MGMT 8.3 Innovation

Being in higher education, our organization is always looking for ways to be more innovated, more creative to bring in more students to the university (Daytona, Prescott and Worldwide) as well as retaining these students. In my department, we are always looking for ways to keep students’ sensitive information safe when they are submitting documents to our office via email or fax. Our IT department does a great job of monitoring each of our systems and sending out information that keeps our cyberspace safe.

One way we found to help keep sensitive information safe (such as tax returns which have their social security numbers and bank information) when students need to submit documents to us was to create a secure upload with IT. No system is fool proof but using this new system will help decrease the chances of documents being compromised. Once we got this secure upload up and running, we had to get our staff, online advisors and campuses on board with this as well.

We met with our staff and encouraged them to let their students know that we had a new secure way to receive documents and we also sent out emails to all our campuses and advisors explaining the advantages to using this system. Before long, our campuses and students starting using this secure upload and the best part is that we get documents a lot faster now. Another improvement that we can make is on our Terms and Conditions form that each student must complete annually. Over the years we have tried to make the form easy to use but it seems to have confused our students even more. By improving this process, we are still moving toward innovation in our processes. Because our counselors are the ones who deal with students daily and they also review the forms they should be the ones to suggest improvements on the form. By giving the staff the opportunity to suggest a better form, we will be promoting creativity among our staff.

As I stated in my discussion this week, I would like to improve communications with our team by seeing what they want improved (processes, policies). I would take the Underscore and Explore and use it from the employee point of view as a major way to boost creativity and innovation. The folks who are in it working our systems as well as our students on a daily basis have the best understanding of what improvements are needed and how we can get this. This is not a quick fix and will take time and dedication but I know we can get there.