| | February - 20208By Jack Suess,VP of IT & CIO, UMBCOne of the talks that I give on campus is one that I call "The Amazonification of Service." I point out how our students and young faculty and staff expect to interact with service providers and lay out five themes we need to take into consideration when providing service:· Me. Me. Me.Personalization and tailoring to the user is the expectation.· Support. Self-service. Concierge. Personalized self-service (concierge) is becoming the expectation.· Data. Information. Decisions.Data is ubiquitous. Information is data, placed in context. Decisions are the information used to support institutional strategy. We need to help users make better decisions.· Smart. Smarter. Smartest.Why software is using AI to add intelligence is the rule.· Easy.Easier.Easiest.Students have high expectations for technology and ease-of-use.I would love to say we can compete with the best of platforms, but the reality is we are mixed in our results. Saying that, we do have a strategy that we are implementing to make all these a reality.For personalization, we consider our portal, my UMBC, to be the critical IT resource. It provides personalized content and services to users, who can enroll (or be enrolled) in groups and get a feed that shows events and news associated with their groups. Academic departments use my UMBC to keep their students informed of department activities, and Student Affairs uses this to support student groups and organizations. Through application program interfaces (API), we present important information from our student information system (SIS) and 3rd party software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in a consistent user-interface. Through their profile page, students get personalized information on their degree progress, courses, billing, financial aid, career services, campus one-card, and learning management system (LMS) activity.For support, we adopted a common service platform across the university. Last year we had 125,000 service tickets with over 1100 people able to resolve tickets. Of that number, only 25,000 tickets and 100 users were in IT. The largest division generating tickets is Academic Affairs ­ registrar, admissions, advising, and financial aid with over 60,000 tickets. Having a common platform for all campus service allows service requests to be internally routed to the right group and doesn't force the user to understand our campus support structure. In addition, when one area develops a service improvement, it can be applied across all service departments. Through this common approach to service, we are now reviewing how we will deploy chatbots and other artificial intelligence (AI) services that will use our common service platform and leverage our portal.Data. We have integrated our business intelligence (BI) & analytics team with our SIS team. The goal is to move from simply providing data to students, faculty, and advisors, to enabling them to make better decisions. For students, we want them to pick the best set of courses to help them maximize their GPA and minimize their time-to-degree. For advisors, we want them to understand the of Service With Respect to Academics TheIN MY OPINION
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