Education means business: the role of KM

Now in operation for more than a year, the Cognos reporting technology is being used for about 20 different applications, with more on the way. It is used for reporting and analytics for undergraduate and graduate admissions, student records, HR and timecard reporting.

"We are in Phase 1 of the project," says Ted Bross, associate director of administrative information services at Princeton. "Our applications are focused primarily on operational reporting. However, by this time next year we hope to have some customers using it for analytics and strategic purposes."

Some of the simplest uses of Cognos reporting software have produced the greatest benefits. For example, 1,600 class lists that used to be delivered in hard copy are now sent to faculty at various times during the semester. Employees can check on the phone calls they have made each month, and undergraduates can see what dorm rooms are still available for the coming academic year. Having only one reporting tool has simplified training, documentation and support. In addition, users can now run their own reports, taking a significant burden off the IT staff. Although high-end users are creating most of the reports used on campus, in the future, a broader range of users will be able to design their own reports.

Increasingly, universities are being run as businesses, especially as state funding becomes tighter. "Universities may be behind commercial enterprises, but they are not that far behind," says Terence Atkinson, industry director for the public sector at Cognos. "And their problems are quite similar—silos of information, a lot of data but little decision-ready information."

Higher educational institutions, like commercial enterprises, are looking for ways to increase revenue while decreasing costs. Both goals are aided by analytics that facilitate data-driven decisions.

Digital video

In an unusual move for the mid-90s, Harvard Business School began delivering digital video over the Internet. The school's leadership had concluded that digital media delivered on demand to the desktop would be strategically important. Several hundred video segments were converted to digital format and were available for download. Some of the content was used for instruction, and some was oriented toward alumni groups or other special interests. However, there was no systematic management of the files, nor were they indexed. By the late 90s, a more sophisticated homegrown system using java script and an Oracle database had been developed. In 2004, the IT department concluded that the next migration should be to a commercial digital asset management solution in order to provide a more robust and flexible system.

After considering various options, the department selected ActiveMedia from ClearStory Systems. "We chose this product because it was a good fit for our core competencies—it did the things that we could not easily do in-house," says Larry Bouthillier, director of educational and multimedia technology development at Harvard Business School. "It automates the video production workflow, and opens up and processes video files."

ActiveMedia offers a smooth flow from content creation to permanent storage. After a video master is created (in MPEG2) and placed in a folder, the transcoding processing is automated through a third-party media processing tool. A speech-to-text conversion is performed, and the file is converted into its delivery format. In the content management system, some metadata is populated automatically, and other data, such as the title and permissions, is filled in by technicians. The system now offers 7,000 videos online.

An advantage of the system is that it can manage other types of content in addition to video, such as presentations and spreadsheets. "Universities want to be able to manage all their files, so they can publish documents, PowerPoint presentations, images and graphics," says Susan Worthy, VP of marketing at ClearStory, "and also collaborate on projects."

When multiple team members work together on a publication, for example, having a centralized library of research materials is very helpful, particularly when faced with tight deadlines. Another example of university use of ActiveMedia is in showing cultural artifacts in a "virtual museum." Even if the artifacts are in different locations, the collection can be viewed on a single site.