll explore some of these strategies that they're looking at, that’s shaping the future of higher education. Qithout further ado, Stacy, welcome to the podcast.

Stacy Pennington:
Thank you, Dayle. I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

Dayle Hall:
Well, it's interesting for me because when we kicked off this podcast, we had one of our other higher ed customers. Actually, it was the very first one we did. It actually became one of the most viewed and listened to podcasts. A lot of that, I think, is because I think within colleges, they're actually thinking about doing a lot of innovations. Sometimes you don't think that a higher ed organization is going to move too fast, but I think we're going to dispel some of those today. I think let's just start with who you are, how you got into this position around being at the college, but also your career that brought you into this kind of digital transformation type of role.

Stacy Pennington:
Sure. I'll be glad to explain all of that. I was a student at the college in the early ‘90s. That's how I found this place. I really love my experience here. I love the city in Memphis, Tennessee. It is an amazing place. Rhodes is a very small liberal arts college, about 2,000 students. It's a nice intimate environment. You get to know your professors very well, small class sizes. Again, it's a liberal arts-focused education, so we’re reading the classics as well as studying biochemistry. It's the full gamut.

I went away into other parts of industry for a few years. I did a variety of different things related to IT and ran a company, and then ended up coming back to Memphis. A job opened up at Rhodes in, essentially, enterprise IT. I jumped at the opportunity and still here 21 years later. I was brought in to help with our ERP system at that time, SunGard, now called Ellucian Banner. It's a big ERP, enterprise resource program, and student information system, SIS, that helps run the school. It ran on Oracle and used a lot of Linux systems connected to one another to provide the environment of Banner. And so administered that for many years here at the school. And then over the past five, six years, I've been involved in our Workday cloud-based digital transformation, so to speak, into a new ERP and then SIS, a project we're still trying to wrap up the last part of the student part now. It's been a whirlwind but a challenging and fun one.

Dayle Hall: 
Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the term digital transformation because, obviously, it's not a new term. We've been hearing it a lot over the years. There's a ton of things that get applied to digital transformation. Tell me a little bit about what you think of digital transformation, specifically at Rhodes College, and how is it having this kind of impact, not just on the students but on the organization itself?

Stacy Pennington: 
I think you can measure it. The words mean a lot more if viewed from the end user perspective. Even though we've had digital-based systems going back into the ‘80s in terms of a command line system or legacy systems, many times the end users were safe filling out a paper form and going and getting wet signatures from people just to gather the data that needed to be there so that they could then enter that into an earlier digital system and have an effect. And so [inaudible] and sees they were driven within the departments or groups gathering the data or sifting it or reporting or using it. The wins weren't there for the student. They weren't there for the person filling out the paperwork. That person didn't care whether their paperwork– it didn't help them at all. They had to do the same amount of work.

You run into this today, I think at like a doctor's office where every year they hand you a new pad of paper and tell you to fill out the same stuff you filled out last year. I would argue that has not really been a digital transformation for the end user, which is where it really matters. I guess when we say digital transformation, we try to see it in terms of the effect for the end user, and that’s a martyr thing to do.

Dayle Hall: 
Yeah. No, I’ll say that's an interesting perspective. No one’s actually put it in that thought to me before. How often then do you look at projects? I know you talked about ERP originally, but how many potential projects that come your way that you're involved with, that could be bannered under digital transformation, how many of them start with, okay, what's the impact to the end user? Or are we trying to fix something for the end user, which, again, could be students, could be other people? Is that kind of how the use cases developed?

Stacy Pennington:   
Our focus has been lately, in the last few years, to try to focus on getting the backend systems to the point where they can transform this for the end user. Basically, a lot of legacy and digital solutions just can't meet the needs of modern requirements that people have. For example, Banner didn’t have an app to allow- so we have student workers, and they were working on-campus for the college. They were turning in paper timesheets when they were signed by the supervisor every week, and someone was having to enter all that data into the system.

So digital transformation for them was to have them clock in and out using their phones to clock in and out of their work. And then their supervisor would, on a screen, review their hours once a week and approve them. And then they would go to payroll and be paid. That was a true digital transformation week. Our older system just couldn't do that because it just would not support that. And so we had to change that internal system to be something that was receptive to a modern interface for the end user. And that takes a lot of time. That's a long-term game plan. You've got to have the right systems in place that can talk to more modern interfaces for people that can you get there.

Dayle Hall:  
In terms of getting approval for those kinds of particularly long-term projects, I've heard from a number of other people on these podcasts that you’ve got to have a long-term vision, you've got to show quick wins, you've got to bring a bunch of people involved so they can buy into the journey. Is that the same principle for a higher ed organization? Are you still looking for quick wins even though it could be a long-term project?

Stacy Pennington: 
Quick wins are important. If you can factor them into your planning and pull them off, they are very important. But I think higher ed, in particular, has a longer-term view. It might be because our customers are with us for at least four years, and a quarter of your customers turn over every year at an undergraduate institution. And so you end up having to have a longer-term view. You also have more, I think, latitude to get it right and have the long-term solution be correct rather than a short-term win, in many cases, because that's what's going to move the needle in terms of momentum for admissions and in lots of other areas of the college. But we happen to have some enlightened leadership back in 2018 when we decided to adopt Workday. That leadership, it went through the Board of Trustees and helped us select this product and implement it. That's been the cornerstone of our digital transformation process.

It's been a very long slog. We did our first implementation of Workday in 2019 for finance and payroll and HR. And then we've been working the last few years on our student implementation after going live with student last year in March. So it's been a long slog, but we had some leaders. Our CIO at the time, Jose Rodriguez, and our president at the time, Marjorie Hass, really just got on board and led and moved this project along. And we're willing to accept the short-term and medium-term costs and inconveniences for the long-term payouts of being in the right system that can provide those new experiences for students.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah. When you're in a kind of higher education environment, it's great that Jose and Marjorie, the people you mentioned, it’s great when you have visionary leaders like that. But again, like most organizations, I'm sure you have limited resources, and you can't necessarily just keep throwing more people at problems to solve. Within a higher ed environment, how do you think about prioritization? What do you look at considering? I'm sure you get multiple requests. I'm sure there's more people who want to do things. How do you prioritize in a higher ed environment?

Stacy Pennington:   
Well, it all comes down to the students, frankly. It's really what helps them graduate, take the classes that they need to graduate, and to be successful. They are our customer. We serve them. It all comes down to them. They'll let you know if you're not serving them well. We operate in a very, very resource-constrained environment. Our IT team, especially the side that handles enterprise applications, is very, very small, just a handful of people. So we have to be very careful about our project management and to take on only things that we can finish.

But we've developed over the last several years a project management style that includes two different meetings a week where we have, essentially, a stand-up style meeting where we go over all of our projects in our information services area and spread the knowledge. That way, people can contribute to each other's projects, fill in when they're out or away, that kind of thing. It's very tricky, but it all comes down to prioritization based on what the students need. We do that within our projects. We actually have on the board risk, required to do this, and who we're serving are major components of each project right at the masthead of everything we do and with all our students.

Dayle Hall:  
I love the- again, you've given me great sound bites for the promotion of the podcast, like it all comes down to the students. I think a lot of companies- okay, maybe it's not students, but we all say we're customer centric. But I think within higher ed, you probably see that a little bit more because, like you said, the students will let you know if they're unhappy with certain things. They have no shortage of having voices, which I think is great.

Obviously, you’ve got multiple systems. You've got multiple data sources. Like you said, you've got at least 2,000 students that are going to be there for four years, but they're going to churn. So there's certain things you have to meet. How do you think about pulling all those pieces together? Obviously, we're talking about integration. But integration, it can be a massive thing, different sources, different locations, different types of students. It feels really important when it comes down to students like it is when it's in healthcare, frankly, because it's really important information to those people. Does the integration challenge feel heavier when it's really focused on people and not just necessarily disparate data sources? And how do you think about solving integration?

Stacy Pennington:   
I think it is more challenging. Rhodes, as I mentioned before, as part of being a student here, it's a small environment. People often come here because they're no longer a small fish in a big pond. They're part of a community. A lot of people, we learn each other's names. We talk to each other like people. You're not a number here. That, when you carry over into information systems, whether they're a health system, an EHR that's used to manage their health records, or a payment system that helps them pay their bills, they do become a number. They become a unique ID, their student ID, or whatever. You've got to make sure not treat them like that when you interact with them. And so it is very challenging.

Getting the data integration right between the various systems so you can pull the data together, you can recognize problems before they become acute, you can try to solve them or look for areas of improvement, those are really important things to do. So yeah, to maintain that small town environment that we have on our campus, data integration actually is quite important because it lets us solve problems before they become larger ones that would bother people that know that they want to be addressed person to person.

Dayle Hall: 
Yeah. How do you manage some of these projects, whether integration or just in general around digital transformation? How do you manage those internally? I've heard from other people on these podcasts, they have a separate board. They have councils. They have ways that they share some of these initiatives. And I think with something like integration, you're touching so many different parts of the organization. So how have you been able to manage that communication or sharing of information internally?

Stacy Pennington:   
We use Trello for this. It's a great simplistic project management solution. We've used that internally for, I don't know, maybe six years or so. Before that, we had a physical board that was put together by our librarian, Darlene Brooks, and our director of academic technologies, Richie Trenthem. They put their heads together with another team of people and developed this kind of project management style. It’s literally with sticky notes on a board. You basically put projects were they were in their process of being completed, and we work them across the board to completion. It was just a way to communicate with one another about what we're working on.

We've manifested that in Trello and have converted over to doing that. We included that in our twice-a-week stand-up meetings related to that.  A lot of other parts of the college have begun to adopt this Trello methodology. We're using it for our Workday stabilization project that's going on to finish the first year of being live on Workday and improving operations within Workday. And it's just becoming a more popular thing at our college because it does allow you to just share where everything is and keep everybody up to date and assigned tasks to do. But it's simple enough that you really don't need any instruction or special training to use it.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah, we have it. My marketing team uses Trello to manage deliverables and outputs and so on. So yeah, it's a pretty useful tool. Have you had situations where as you've been working potentially on a project, and as you've shared something, whether it was the sticky notes in the past or whether it's using a tool like Trello nowadays, where people have seen some of the things that you're planning, that you're working on, and they've reached out because they want to leverage it, or they think that something else that they could be part of, has the sharing or the open communication allowed projects to become more important or bigger?

Stacy Pennington:   
I would say that hasn't happened as much for us. That's happened. It helped us communicate to senior leaders about what we're doing. So much of what we're doing, we're often just staring at a screen typing, and they don't know what we're doing day to day. And this helps them see the actual products we're working toward, the things, the deliverables we're trying to get out to our campus. And it's been a great way to just kind of message them and let them know and provide visibility where if they needed to change our prioritization or whatever, they could reach in there and speak to that.

We've also used it, though, in kind of what you were talking about, to help deal with scope creep, because that's a problem of every project. If you've got an agreed-upon set of tasks, if new things start to manifest themselves because it wasn't well scoped, then this will make it very obvious why some project took much longer to complete than it should have. For us, it's largely a communication tool and just making sure to close the loop tool. It's being used in lots of different ways, instructive ways for the college.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah, that's good. I think when we talk about these large projects, I do think communication is another key piece of it. Again, whichever tool you use, or if you are using post-its, I don't think it matters, but communication is key.

Let's talk a little bit about user data for things like analytics, again, potentially impacting student services, if it's personalized learning or other streamlined services you may offer. But tell me a little bit more about what kind of data analytics you have, how is it being utilized, and how is that helping to provide a better experience, at least for the staff and the students?

Stacy Pennington: 
I would say that this is an area we're very much working on right now in our stabilization project as a college in general. I think next year, I'll be able to answer this question a lot better. We're kind of restructuring how we do reporting at Rhodes. We're coming off of a 25-year-old reporting system that took a long time to develop and get kind of molded to our campus. And now we're doing something new. It has a potential to be much, much more powerful, but we're still putting the people around it and processes around it to make it work well for us.

I will speak to save for the student experience. For example, we used to have a constellation of systems around the student, and we've shrunk that constellation down to fewer. For example, you would be in Banner to view your grades or see your class registrations. And then you would use another outside product that we actually developed to do your class registrations. And then there was a third product that was in charge of doing your degree auditing and making sure that you were moving toward your major and minor and college requirements to graduate. These systems could disagree with each other. They could be not in sync. It was problematic. And so by moving to Workday, we helped make bring all those things together. And then our registrar's office and their consultants helped to build a set of dashboards within Workday to provide real-time analytics to our students in a way they just never had access to before.

At Rhodes, we’re so unusual in that our faculty also are advisors. We don't have a separate professional advising team or anything like that. Our faculty double as advisors. Those advisors also have the same information about all their advisees at their fingertips in dashboards that are customized for them and what we've heard back from them that they need to provide the best advising experience. And now we're in the driver's seat to change those at will, based on feedback going forward. It took us, of course, many years to get to this point. We’re just now where we can actually take advantage of this and improve and get in the process of improvement of this from the student or the advisor perspective.

We're still working on a lot of this in other areas in the college, especially tying data together from different systems. Workday has a technology called Prism. That's extremely helpful for this because it stores the data outside of Workday, but it has access to Workday data. It can take data from other third-party systems, import them to Prism, and then mix that data with Workday data and present it as dashboards or tabular reports in dashboards within Workday to decision-makers, or students, or faculty, or advisors, or whoever. We're in the process of trying to figure out how to build that up and stand that up in ways that are just as useful as the student and advisor dashboards.

Dayle Hall: 
Do you have policies in place? Because, obviously, we mentioned earlier, I think student records, healthcare, HIPAA-compliant systems and so on. How do you think about data privacy at your college? Are there separate groups that manage that? Is it something that you have certain processes that you make sure that you're on top of? How do you think about that in a college?

Stacy Pennington:  
This is another point of improvement for us. We have policies. You mentioned HIPAA. We actually aren't HIPAA compliant. We don't have to be. We, as colleges, are actually exempted from those onerous rules, thankfully. That doesn't mean we don't try to stick to those guidelines and keep the data as secure as if it was HIPAA. But thankfully, we don't have to deal with the audits and other kinds of things that people that have HIPAA compliance have to do. But it did drive us to move our data into a very widely used student electronic health record system in EHR, called Medicat, to storage when we moved it out of filing cabinets. Again, a digital transformation in that respect.

In terms of data governance for the whole college, it's been a stop-and-go experience for us. Our current CIO, Harvey Smith, is restarting a data governance and stewardship initiative at the college and trying to get that going again. He's very, very aware of the need to get handles on where the data is in the various systems to make sure it's protected. We're working hard on that.

Dayle Hall:
That brings me to an interesting question because there's a couple of things there. I actually appreciate and love the fact that you say, these are things we have to improve. Because I think often, people believe that when you talk around this kind of thing, we've got it all figured out, of course, we know what's going on. You mentioned this around using data analytics and also around the data privacy side.

Stacy, what I think about is if someone's listening to this podcast, maybe they're going through something similar, maybe they're looking at data privacy, maybe they're looking at getting better analytics and dashboard, they're at the same stage or improving, is this something that you've learned either around the analytics or the privacy side and governance, something that you think, if I went back in time, I wouldn't do it this way, or I'd tell someone that's going to be on the same journey. What kind of thing would you tell someone out there listening that may be on a similar path? What do they need to be careful of? What should they avoid? What have you learned? It could just be something minor. Do you have any gotchas, any like, oh, yeah, I remember that?

Stacy Pennington:  
I think the number one thing is to just have a plan.

Dayle Hall:
That sounds simple, but I'm sure it’s not.

Stacy Pennington:   
It sounds like a no-brainer. But in so many ways, a lot of what it means to be at a college and operate in a college environment is quite reactionary. You're just trying to respond to the day-to-day crises and needs of people. It's really important, though, with reporting and a strategy around that, around analytics in terms of how you're going to use data across different siloed systems around the college, that you have a plan and you've got the resources, and people are centered around that plan that can pull that off. A lot of schools, I think, might take that for granted because they already have that group. And I can tell you, at Rhodes, we've struggled with this because we've kind of lost that centrality that we're trying to re-instantiate it. It's very difficult to get it going again once you lose it.

So having a plan and carrying forward on how you're going to do stuff is important because you'll learn along the way of building that plan aspects of your current environment that won't work, or certain system doesn't export data in the way you need to pull it into your central reporting system or your data lake or whatever you're doing. You've got to have a plan. The planning will also make the work go much, much quicker and smoother.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think that comes back to your point earlier around even communication, once you have that plan, communication, make sure there isn't scope creep because people are often throwing things, well, let's try and do this at the same time. So I understand that.

My last question specifically on this is that we know- you know SnapLogic, and this isn't a promotional, tell me how great the product is. We think the product is great, but that's not what this is. But just one question specifically. The things you talked about, having a plan or bringing in the disparate data sources or governance, how are you using SnapLogic to help any of that today?

Stacy Pennington:   
Our biggest thing with SnapLogic is we got to a point in our project, I guess it was in 2022, so a couple of years ago, where we realized that we could not go forward without an infrastructure and integration platform as a service. We could not do it. Literally, to that point, we have always had information systems who we’re connecting to that had relatively strong integration capabilities. But we started doing a lot of integrations related to Workday Student that there was no functionality in that downstream system. It just wasn't there. A lot of these are just Hotel California-style systems. Data goes in, and good luck getting it out. But we still need to, we need to have the systems talk to each other.

We baked SnapLogic off against a variety of other systems. These systems are not cheap. They're expensive, both to buy and to subscribe to, but also to train people in and to gain expertise in. We looked at several of them. But SnapLogic rose to the top quickly due to its very visual coding method and the abilities- you can take a SnapLogic pipeline and just pull it up, and within a few minutes of clicking around, get the whole gist of what's going on here and where it's going.

In our college, various offices work together on these. We don't have any programmers at Rhodes, any, at all. We have some data analysts, some system analysts, and they’re spread across all different departments. We need those folks to be able to share in the integration work that SnapLogic provides for us. This has allowed us to use a system with other offices and share the load of this so that an office might own, say, a pipeline related to their tasks to what they need to do. But if IT needs to jump in because it's an IT-related problem, we can go in and see what they've built. You can ask them questions about why they did this or that. And that visual nature, combined with the capability of the snaps themselves, really helped make the decision for us.

Dayle Hall:  
Again, this isn't a podcast to talk about how great SnapLogic is, but I appreciate you saying that. Because those things you mentioned, being able to not necessarily have in-depth engineers build the pipelines and the nice user interface, so it's simple to figure out, those are all important and help you on your digital transformation journey. So I appreciate that.

Let's finish the podcast. Let's talk about the future. Let's talk about the future of what technology you might be looking at preparing, not just data but digital learning and other aspects. I'm going to ask you one thing because it is the hottest topic around generative AI. And I am just interested when I have these podcasts because they come from very different backgrounds. I've talked to Walmart. I've talked to Meta. Everyone has different perspectives. Just give me Stacy's perspective on generative AI, within your own experience but also potentially from an educational institution perspective. How are you even thinking about what's coming down the pipe?

Stacy Pennington:   
I really think that generative AI is a transformative technology on level with the internet, or maybe even something more profound. However, I also believe that we're in the punchcard days of it. We are in such, such an early stage. And it's a different kind of technological revolution than we've been through before. The amount of data, of models that you have to work through, the data you have to back up those models is tremendous. In the internet age, somebody could just get a dotcom and draw up a website and learn how to code and you're just consulting people. In this, you're going down to a few companies that have this level of data and these particular models. And you're buying into a platform in a way you've never bought into a platform before as you integrate.

It's very early days. I think a lot of the current AI stuff that we currently see and experience is really cool, but it's not much more than a parlor trick at this stage. But it won't be that way forever. Workday and other major partners of Rhodes and systems we use, we lean into their AI capabilities whenever we can. We help them investigate what they need to do to make their systems better work with AI. But it's going to be a very, very long road to get things done. These different systems, just simply getting access to them to build a language model, a large language model, that could incorporate data from multiple systems and then provide the feedback quickly to somebody, it's a major task and something that I don't think any college, no matter the size, could actually do today.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah. Do you get pressure from, I don't know,  either the CIOs or other parts of the institution to at least look at these things? Frankly, are you getting those questions from students? Are they looking for that kind of capabilities? And do you think that's going to become more of a- I don't want to say differentiator, but are people going to ask for these kinds of capabilities when they have an experience on campus?

Stacy Pennington:   
Right now, the students are leaning into that very much. That can be the nature of our particular students. In general, they're more person-to-person type of folks, and a lot of our services are face-to-face. But it's a matter of time before that turns around. I've seen a lot of promises in AI in simplifying something otherwise complex. So you take something like, say, a college catalog, which covers all the rules related to graduate from a program and major in a certain subject, those rules over time get bigger and more complex and more difficult. And different students can elect to use different catalog gears as their rule set to graduate. It becomes difficult for, say, an advisor, human advisor, to keep all that data in their mind.

AI would be a perfect solution to keep these rules of unstructured data from a printed catalog, a PDF, let's say, that years rules, and be able to look at the students data, and then answer questions for them. Like at three o'clock in the morning, as a digital advisor, of course, you'd want to always have the registrar's office and the real advisor make these answers to be legitimate and make sure that they're correct. But there are these emerging possibilities in situations where you could utilize AI, w're just several years away from being able to pull that together. It's something to keep on the horizon, look for that opening, and it's a tantalizing opening. Our campus is mostly focused on AI in terms of generative AI as a way for cheating, basically.

Dayle Hall:
Yeah. I’m just going to say, I'm sure you're dealing with different challenges around that.

Stacy Pennington: 
Yes. Our faculty have been moving to change their lessons, change their way that they grade students, the projects and papers and tests that they give students, to move away from those things that could be easily done or be rote done by an AI model. I see that only as a positive thing. It forces kind of a reexamination of how we educate students in in many different areas. And so that's a very positive thing. But it's a source of stress for our faculty. And it's a source of temptation for our students. We have a strong honor code at Rhodes, and these things will be very serious if you break it, but it's a concern. I look forward to the day when we stop thinking of it in those terms and start to have the tools to bring in the possibilities of it being the help that it really can be.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah, for sure. Again, I threw the generative AI at you because, obviously, it's a hot topic. But thinking about other ways, you hear this phrase all the time, future proofing. I actually don't like future proofing as a term because it's almost like an oxymoron. It's like, you can't have that. It's impossible. Technology moves so quick. Generative AI is a great example of that. But I'm sure when you sit down and you make investments in some of these tools you talk about, you're going to end up with more data. You want different types of learning experiences or digital learning and so on. So how have you thought about at least that piece and making sure that you're scaled to grow as well as solving those immediate use cases that people are demanding right now?

Stacy Pennington:   
I think, for us, it was getting away from on-prem legacy solutions and starting a trend moving those from IT-based solutions to services in the cloud. That's something that I worked with a colleague of mine here, Richie Trenthem, the director of academic technologies at Rhodes. We've been working on a strategy for this for well over 10 years, the cloud-first strategy. This came out of a need of practicality, basically. We just didn't have enough people to manage all the different siloed-style systems in all the different department service points that needed to be there. We just didn't have enough people to handle those OS upgrades and system upgrades and changes to the integrations between other systems. It was just too much.

We also just couldn't stay on top of all the security issues. Cloud-based or service-based approaches became available. We adopted them and transitioned one after the other to those newer solutions to leverage the intelligence and knowledge about that solution that the maker of that solution has when they serve it out. If they want to move from AWS to Azure back and forth, go for it. It's their system, we're just using it. And we kind of transitioned to tying these things together with single sign-on, then MFA on top of that, and then helping to get those systems to talk to each other.

The move away from Banner to Workday was just another part of that process. We all now will have a few systems left on campus that are actually used in that legacy way. We're looking forward to moving those. It's not so much future proofing, but it is putting things in a place where you can spend your energy working on, say, data privacy for students, working on leveraging that software or service better, and not so much on the rote day-to-day stuff to just kind of keep it alive and keep it from falling over. And that's proven to be successful.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah, that's good. A lot of customers that we have, or prospects, when we originally talk to them, particularly on the legacy side, whether it's on-prem or just legacy technology, again, it feels like there's so many things you can take advantage of these days, or you will be able to. It's going to be really hard to leverage generative AI if you've got a lot of on-prem, hand-coded, that kind of stuff. You definitely need to move to a different model for that. But how does a university or college think about the buy versus build themselves? When you're trying to solve a problem, do you actually go through that process? Or now are you always looking at there's better people out there, let's leverage technology? How do you think about it?

Stacy Pennington:   
We’ve had a buy-not-build philosophy for decades. I mentioned that we’re very, very small. We're just extremely small team. At one point, we were less than half of the average IT team for our peers, our peer institutions, small liberal arts colleges.  We're just very, very small. And so the only way we could kind of survive was, as a certain number of systems grew, moving to a model where those systems are hosted outside and upgraded by those systems outside.

But with generative AI, I actually can foresee models where we could actually utilize the generative AI and even switch between models with some work as we begin to deal with the price of this new magic technology. It's going to involve publishing data from these various systems with tools like SnapLogic, and pulling it into a data structure that model can ingest. That's a standard. And then allow it to provide the solutions that model has been designed to provide. For example, you might think about it in terms of in the distant past, you would produce reports on greenbar, tractor-feed paper of the number of students, say, in school.

Dayle Hall:  
I'm old enough. I remember those pieces of paper, Stacy, too.

Stacy Pennington:   
In the current day, you're looking at maybe a dashboard of how students are doing in a class and maybe a tabular report when you drill in that a human would look through and understand. But in the future, there's going to be situations where an AI is actually going to be looking for, proactively, students are doing more and more poorly in school. We're detaching from certain cohorts like fraternities, sororities, or clubs that they participate in. And so we wouldn't need to necessarily knee with the student or talk to them to know that they're starting to have trouble in needing assistance. And that's really where the focus should be, is back on the student and utilizing this technology to leverage our human resources better and rather than look at reports, have those same people actually acting to help the students that the AI has flagged.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah, that's great. So my last question, and I try and ask everyone this, we talked about the future, the technology, the buy side. We talked about generative AI. You've talked about you're excited to move those last pieces of technology off from the on-prem side and move to legacy. Is there something in the next period of time, you could say 12 months, it could be three or four years, with the advent of some of this new technology and capabilities, what are you really excited about? What do you think could be, I don't know, a game changer for the students, or great for the college, or just something that you know is going to make your life easier? What is that thing, like I'm really excited to execute this, Dayle?

Stacy Pennington:   
I know this may take more than a year, but I really think that we're really poised now for a situation where we can provide some of our senior leaders day-to-day data in an easily accessible dashboard-style format that can help them see the gauges of the college and whether the college is improving in the things that they care about or is falling back and needs assistance. A lot of schools have these kinds of things. We've never really had this at our college. A lot of it's done by field, by conversations that you have. But we have a lot of data that could be applied to those conversations. It could augment it. It could help provide color to it. And I'm really excited about the possibilities of using it. We finally have our systems starting to settle down and to be where they will be for the next decades. And so I'm really excited about putting this hard work that we've done in front of our leaders so that they can leverage it and make decisions from it.

Dayle Hall:  
Yeah, that's exciting. Look, Stacy, I'm going to wrap up. I think the best compliment that I can give you and the work that you're doing is that to hear you talk about not just the technology, you obviously have a passion for that, but you mentioned three or four times, the thing that came through today for me and you, that I learned from you, is it all comes down to the student. I have a sophomore in high school, and hearing you say that is as important for me to think about where she may go to college and the experience she will have.

It's not just about whether she goes to somewhere that has more sun versus less, or whether she's in a sorority or not. To me, if I would be- and I will tell her about this, I will tell her that when a college thinks about the things that they do, whether it starts with IT infrastructure or the services that they're going to offer or how you get your grades, if a college is thinking about always putting the student first, I think you're on the right track. I'm sure you’re provideing a great service. I'm sure the students are incredibly happy. And I am incredibly happy that you're able to join us today on the podcast.

Stacy Pennington:   
Thank you, Dayle. I really appreciate that. That's very kind.

Dayle Hall: 
Yeah, it's a pleasure. I appreciate it. We'll make sure that we spread this far and wide and we get some good publicity for the work that you're doing. Thanks again for joining us.

Stacy Pennington:  
Thank you. Appreciate it.

Dayle Hall:  
Thank you, everyone. Thanks for listening to this latest episode of Evolving the Enterprise. You can check out all our previous episodes on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcast, and we'll see you on the next one.