Dive Brief:
- Kevin Palmer is a longtime CIO who transitioned into enrollment and marketing at Columbia College in Missouri, finding his thought process as a technologist helped create a streamlined digital enterprise.
- Campus Technology reports Palmer improved the processing time for evaluating transcripts and inputting credits into the student information system significantly, and he automated processes for sending transcripts that cut the number of people needed from three to one while speeding up the process from five days to one.
- Palmer’s focus on technology, track record in project management, and mindset that takes entire systems into account when strategizing solutions made his CIO background a perfect fit for an increasingly high-tech operational area.
Dive Insight:
Much of Palmer’s initial work in Columbia’s enrollment department included cleaning up processes that had been poorly designed in the first place or evolved into a state of disfunction. Palmer sees higher ed as slow to adapt to technology, in part because of access to low-cost work study students, who make it easier to add more labor rather than figure out efficiencies with technology.
If more CIOs parlay their skills into other operational areas of their institutions, this could change. Colleges are being pressured to streamline their processes and become more efficient with administrative resources because of the rising costs of tuition and average student debt. CIOs may be just the people to help them do it.