From Sticky Notes to Success: The University of Tampa’s Digital Transformation Journey

Speaker A: Hi everyone. I'm Kenyatta Berry with Student Product Marketing at Workday Today. My guest is Gary Christiansen from University of Tampa. Welcome, Gary.

Speaker B: Thank you, Kenyatta. My name is Gary Christianson and as she said, I'm from the University of Tampa. I am associate Vice President of Enterprise Solutions within our information Technology and security team.

Speaker A: Great. And so today we're going to talk a little bit about student success. But before we get into that, tell us about the University of Tampa.

Speaker B: So the University of Tampa is situated on the Hillsborough river to the west of downtown Tampa. We're a medium sized private university and we have about 11,500 students total between our undergraduate and graduate programs. I have to tell you though, our campus, it's so picturesque. It's incredible to see the campus with the background of downtown Tampa right there. We have a lot of brand new buildings and renovated buildings within just the last 25 years. And the technology investment that the campus is made is just really incredible, Workday being one of them. But it's just such an impressive campus and, uh, very near and dear to my heart as a graduate twice from the university, uh, I'm very proud of the campus and all the different academic programs we have to offer. And you know, it's also really neat that with our location being so close to downtown Tampa, our students enjoy thousands of internship opportunities just within walking distance. So it's really a, uh, neat location. Great people there as, uh, students and employees. So I can't say enough great things about the university.

Speaker A: Awesome. Glad to hear that. So I have to ask you, what's your favorite building on campus?

Speaker B: I mean, I feel like I would be remiss to not say our own technology building.

Speaker A: Right, right. Well, I thought I'd just throw that in there.

Speaker B: It's brand new. We just moved in about two years ago though, and it's outfitted with some really neat, sophisticated whiteboards that have, uh, digital displ and you can pull up YouTube videos and then be drawing over on the other side of the board. And then faculty, uh, can capture that and export it out in a file that students can go and review that content, uh, afterwards outside of the classroom. Just one of many really neat new tech savvy things that exist in that building. So I love it.

Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome. Well, you mentioned workday as part of your, uh, technology investment, so let's talk about your workday implementation. Um, were there specific improvements and outcomes that you were looking related to student success prior to implementation?

Speaker B: Yeah, we were looking to make a lot of improvements. Um, all ultimately affecting student success. As we all know, student success can't ever be pinpointed to a single feature. There's a lot of things that go into it. So we had identified many different things that we wanted to enhance to make sure that we could provide students with the best possible experience possible. And employees and students alike had grown frustrated with a lot of the legacy processes because we were very paper driven and, and a lot of the systems were the old mainframe, uh, style, uh, systems that were on prem, very heavy infrastructure required to support them. And during peak activities we'd have a lot of issues where we'd have to send out emails and tell people, don't use the system between these hours, it's going to crash during the middle of registration when we have 100 students trying to register. Meanwhile, we've got anywhere from four to 10,000 students at that point in time trying to register. So it was pretty impactful and not a great way for everybody on our campus at the time. Um, and also we're really looking to continue a push away from the paper processes and drive us to a more modern electronic business process framework like what workday supports us for. Um, and workday's not disappointed us. We've uh, got more data points than we ever dreamed of, but it's been really great. And now that we've been live on student for about the past four years, we've been able to start gathering a lot of data points and starting to build those into our models to do analysis on how can we help get in front of things and help students to ultimately drive their academic and career, ultimate career success. And um, in terms of paper, I just have to share this was kind of an entertaining story and it actually predates me. Um, but back in the day we had all of our paper files up on the fourth floor of our iconic building, Plant hall, first resort in the state of Florida. And there was so much paper in there that the floor literally collapsed one day.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: And, and the filing cabinets went down a floor. And so when they went to rebuild it, they had to do double layering, support beams, extra support beams just to support all the paper. And even when we have, you know, hurricanes or whatever weather events, we'd actually have to hire contractors to move them even higher out of the building, uh, just to make sure that hopefully everything would be okay and we wouldn't lose any really important information for the university. So things have definitely changed. Now that workday is on our campus, you know, we have minimal paper and we can do a lot More analysis than we ever dreamed about before.

Speaker A: Well, that's great. I mean, I think it's kind of interesting that workday not only helped eliminate the paper process, but also helped, I guess, uh, with building improvements most definitely as well with, with not having to hire external folks to do that. Um, but let's get a little bit more into student success. Um, so where have you seen the most effectiveness here? Um, and with student success?

Speaker B: So there's a couple of different ways. One of the first ones that always comes to my mind when I think about that is the students are now able to plan their registration based on accurate and reliable academic progress or degree audit information. Previously there were pieces of paper lying around if you were lucky, maybe in an Excel spreadsheet. But there was no central point of truth and that was detrimental to students as well when it came time for graduation, that potentially somebody would go and evaluate their record and realize, whoops, there was a missing requirement that they didn't meet, that they thought they had met. Whereas now inside of workday it has the flexibility and adaptability to cater to all of our different academic requirements so that students and advisors as well as the registrar staff that are evaluating that all academic requirements were met for graduation, they actually get a true, true image of that and we don't have to worry about that. Um, and that's also, you know, a good point too is that there's the registration and the academic progress information, but there's also students ability to plan for the upcoming registration period, which was something we didn't really have. Again, that was emails back and forth or sticky notes and pieces of paper being passed around between advisors and students. And now we have a way to go into workday and see exactly which students are planning their registration. So now we've been able to do more proactive things to do outreach to students that we see are at risk because they aren't planning for their registration. And it's pretty sweet. Once they have that put together, their registration window opens up. They can register right from what they've been planning on with multiple different scenarios. So something changes at the last minute. They can just switch over to the other scenario and quickly register from that. Um, we now hear a lot of positive feedback from our students about the ease of their registration. And one of the things that we kind of knew going into it, but definitely got validation from our students is the mobile app functionality too. They have their phones everywhere they go, so it's really easy for them to be able to quickly register when they're on the go or if they need to look something up, it's very easy for them to do.

Speaker A: You mentioned something about at risk students, and that's something that's kind of, um, for me, kind of near and dear. Because having worked in higher ed for the past 20 years at various companies, I do find that a lot of times students may not necessarily have the support they need at home to be successful at school. Right. Or they may be working like I did when I was in college. And so I think being able to identify at risk students is essential because that means they have the support. And it seems like you guys can do that today, which I think is great.

Speaker B: Yeah, we have data points coming out of our ears. So another point that I want to make when we get to a different question is about bringing in Prism into the picture and being able to aggregate data from even more places. But yes, totally agree. We have a lot more data and a lot more interactions with our students that we'd never had before. That does allow us to get a better idea of how they're doing academically and also from a, uh, health and well being perspective as well. So now we've got a way to bring it all together and to actually make it actionable versus we just get lost in analysis paralysis because we have all these Excel spreadsheets flying at us. We don't even know what to do with it all because we don't have enough hours in the day or enough people to uh, look through it to even begin to really prioritize. Where do we even start? So having a system like Workday and having something that can help us with, uh, synthesizing that data is going to be really helpful to us and has been really helpful to us.

Speaker A: That's great. So staying on that, let's look at like, looking at new features and the continued enhancements that come out with Workday. Um, what are you most excited about?

Speaker B: So the first thing I'll say about that doesn't really have as much to do with feature release per se, because it's been out there. But I just want to say, because I'm very excited about it, is that we recently got Prism and so that's a new opportunity for us to build out even bigger and better dashboards, culminating data from many different sources. So as I was just mentioning, the student success angle of it is just so, um, important. We have a lot of systems that sometimes it's hard to pull all that data together. So I'm super excited to be moving in the direction where we're going to be able to do even bigger and better dashboards than what we've been able to even do with just the workday data alone. I don't want to underplay. The dashboards we've built already with Workday are very cool. I remember one of the first ones we built during implementation had to do with registration statistics. And the minute that people started to get wind of it, I would get an email, then a day, then I'd get 2, then like 10, then like 50 a day. Like I want access, I want to see all these numbers. This is such helpful information. And those dashboards live on to this day. People still use them and that's something we never had before. Dashboards for us were Word documents and you know, we didn't have a way to get information out real time like we do with workday now. So that's one thing that I'm really excited about. In terms of feature adoption, though, I do want to make one comment before I actually answer your question. So feature adoption is a process. And so when we moved into workday, that was something that we had to adjust our minds to. So going into it, we understood what it meant, but we didn't really understand what it meant until we got into it. And having new features come out every six months is really, really nice. And then at the same time it can be really, really hard to keep up with. But it's so important to us and we are continuing to refine our process. And in talking with a lot of other schools, it sounds like we're all in good company of figuring out what's the best way to keep reviewing all the new functionality coming out. Because it's all things that we're asking for. It's things that workday is seeing in the data that we need and things that are going to be beneficial to us as we serve our students. And so, um, it's really important that we're doing a regular, good, hard look at those. So coming up with a process is really important. We've been moving into the workdays adoption planning dashboard. I've seen some schools are using worksheets to manage it. And I don't think there's really me personally, I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer. As long as you have a system that works for your institution, where you're going through and looking at all the new features that are coming out, that's what's most important. So going to your specific question, which is actually a really hard question because you look at the roadmap and uh, there's hundreds of new things that are coming out in the next release, in the next year and even beyond. And so I uh, did my best. I could only get it down to four. I couldn't go any lower. But I did four. So the first one that I'll call out is the real time refresh of the student accounts. So being able to see those live balances as registrations and financial aid changes are made, really important and really helpful to students. So then as they're having conversations with those uh, people in those offices, then they can see those real time updates to their balances. Also the wait list, uh, user interface enhancements. Wait list has been a hard topic for us way before workday, but workday has enabled us to keep adding in new functionality to continue evolving it to make it an even better experience experience for our students. I think what really called my attention to this one is the improved communications to our students because that we've always struggled with. I have an interest in taking this class from a student perspective. I really want to take it. I'm putting myself on the wait list but then I'm going to go off and get distracted with everything else that I need to do. Studying sports, working, what have you.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And so now this is going to help with the communications to them to say do you really want to take this class? And here are the impacts of, you know, if you do sign up for this, this is how it'll impact you. So very excited to see that and the automation that'll come with it. Also looking forward to the mobile app functionality. So this next release is going to have some more functionality for friends and family. So I'm very excited to see that that's really important on our campus especially as students want to grant their family access to see different parts of their profile, um, whether it's their course schedule and grades or it's their financial aid or their bills, so on and so forth. That's been really important on our campus and supporting that mobile app. The next thing that caught my attention is the future enhancements for the saved schedules and registration. We can never have enough features with those. So continuing to evolve them and looking at uh, what works best for the students and improves their experience the best. That's where we need to devote uh, time and energy and giving us the configurability to do that is what well received among schools.

Speaker A: Mhm. And you said that about students. I mean it's really about the student at the end of the day. Right. They're the main focus for any institution. But I want to go back to as you were talking through that, um, prism you mentioned as well, that you adopted, um, you're using. But you seem to be the data guy. Is that, is that true? Are you? Because you, you seem very excited about the data.

Speaker B: In a former life, I was a data guy.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: I try to distance myself as much as I can, but sometimes it's too enticing and I can't help myself and I get sucked into it. But at the core of it all is the data. I mean, making data driven decisions is paramount to business. I mean a university, you have to have revenue and you have expenses that come with it. So without the data to support it, you can be in, um, uh, quite a predicament financially. So to me it's really important to have that strong data source and then being able to report on it and make meaningful and impactful decisions based on it. So despite me trying to distance myself, I also have a very strong team that understands it, um, I would argue even better than I do, which is really important, that they're there and they have the resources necessary to be able to do the right things and make the right recommendations that uh, then I can help carry that forward.

Speaker A: Yeah. So just to dig into that just a little bit deeper, um, um, I could imagine you said you got a lot of emails, right? Versus it was like one a day and then maybe a couple more and then it's like 50. Wanting access to a dashboard, to that first dashboard you mentioned around registration. Do you find that people, because they have access to the data now, they get very excited and they want a dashboard or for everything. And how do you kind of manage that?

Speaker B: Of course. And I'll let you know when I figure out how to manage that demand. You know, I think uh, some of the popularity was uh, it was genuine. Like we need to know where we're at for registration. We went live during COVID I mean our first registration was in April of 2020. So we were like every institution nervous. What's happening with our enrollment numbers? And give me a live view of it. I think also though was just a, ah, pure curiosity. I've never had a dashboard before. What does that even mean? And what can it show me? And you know, retention numbers used to be something that we wouldn't get until, you know, well into the semester. And we had dashboards built that we could see at moment's notice. Like, are we on track? Like, what does it mean? Like what do the numbers look like where do we need to start throwing resources to try to make those numbers even better than before? Um, so I think that that was a lot of the drive, was the fascination that I've never had one of these. And the numbers on here are pretty cool. And I can drill down like you can in so many different workday dashboards and reports. I can drill down and see the underlying data and then go and actually take action on it. It's not just a piece of paper that has a pretty chart and I can't really do much other than make general statements about what we should be doing now. I can click on it and give a list to somebody and say, this is, you know, go and do this with this list of students.

Speaker A: Right, right. Well that's great. I love that you use the word business, uh, in the same kind of sense sentence with institutions, because I found in my higher ed career, um, a lot of times institutions, just my personal opinion does not, they do not function like a business. Right. It's very different. Um, and I understand that. But to your point, those data driven decisions need to be made. Right. Especially with way we see declining enrollments. And as you said, you went live during COVID right. So what was going on? We all were trying to figure it out. Um, so with that, my last question for you, Gary, is um, what are you most proud of as it relates to student success?

Speaker B: So as you mentioned, the UH universities have been, um, suffering from declining enrollments. Research shows that, ah, that's going to continue and not stop anytime soon. And as we've seen in news headlines, a lot of universities and colleges have had to close their doors in recent years. And um, this puts universities in a position where they have to be very competitive in what they're offering and how they're offering it just to maintain solvency. And so, uh, something that I've noticed with Workday is that we've never hit a roadblock where workday can't support our evolving needs. And in fact it's really enhanced us being able to achieve our initiatives by providing us with solutions that are even better than what we originally thought we could accomplish. It's really given us a platform to help streamline processes to the that staff and faculty can spend their time focusing on what really matters, what the real core of our university is, and that's our students. So we're like every campus. We've had a steady eye on how to continuously improve. We've been looking across all of student, whether it's from the Admissions process to how we advise them, even the activities that we offer to them. And so our ability to have the real time reporting, like through those dashboards, but also something I hadn't mentioned already, is the modern integration capabilities as well. So the web services was something that we've never had access to before, but those have been really important and made a huge difference for us too in being able to provide more real time interactions for students and provide quicker service for them. Um, and it's really made an impact on our retention, registration, career placement, so on and so forth. So in preparation for us talking today, I was doing a little bit of field research on our campus too, and talking with some others from our advising area and they shared that the registration dashboards, uh, from their experience at many other universities, have been a real game changer. And I hear that from a lot of our campus partners too, is that, uh, being able to see all that information at glance and being able to tell what students have taken, but even more importantly, what do they still need to take has been really, really important to them. Because now instead of just saying, let's just offer the same class sections that we offered last year, now we can start looking at, well, does that even make sense? Like, let's look at how many students even need that class and where are they at in their academic journey to be able to make those sorts of decisions. Um, so the simplicity of our processes since moving to workday has been a real testament of the product's functionality, I feel. We offer training sessions every semester to teach everybody how to use workday, and it seems like we get regular feedback from the students that, uh, it's intuitive, it just makes sense, we just understand how to use it. There's always guardrails to help the students through their processes as well. So.

Speaker A: Well, great. I mean, it sounds like from our discussion, you said you guys have, using a lot of data, a lot of data driven decisions, a lot of data coming out of workday, improved, uh, student experience. Right. Improved experience for faculty and staff. No more paper, uh, no more, I guess, boxes causing a fire hazard. A fire hazard. Okay. You know, and hiring third party consultants to help. And so with workday, you streamline a lot of those things. And so I appreciate you, uh, joining me today on our Rockstars bus here at Educause in San Antonio. So I'm sure hopefully later I see you in some cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, maybe.

Speaker B: No pictures, please.

Speaker A: None will be taken. All right, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker B: Thank you. Likewise.