Testing Times: Digital Trends and Challenges in the Education Sector
The education sector is undergoing major digital transformation. Universities, colleges and schools have leveraged technology to improve aspects of the learning experience turning to virtual lectures and introducing hybrid models of learning to adapt to the growing demand from students for innovative technologies. To adjust to this new digital transformation and maintain a competitive edge, many educational institutions adopted platforms like Workday to streamline business processes.
Meeting the demands of consumer culture
For generations raised in an online world, it is understandable that today’s students expect state-of-the-art physical and virtual facilities and access to learning resources 24/7. Students have become “education consumers” with raised expectations of customer service from colleges and universities. But student expectations extend beyond the virtual classroom. Institutions must handle admissions, records, and student finance seamlessly to provide students with a satisfactory service. As these essential tasks evolve alongside student and faculty populations, IT (Information Technology) teams must ensure that their system of record is appropriately configured to manage rapid change and so inhibit any disruption to service.
How Workday is transforming educational institutions
To manage the impact of these new organisational and technical challenges, many educational institutions have adopted Workday, as the backbone of their operations. Universities and colleges benefit from all the functionality Workday offers, from managing enrolment, student assessment data and grants, to traditional HR (Human Resources) and finance functions, such as recruitment, payroll, talent management and benefits. Workday brings previously siloed data sources together, giving valuable insights into resources to support better decision-making and planning. However, while many educational institutions have adopted platforms like Workday, there are new challenges that may hinder the growth of educational institutions.
Resistance to change holding back successful transformation
Persuading intelligent and challenging stakeholders to change the way they operate is always difficult. The main problems that arise in adopting new technology come from organisational issues, for example, social and cultural barriers, and user resistance. The buy-in can be harder to achieve for some higher education institutions because of the nature of their governance and the need for public transparency.
Cost constraints
Universities generate large revenues, and any significant level of expenditure could be open to critical public scrutiny, so educational institutes are highly cost sensitive. The sudden digital shift has put educational institutes under unprecedented budget pressures leaving them with little choice but to invest in new cloud solutions. As a result, finance teams have tightened control over costs and budgets in all departments, so it is imperative that investments in operational solutions are not only utilised to their full potential but protected from disruption.
Addressing the skills gap
A strong balance of business knowledge combined with technical skills is a crucial one to strike when building teams to support system change. With tech skills in high demand, universities and colleges struggle with recruitment. Equally, training existing employees alongside their day job can cause fatigue and resistance to change. Because of this, the education sector depends on strong partnership with vendors to support new implementations and on-going operations.
Complying with evolving legislation
Educational institutions are following the lead of enterprise and turning to solutions like Workday to drive change, better support employees and students and enable effective planning but online data storage requires strict compliance with ever-evolving, complex data privacy laws. A data breach could result in crushing fines or severe reputational damage. Regulations vary across country borders and US (United States) state lines, and institutions might find they have to fall in line with multiple, and even conflicting, laws according to students’ country of origin.
Legislation updates could also require an institution to adjust systems configuration quickly, putting extra pressure on IT or data management teams that can distract from higher value activity or essential, business as usual tasks. As student populations grow, and staffing is increased to cater to those populations, change by necessity can snowball and become unmanageable without mitigation.
Seamless operations in a changing environment
As Workday becomes increasingly essential to many educational institutions, teams must test their system regularly to ensure it runs smoothly. Any change to the configuration, such as new legislation, software updates or functional changes, may impact the overall system. The unintended knock-on effects of a change may potentially wreak havoc across day-to-day operations. However, a solid testing capability can be challenging to implement. Each school, college or university has a unique and complex structure, often resulting in highly customised Workday configurations and tenants. For example, universities are likely to have a much wider range of roles than the average enterprise, including many with highly specialised functions, all needing different access rights to information. The system will also house records for potentially tens of thousands of students studying various combinations of courses with unique enrolment and assessment requirements.
As an organisation expands its Workday footprint, it must also provide additional testing and support in equal measure. In most cases, manual testing is simply not feasible. The time and resources needed to perform thorough testing quickly become unrealistic. If an institution cannot test its core systems properly, it is left vulnerable to error and even a reputation-destroying data privacy breach.
Taking a Smart approach to Workday testing
To support institutions in maintaining and optimising Workflow configurations, Kainos has developed Smart Test for Workday. Smart Test provides automated testing of all Workday tenants from sandbox to production, regardless of how complex and customised they might be.
As universities such as Bentley and Cornell are already discovering, Workday testing doesn’t have to be complex. Automated testing can free up teams to focus on providing better student experiences, cut costs and ensure data is always ready for a compliance audit.