| |April - 20188IN MY OPINIONBy Rick Torres, President and CEO, National Student ClearinghouseThere is no bigger transition in business than moving from large for-profits to a non-profit, mission-based technology environment. At non-profits, success is measured by extending your mission of service provision to as many of their stakeholders as possible with relevance and impact. In January 2008, I joined the National Student Clearinghouse to further its mission to benefit education. We serve more than 3,600 colleges and universities that enroll about 98 percent of students in U.S. colleges and universities. Understanding our stakeholders comprised of students, alumni, post secondary and K12 institutions, and numerous outreach organizations as well as their goals, pain points and limitations are critical for developing technical and service road maps to meet their diversified needs. Our work with education, particularly when we leverage new technologies, requires us to focus on four types of stakeholders: the bleeding-edgers, the leading-edgers, those in the mainstream, and the laggards. The Clearinghouse must serve them all. In business, they teach that--as you build out your products and services--you cannot be all things to all people. As a mission-driven non-profit, we serve all of education with ubiquitous Software as a Service, Data as a Service, and other service solutions. My varied experience outside of education helped inform the transition the Clearinghouse has made over the last 10 years to a thriving non-profit serving our education stakeholders with technical solutions. Nearly 25 years ago, higher education helped form the Clearinghouse with a simple principle in mind: establish a trusted and secure environment through which we can relieve the administrative burdens related to school compliance-based activities for the benefit of students, administrators, institutions, and the federal government.During this time period much needed technical disruption to the status quo was greatly needed. This resulted in our saving school administrators, students, lenders, and the U.S. Department of Education time and money while improving the accuracy of data maintained in the National Student Loan Data System, which is supplied by the Clearinghouse. And the technological disruption is growing. We are in the midst of, as Klaus Schwab discusses in his book the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a period in which digital and multiple other technologies are fusing to revolutionize and impact all disciplines, especially education.In my assessment, however, the education community has been overwhelmed with technology platforms and solutions. One of the main issues has been the relative lack of interconnectivity between platforms and the need to manage multiple vendor relationships, each adding complexity to an already overburdened staff. Given the amount of juggling that staff has to manage, the mood on campuses is one of outright frustration. This has led to a focus on reducing platforms and a search for technical innovations that can reduce administrative work burdens on the IT staff and others while improving the overall student experience.Building crosswalks as platforms evolve has become a huge challenge...bridges...EDI to XML to PDFxml to JSON also On-Premise to Cloud...hybrid solutions and the move to decentralized networks without a central authority.Open Badges and the wide open issuing of credentials have the potential to create market confusion on quality and validity of artifacts. Even with block chain, as digital artifacts become currency, the risk of fraud grows along with the burden on requestors to know what is real.Higher Ed Administrators and Tech Teams Must Collaborate To Navigate a Complex Ed-Tech EnvironmentRick Torres
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