From Normal to the New Normal: Smith College’s Digital Transformation Journey

Dayle Hall:

Hello. You’re listening to our podcast, Automating the Enterprise. I’m your host, Dayle Hall. This podcast is designed to give organizations insights and best practices on how to integrate, automate, and transform the enterprise.

Our guest today, Julia Keller, who’s the Director of Enterprise Data and Integration Services at Smith College. She spent over a decade at Smith, now helping to lead Smith’s digital transformation initiatives. Julia, we’re so excited to have you with us today. Welcome to the show.

Julia Keller:

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Dayle Hall:

We’re going to talk about a lot of things today in the work that you’re doing. But before we jump in, why don’t you give us a few minutes on your background, where you started from, how you got into Smith College and why this is really important work for you?

Julia Keller:

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been at Smith College for about almost 15 years total. I started out in a functional area at Smith in the advancement department, working on fundraising and alumni relations work and reporting and data related to that. And then I moved into the central IT function about 12 years ago. My story at Smith has many varied. I’ve had about 10 different positions at Smith. So they’ve kept me busy and interested, which is great. Smith College has an amazing mission, to educate women of distinction for lives of purpose.

And I am really happy to be a part of that in the way that we’re able to support all the functions of the college. I mean, we get involved in everything. Integration ties all the things together. So we get an opportunity to touch all the different parts of things, which I think is really fun and interesting. I’m also in graduate school at Worcester Polytechnic for systems engineering. I’m about halfway through that graduate program.

Dayle Hall:

You’re not busy at all right now then?

Julia Keller:

No, no. Keeping myself entertained. That’s the way I see it.

Dayle Hall:

Well, that is a lot to take on. I love that. I love that mission that Smith College has. As mission statements go, that’s a pretty good one.

Julia Keller:

I think I got it word for word, but I might have been a word off. It’s the general gist of it though.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, no, it’s excellent. So let’s dig in a little bit. Let’s talk about the work that you’re doing, your digital transformation efforts, the activities over the past few years. So where did it start? Was there something that happened, your IT organization got together and thought, we have to make changes. Was there some impetus that said we really need to start on these initiatives?

Julia Keller:

Yeah. I mean, Smith has a strategic plan, and this digital transformation was part of our overall strategic plan that came from the work of the president’s office and the board of trustees and whatnot. What that plan was, was kind of determined through a lot of conversations with the community and all the stakeholders. We had an outside firm come in and do some assessment work, but kind of while that was going on, my team, we could kind of see what was coming a little bit. Transformation was coming, stuff was happening. Other schools were starting to move into new systems and start these initiatives.

So that’s when we started looking at getting a tool to help us pull the data together across the ecosystem of systems that we would then have at some point in the future. And that’s when we licensed SnapLogic in 2017, which was a year ahead of our decision to move to a new ERP system. And that was purposeful. We wanted a year to get ourselves up and ready and up to speed with the tool, and up to speed with our strategy and our whole thinking around what would things start to look like in the new world where our data wasn’t all in a central on-premise Oracle database system, which was the 25 years previous to that.

We purchased SnapLogic in 2017. We started off slow. We did lots of proofs of concept and kind of as we touched integrations, we had to change or update an integration at that time. We slowly moved them into the new tool. So it was kind of you touch it, you move it kind of a scenario rather than thinking about the whole ocean of things we had to deal with. We just kind of slowly and incrementally started to learn and move things forward.

Dayle Hall:

But you said you started this. So you knew you were planning to have an ERP, an updated the ERP project [inaudible 00:06:30].

Julia Keller:

We knew something was going happen, whether it was a reimplementation of our existing ERP or a new ERP, something big was going to have to happen to really meet the future needs of the institution.

Dayle Hall:

Right. We will get into this a little bit later as well in terms of advice for other people. But it’s interesting to know that for a big implementation like that, you’re thinking about, you mentioned, it ecosystem of systems. You think about that ahead of time and how do we start to make some integrations? How do we start to pull that data together? Because often, we hear this, people fly into a big ERP, CRM implementation and don’t think about the other systems first. And then they struggle with that transformation.

Julia Keller:

You could kind of see in the literature that that’s where things were headed, like things were going in terms of into that, what is that- Gartner called it differentiated systems. I don’t think that the world has quite landed there yet, but that’s sort of where things are still in motion in that reality.

Dayle Hall:

Yes. Well, if Gartner have their way, that thing will never end because they get paid on those kind of thoughts. So I love Gartner.

Julia Keller:

Absolutely. And I think the vision of us, differentiated systems, as now we’re multiple years into this process and that the reality of it is actually pretty different. There’s still some elements of that that I’m questioning, which direction are they really going to go in longer term? I’m not quite sure. We’re kind of dealing with the stepping stone that’s right in front of us and going with the certainty that we have, what level of certainty I have about that next stepping stone, I’m going to go there.

My CIO has a phrase she uses sometimes that I’ve kind of latched onto, which is called directionally appropriate. I’m going to be moving in a directionally appropriate way. Taking those little stepping stones as far as we can see ahead of us so that we’re moving forward in the direction we want to be headed.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, I really like that term, directionally appropriate. That reminds me of fail forward. You can still fail, but you have to be moving forward at the same time.

Julia Keller:

Well, it acknowledges the uncertainty that we’re all dealing with.. There’s only so much certainty we have.

Dayle Hall:

Absolutely. So 2017, slightly ahead of the implementation. You started looking at pulling that data together, looking at the integrations. What are the other systems? What are the other big projects that you started to work on as that digital transformation effort continued?

Julia Keller:

Yeah. Well, in 2017, we went with SnapLogic. We started to get up to speed with that. We were in the middle of several- I mean, the projects never actually end. So we had several kind of smaller SaaS implementations going at that time. And then in 2018, the college made the decision to change the ERP, and we immediately dove into that project because our go live for Workday HCM was March 2019. And for finance, it was November 2019.

And then for student, we did our very first component of go live in October of 2020. So it’s very hot on the heels of one another moving forward. We just jumped right in. As soon as we started that project, it was kind of all in on building Workday integrations. And that’s kind of what it’s been the last couple years.

Dayle Hall:

Yes. I love what you just said, which is software implementation never really ends.

Julia Keller:

No.

Dayle Hall:

That’s a good one. But talk to me a little bit about as you start on these journeys, you’re doing some implementations. One of the things that I know you are very focused on is not just implementation, but what comes after that? What are the things that you learn once you start to implement some of these new systems, new software?

Julia Keller:

We learned a little bit. We learned things. Every time we did something, we learned something new. And everytime we- our first round of integrations that we built in 2017, we reimplemented them in 2019 with the things that we had learned. We revisited them and reimplemented them at that time for efficiency and resilience to add in features like standardized error handling, which came into the product kind of after we did our initial implementations. We kind of made sure to backfill those original integrations with the enhanced practices that we were standardizing on.

So we’re standardizing on best practices. Every time we test something, we loop back to build resiliency into those existing integration systems. But I think that the core thing that we did to be successful was to decide that this was how we were going to do our integrations. We weren’t going to do them. Workday has its own integration tool. We have our integration strategy is that SnapLogic, it’s our platform for orchestration. So even if Workday’s doing some of the work, we’re still orchestrating that through our integration tool through SnapLogic because we want to have the visibility and the end-to-end functionality that we have through that system. So for example, we might build some of that into Workday Studio, but I’m going to launch it using SnapLogic, if that makes sense.

Dayle Hall:

Look, we hear that a lot. There is obviously hundreds of systems. My CEO just sent me the MarTech landscape of which there are now 10,000 different systems for MarTech. But in Smith College and some of our other customers like Box, hundreds of software systems. So some of these proprietary software packages do have some of this point-to-point integration. If you truly want something we refer to, which is enterprise automation, if you want to look across your whole organization, you do need something slightly different.

Julia Keller:

And that’s why we decided and standardized on that centralized integration platform. While we might utilize some of the tools at those outlying systems, we’re going to centralize on the whole bit, the actual flow of it through that central system because we don’t have a single system of truth. We have multiple systems of truth, and that’s only getting more complicated. Salesforce, we have Workday, which is Workday and our old system, which was Ellucian’s Banner product. So those were our systems. But now we’re bringing Salesforce online as another system of truth.

So we’re adding in a third one now. Actually, there’s a fourth one, which is our admission system. So we have multiple systems and the flows. And preventing those flows from colliding when they shouldn’t and making sure that the flows that are going into systems are unique and not overlaying one another is an interesting challenge. But I think we’re still figuring out.

Dayle Hall:

I can imagine, the more systems, the more things you want to do. Innovation within your organization, that will certainly escalate. I’m going to come onto some of that implementation around Workday Student that you have in a second. But before we go there, obviously, we’ve all been impacted by COVID. Particularly, I think many colleges and schools and the change or the flexibility you had to have during that period of time is as significant as any major enterprise, if not more so.

So I’d like to just ask a few questions around that. I prefer not to dwell on the challenges of the pandemic, but I do believe that there are some strong learnings there. So talk to me a little bit about how did COVID impact not just your timeline, the way you work together to do some of this implementation across Smith College.

Julia Keller:

So before COVID, when we did our HCM and our finance implementations for Workday, we were all in a room, one big room all day for weeks at a time with our implementation partners, very flexible, lots of FaceTime. With COVID and actually a little bit before COVID, I think because of the size and scope of the student project, it’s just bigger. We were doing more Zoom and more remote sessions as our consultants and whatnot are spread all the way across the country from our implementation partner.

When we went suddenly remote in mid-March of 2020, there were some adjustments, but I think we had a fair number of the tools in place because our leadership was already looking at contingency planning for this back in January. We started in January of 2020. We were really early and fairly conservative in terms of what we might need to do. So we were already well into getting implementations of Slack started so that our faculty could communicate more easily with students, getting training up and running. I was not part of that part, but the parts of our IT team were really instrumental in like getting the faculty trained on Zoom, getting students trained on Zoom, getting that stuff all up and running . It was a huge, huge effort, but we did implement Slack, Enterprise Slack.

We do use SnapLogic for our integration with Slack. We create workspaces for each course that wants one, and we push the enrollments. So when ads are dropped, of course, we push those enrollments to Slack as well. So that it’s all set up and ready. People don’t need- it’s all ready for folks when they want to use it. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for them. So we had to pivot fast and add a new integration quickly.

Dayle Hall:

I think whilst a lot of people were probably looking at the concern around the pandemic, the fact that you were months ahead of thinking about, Okay, this could have an impact. What do we do? And then started to look to implement those tools. As you started to come back, do the tools still become as useful? Are you still using them? It’s just a different way to work. Nothing has been a wasted effort as it were.

Julia Keller:

I don’t think anything’s been particularly a wasted effort. I think there was a lot of effort. For example, one of the huge efforts that I wasn’t but closely involved in, but that our IT team undertook was actually getting equipment out to people so they could participate. So sending laptops out, sending hotspots out, sending actual equipment out to folks. So now I don’t think Slack is going to continue. I think it’s only actually growing in usage. People like it. Students like it. I think that that will continue.

Now, hopefully, when we get to the post-pandemic stage, we are all back in-person now at Smith. All the classes are in-person. We’re a very place-based education is what they call it. So being at Smith and on campus and in the classrooms is very important institutionally.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, I would agree with that. I have two- I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old, and I’m very glad that they’re on campus and doing that work because that was a nightmare, I have to tell you.

Julia Keller:

I was grateful to have an 18-year-old who didn’t require much from me.

Dayle Hall:

So there’s something that we talked about, which was you also managed COVID testing data. Is that right? Well, a lot of other schools outsourced it.

Julia Keller:

I’m not sure, we did talk to a lot of other schools about how they handled it. But in terms of testing data, we did our testing through the Broad Institute in Boston. And they have a product that is kind of attached to their testing program that we use to load data, to manage data. We extract data from that system for our COVID dashboard. That’s all done through a pipeline that we built to do the aggregation and push that out as an endpoint to the dashboard that we have on our website to show kind of incidents and whatnot.

The biggest thing we did with COVID data now is we’re actually loading the data from our testing provider into Workday. So we have two tests a week still right now to everybody, asymptomatic testing twice a week, everybody who’s on campus. So kind of managed the compliance of that the last two years. It’s been an intense couple of years.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, yeah. I bet. You said it’s been intense for everyone. As I said, I know we have a number of higher ed colleges, universities, and so on. It’s been a massive challenge for all your organizations I’m sure. So let’s move on a little bit to the Workday Student implementation. So you’ve been instrumental in this. And I think this is the definition of what digital transformation is all about. Could you tell us a little bit about what Workday Student is?

Julia Keller:

Workday Student is our new student information system. So it should handle all of the administrative functions around students, from advising, to granting degrees, to registering for classes, that sort of thing. To billing, of course, and all those different components. It’s a huge product. I mean, to switch, we were on Banner Student since 1994. It’s a big change. It’s a long time. It’s a big change. Exactly. But registration has gone incredibly smoothly. I think people are really getting used to the new product. 

Things that Workday does well, it does very, very well. There’s some things that it’s still figuring out, which are, I think, more a challenge on the technical side than on the user side. Their data models, I think, if I were talking about somebody who is going to Workday Student, I would say data models are not what you would expect. It’s an evolving product. You may have to do more manipulation of the data to make it function the way you need it to than you would expect.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that data piece and the other data sources that you’re using. Like I know you have SnapLogic. Why is it important to bring all these pieces together so you can be more successful in recruiting or really understand the student population?

Julia Keller:

So we are headed into the second cycle we’ve had in Workday Student. So we started our production cycle in Workday Student with matriculating our fall students into Workday for the first time. So our students who were entering for fall 2021 were matriculated last year in June. So in about two weeks, we’re going to matriculate the fall 2022 students into Workday.

So this is our second entry into our second cycle of data in Workday. That enables students to do all their onboarding, get started with registering, get started with advising, get started with all of that good stuff that they do. Does that answer your question? That’s a partial answer anyway. I’m sorry. I think I lost track.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Look, we have very different types of customers. But what- the thing that we hear a lot is, We can’t pull our data together. We can’t make- it’s not about visualizing it, but it’s really driving insights from it. And I think a lot of the things around whether it’s a college, even the biggest enterprise, data silos are becoming an issue. One of the things that I like to ask our guests is what have you done internally? Not just with the systems, but how do you manage to break down those data silos?

How would you, if you think of someone listening to this podcast and they’re like, Okay, so, okay, I need an integration tool using some of these other systems. But how do you manage to break those data silos down, not just with the systems with SnapLogic, but with the organizations? How do you pull those people together?

Julia Keller:

That’s a continual work in progress. And one of the ways that we do that has been the structure we have around our Workday program team. We have a Workday program team that includes functional representatives from all of the areas that are involved in the Workday project. It also includes some of the folks who are kind of adjacent. So for example, our development in alumni relations are not in Workday, but they certainly depend on data that comes from Workday. So they participate in that Workday program as well. And all of the change management for Workday happens through that. The testing, the releases happens there.

We have a report writing group that works together on defining data and defining calculations. And again, a work in progress. But I think that it’s really those structures around change management. We have an executive and steering committee that really is who you go to if you need something cross-functional really sorted out. So I think that those structures have been really important to the success of our project. And also the senior leadership being all onboard and all in, in getting this thing done.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. I think large projects like this, we hear a lot of our digital transformation initiative is failing. And I think part of the challenge is a lot of these organizations haven’t really defined what their digital transformation actually is. What does that look like? You had an ERP project. You had Workday Student. So you had something tangible that was under this umbrella.

And I do believe that’s a challenge facing IT today. Even CIOs, people like yourself, that unless you can clearly define what a project’s- what the outcome is in digital transformation, I don’t think your project will ever be successful because you haven’t really defined what success looks like.

Julia Keller:

Yep. There were several projects under our transformation initiative and the ERP transformation was one of those. We have some others, that voice over IP project and some others that I’ve been less involved with. Some network-related things as well that I’m less involved with as well. But they’re all components of a larger mission to make technology work better for Smith College.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Like I said before, that’s exactly what we’re here to help you with. But let’s move forward and let’s think a little bit broader about- let’s talk about higher ed. So I have a few questions on this, but let me start with this one. What is the biggest misconception that people may have about working in a higher ed type of organization versus a profit, a B2B, B2C type enterprise? What do you think some people misconceive?

Julia Keller:

Gosh. Hmm. Interesting. I’ve worked in higher ed for so long I’m not sure I have the outside perspective. I can tell you something interesting about working in higher ed, which is that I think each type of business in each environment has its own culture. And even each institution has its own culture. And I think we, at Smith, in our operational culture anyway, we value both distributed decision-making and the ability to- and a lot of collaboration just like we do with-.

There’s a lot of meetings where we get together and we talk about how can we do this a little bit better? How can we look at this from an institutional perspective rather than from a siloed functional business area perspective? I think that’s an area where we’re growing. And I’d be interested to know what the perspective is from outside higher ed because I think I’ve just been here for so long. I’m not sure I’ve got that.

Dayle Hall:

From the conversations I had with some of our customers, I think there’s this perception that you don’t have the same type of challenges where I think that’s completely incorrect. And I think the impact that universities and colleges have is there’s a direct impact on people’s lives, on their education, which it doesn’t mean a B2B enterprise doesn’t have similar concerns.

But when you are trying to take care of students and COVID comes along and so on, you’re dealing with people’s psyche and how they feel about their daily lives. And you’re trying to make their experience with the college simpler. There’s nothing like waiting for test results or your grades or [inaudible 00:25:56].

Julia Keller:

There’s definitely intensity around the periods in the year that maybe would not be the case in other places. So we have all that intensity around the end of the term. We have what we call quiet periods, where we try not to make any changes to systems during exam week because that could be disruptive and upsetting for people. So keeping things stable and structured during that time, we’re just very careful about what we do because of that sensitivity, so.

Dayle Hall:

I feel as well that a lot of Smith College, for example, is more about building community, connecting people, which I think is also just as important. Let’s take it like this. If you are advising someone and they’re about to start on what they would describe as we have a big digital transformation initiative and all the things you’ve learned.

If I asked you what advice would you give them, educational institution or not, where would you tell them to start? And what pitfalls would you say, Oh, here’s something that we learned very quickly and try and avoid this. What would that be?

Julia Keller:

I’m going to start with a pitfall, which is don’t underestimate the volatility of the data in any kind of change process. It’s really easy to kind of approach implementation or anything that involves a large amount of conversion of data into a new system in the way you would approach a traditional integration. But the data you’re working with is not stable. It actually doesn’t exist yet in many ways. That is something that I underestimated. It was really a challenge in terms of getting things done. And the way that we’ve approached that is let’s get it done in op for now, let’s get it done enough for this cycle and then we’ll revisit it.

But right now we’re in that cycle of stabilization and looping back to all the work we did the last two years to implement things and saying, Okay, that worked for the first term, but now we’re in the second term and the second year. What do we need to do to stabilize and rationalize the integration knowing what we know now? Because you only know what you know when you know it and there was a lot we didn’t know.

Dayle Hall:

There’s your favorite word, volatility. Volatility of data. Good one.

Julia Keller:

Yes. I knew I would get there eventually.

Dayle Hall:

That was excellent. That was excellent how you got that in. So, obviously, you’ve made a lot of strides. You’ve made a lot of progress, as well as you just mentioned, stabilization of the data going back and looking at it. What we had before, we now have more data to use. Make sure everything’s still working the same.

What are your next initiatives? What are the things outside of that that you feel like where Smith College is going, but also higher ed in general? Like what are the things you hope to achieve over the next few years?

Julia Keller:

I have a couple of things. We’re in the midst of our final component of our old ERP system and moving that to Salesforce. So that’s part of expanding our CRM footprint. And that project is going to be another year to 18 months or something like that. That’s kind of our next big focus. In the midst of that, kind of continuing our stabilization work, working through standardizing our best practices. We put in some really useful things into our integrations as standard pieces.

Besides the standard error handling, we always have an audit option. So you can run the integration, but it won’t do anything. It’ll just tell you what it’s going to do so that it makes it easier to run those last minute testing cycles ahead of deployment. We also instituted system reviews. So we often have multiple interrelated integrations. So for our financial aid system, we probably have eight or nine different related integrations that either go in or out of our financial aid system, which is called PowerFAIDS.

So we built all those over the last two years. But things changed during implementation. So now we’re going back, reviewing them all, looking at them in context of each other, making sure everything aligns and nothing kind of is stepping on the other one or selfishly. That’s for me to decrease the amount of churn in the tickets we get and the instability in that system, so.

Dayle Hall:

Understood. This has been a great conversation. A couple of things. What I like to do after we have these conversations and people listening to this podcast, I like to make sure that people understand some of the key things that we’ve talked about that they can learn and take in their daily lives.

A couple of things that I heard. Plan ahead, clearly. So even if you have- think you have an ERP or a CRM or some other big system that you’re trying to implement, plan ahead. And plan ahead doesn’t always mean just what that system will do. But ahead of time, think about the data, think about the integration points. And you very kindly called SnapLogic the platform for orchestration. I love that. I’m going to use that in my daily life and my CMO duties. And I love that.

A couple of other things, directionally appropriate. Make sure that you keep moving forward, but always go back, not just from implementation, but stability. So go back and look at the data and make sure that you’re still getting what you need. And my favorite quote was, Your software implementation never really ends. So you do have to keep going back and making sure that what you originally set up is still having the same kind of impact.

Julia Keller:

I think that’s what digital transformation really means is that it never really ends. That means you have to have an attitude of continuous improvement. That’s kind of how we ended up in this position of needing to do like a big, massive transformation is because we implemented Banner in 1994, and we made small improvements. But we didn’t really keep those improvements flowing through. So let’s do that.

Dayle Hall:

Excellent. Well, look, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you joining us today. What I always like to do at the end is give you the last word and tell us why you’re so excited about being at Smith College, and why someone potentially listening to this, who is interested, should be considering being part of the Smith College setup.

Julia Keller:

I love learning things. I love figuring things out. And there is no end to the amount of things to learn and figure out in the work that we’re doing. There’s always more places to explore and improvements to be made. And I’m just really excited to be in this position of getting to this part of our Workday implementation and moving into what’s next. It’s very exciting.

Dayle Hall:

That’s a great environment to work in. Julia, thank you for your time. We appreciate you joining us. To everyone else, thank you for listening in and we’ll see you on the next episode.