Mobile Strategy Panel:
- August Alfonso, CIO, Del Mar College
- Susan Kellogg, AVP & Deputy CIO, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
- Santhana Naidu, Indiana State University
Susan Kellogg
- First public institution
- 29,000 students
- $2.7 billion annual operating budget
- $792.7 million total research funding for FY2014
- What was needed in a mobile app
- Student-led mobile app was led by: Nikita Shamdasani, Diana Dayal, Matt Leming
- Tech landscape: highly decentralized funding environment, large MarCom and IT environments, also decentralized; WordPress CMS, 10,000 sites; Kurogo for centralized mobile app; Use of Adobe DPS is growing; 10 legacy mobile apps
- We are looking at partnerships, especially with students, MarCom
- Operational monitoring: watch what’s happening and pull content that is not being used. Update with seasonal information.
- I’m a waterfall person, but I can see that agile is going to be the way forward (and I’m not totally comfortable with this!)
Santhana Naidu
- Doctoral/Research in Terre Haute, IN
- 13,200 students
- First public university in IN to require a laptop
- Mobile initiative started in 2010; native apps by OIT & mobile web by MarCom
- Went back to the drawing board in Fall 2011; MarCom and OIT partnership with student feedback; Modo relationship
- ISU Mobile: over 25K downloads in 3 years
- Popular modules: courses, dining, map, email, directory
- Primarily a marketing tool
- OIT and MarCom partnership: we meet quarterly to review analytics.
- Governance is centralized and involves purchasing department
- Lessons learned: adoption of a user-centered design cycle; CMO vs. CIO partnership; finding the right mobile partner
- Future: mobile ubiquity and managing student expectations: student services; RAVE guardian; audience segmentation; mobile ID/Digital wallet; geo-location based services; push messages; private app store
August Alfonso
- Access to Excellence is the theme for Del Mar’s mobile strategy
- Inspirations: “we shutdown when we step into colleges or universities…we are fully well connected anywhere else” and “you all need to get your act together so we can get to what we need, when we want to, with our own devices”
- BYOD Mobile Strategy: VikingNet BYOD (4 devices per); Canvas – 100% of credit/non-credit courses; Ask-The-Viking 24/7 online help; lecture capture within the LMS; Online Faculty Evaluation by Students; NEW mobile engine VikingGo
- Del Mar MUST excel in online and mobile: “you can carry Del Mar wherever you go”
- VikingGo Mobile App: Full Modolabs functionality; RAVE Alert; RAVE Guardian; Ask-the-Viking; Canvas LMS, et. al; alumni; Board meeting module; links to important resources
Panel Discussion
Susan: how were mobile decisions made? Who prioritized things?
August: we had a mobile app we were about 11 months into when we decided to go to Modo. Users were demanding more features than my staff could deliver using the existing solution. We used analytics and asked students what they wanted. We also asked our staff the same questions.
Santhana: we have quarterly meetings with campus principals where we discuss prioritization of what needs to be done. Items that affect student status are a high priority.
Susan: speed is a challenge, and we need a way to maintain the student’s voice in all this. We have a lot of customers who say that they’re boring, but important, and that leads to some interesting discussions about home page real estate.
Susan: do you have plans to have multiple groups to maintain your content? How do you plan to manage that?
August: we look at the total student experience. The heaviest investment is the mobile engine itself, so that decision has be gotten right the first time.
Santhana: we rely on Modo to provide an extra hand in development when we don’t have the bandwidth to handle all the work.
Susan: multi-tenant functionality will be important for us, and identifying the stewards of that associated content is probably even more important (content “ownership” can be challenging).
Santhana: use of publisher in a multi-tenant
QUESTION: How do you use analytics in your decision-making?
Susan: we’re not doing much with performance right now.
August: we’ve used analytics to keep an eye on our peak times.
Santhana: we use Google Analytics
QUESTION: How do you control who can create and manage an application? What’s the life cycle for these apps, how do you manage it?
August: IT/MarCom have to work closely to manage this. Objectives need to be clearly identified before resources can be committed to a project.
Susan: change in upper management at our university means that we don’t have a lot of entrenched views. This has enabled us to “cheat a little bit” and move forward faster than we might have been able to in the past.
