Higher education is no stranger to an economic environment in which every penny counts. As we come through the pandemic, we are finding ourselves concerned about the macro-economy like many other companies this year. With that said, it’s still important that we continue to innovate, retire technical debt, and find ways to do things more effectively with technology.
I personally spent a lot of time in 2022 trying to introduce more automation to UCLA Anderson and I implemented (via purchase) our first chatbot. The chatbot is specifically for IT Service Management, and the hope is to remove some of the more mundane tasks from my client support staff, who are admittedly still shaking off some of the burnout from being totally “on” during the pandemic. Additionally, by having automation handle some of the most basic, repetitive requests, it frees them up to work on tasks that are more value-added for both them and the organization, which is good for retention and for the overall customer experience. Lastly, it’s the first software I’ve purchased that meets my clients where they are, as the bot lives in Microsoft Teams for our staff and faculty and Slack for our students.
The one initiative that will take up most of my time in 2023, while I continue to figure out how to innovate in times which likely will be less favorable than in years’ past, is data. Other than the chatbot, it’s by my biggest quest to conquer since starting at UCLA Anderson almost 4 years ago. That quest is data-driven decision making. It’s perhaps more strategic than it’s ever been, and we need to really focus on key areas such as admissions and financial aid, which will make us an even stronger institution and even more attractive to our applicants.
I’ll continue to stress that the data quest is one that is as important from a business lens as it is from a technology platform. We did go through an excellent strategic consulting engagement last spring, where we identified the most important use case to the school, as well as several others as a backlog for us to conquer when we had time. Not surprisingly, assumptions have changed as the economy has as well, and that key stakeholder involvement and commitment is even more critical to the data and analytics work moving forward.
We continue to work with some of the biggest industry partners, think Microsoft and AWS, to continue our measured journey to the cloud and to take advantage of what modern technology has to offer. We’re also growing our footprint with Salesforce as part of an overall data strategy and partnering with UCLA ITS on Salesforce Marketing Cloud for our MSBA program.
2023 will ultimately be a year that is as transformative for us as any. We will continue to innovate wherever possible, through traditional and perhaps some non-traditional ways, while ensuring that UCLA Anderson is both a great place to work and one in which a wonderful customer experience is delivered.
CIO, UCLA Anderson School of Management