Your Student Information System (SIS) is the heart and lungs of your college’s operations: from managing enrollments, to graduation, to vital transcripts. Ideally, it’s a finely tuned perpetual motion machine that hums along without missing a beat, but that’s never quite true with software. Even at its peak, there’s still quirks. Of course, we’re compelled to innovate, which reveals the rough edges of built-in capability.
Managed services for an SIS or ERP are a different beast than traditional IT managed services: the stakes are higher, and the intersection of business and technology means the complexity is deeper. The margin for disruption is narrower too.
It’s a particularly relevant topic now, with the acquisition of Anthology’s Student SIS and Finance platforms by Ellucian. This moment has given some institutions pause in thinking through how to proceed.
That’s why understanding what effective managed services looks like is a practical question to ask.
Pillars of Effective Managed Services for an SIS
Discovery and Governance Before Anything Goes Wrong
The clearest sign of an effective managed services relationship is that it’s proactive. Before a partner takes responsibility for some (or all) of your SIS and ERP operating environment, they should conduct a thorough audit: What are you running? How is it configured and why? Which integrations work well and which are temperamental? How skilled is your team; meaning, who needs help and who’s a superuser that flies high?
Savvy institutions ask hard questions and quiz their partners on how their understanding of the business and the system at its heart. Those that skip this step end up with a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) built on assumptions, not facts.
Good partners also consider the governance of your tenant in SaaS products. You should look for prospects to ask key questions like:
- Who owns which decisions?
- What does the escalation chain look like?
- How will communication work, and how often?
This sensibility is at the heart of effective partnerships. Managing relationships alone via SLAs and contract language is quite the opposite, which is why “partnerships” are anything but.
Perhaps it’s contrarian, but practitioners with real responsibility and accountability know that delivery is about having a real trust relationship both ways, and knowing that your partner will do what it takes to keep your back.
Effective Day-to-Day Mechanisms of Managed Services
Once you’re engaged and working with your managed services provider, here are the four key areas you can look at to determine your effectiveness:
Operational Support
Ensure your staff have somewhere (with expertise) to go when something isn’t working. These people should know the specifics of your particular system; they shouldn’t be a generic help desk.
Proactive Maintenance and Upgrades
Patches and updates need to be made carefully and mindfully as it relates to your academic calendar and your configuration. Ensure your managed services partner is proactive about scheduling, asks good questions about key milestones in your academic calendar, and documents what changed (and when). Partners who are reactive often choose quick and suboptimal solutions, leading to technical mess that will become increasingly expensive to unwind, with unhappy faculty and staff to boot.
Integration Monitoring
Your SIS connects to your LMS, ERP, and other systems; sometimes intimately. Each of these connections is a potential point of failure. An effective managed services partner will actively monitor these data pipelines and catch errors before users report them.
Security and FERPA Compliance
With an effective managed services team, baseline expectations should involve overhead of the following, at least:
- Role-based access controls
- Audit logging
- Backup & recovery
- Compliance continuity through system changes
Risk is also the highest during system transitions, and that’s where management of these items matters most.
Implementing Governance While Staying in Control
When pursuing managed services, higher ed leaders are often (and rightfully) worried about losing control. An effective partnership is one that will preserve your decision-making authority while extending your operational capabilities and capacity. Ideally, your partner is managing the system, and you’re owning the direction, data, and relationships.
In action, this means that:
- Non-technical leaders should have access to regular, readable performance reporting
- Internal staff are informed and capable, empowered via documentation and training
Ultimately, effective partners should not breed dependence but rather actively treat knowledge transfer as a regular part of the job.
What Managed Services Is Not
It’s important to distinguish that managed services is not a replacement for your already-existing internal IT team. The concept behind managed services is to extend your team’s capacity and free them to focus on more strategic priorities, rather than maintenance and troubleshooting. While sometimes complete outsourcing is needed, the real trick is to match outsides skills to the capabilities and strengths that live in your institution.
Managed services is also not a black box, where decisions and rationale aren’t communicated. What your partner is doing, why, associated costs, etc. should always be communicated and should be an expectation of the partnership.
Learn More About Effective Managed Services
Knowing what effective managed services looks like is one thing, but evaluating whether a specific partner can actually deliver, relative to your needs, is another.
The questions to ask aren’t always obvious, so we’re happy to have that conversation with you if you have any questions; what to look for, what questions to ask, and what “good” should feel like for your institution.
Feel free to reach out, and we’ll help you work through defining what “good” means for your institution.
