Becoming user-centric has become paramount for most businesses due to changing market demands. Business leaders and IT departments are investing and scaling their technologies to improve system speed, updates, infrastructure, and ultimately the user experience their organizations deliver. Enterprises seeking to become more user-centric have turned to certain technologies in order to meet increasingly evolving new customer demands. Among the technology that helps these businesses optimize their customer experience strategy is cloud computing. Pioneers of cloud computing, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, achieved massive success when startups began seeking ways to disrupt their markets with cloud technology. Companies like Netflix shipped and scaled service offerings with increased reliability and security through the cloud. Since Netflix decided to move to the cloud, PhorMag reports that the company has increased its user base from 10 million users to 16 million, scaling the startup to the mainstream streaming service provider it is today Today, cloud computing acts as a catalyst for innovation, as it evens the playing field with pay-as-you-go pricing models and enterprise architecture that is accessible to nearly everyone. Up until the last few years, cloud computing has been primarily innovating enterprises within a business. Sectors outside of corporations, like higher education, have since recognized the potential of extending this user-centric technology to improve existing processes, security, and reliability across the entire organization. Like their business counterparts, higher education institutions want to remain competitive against their constraints and within their markets. Due to many colleges still operating with on-premise and legacy solutions, the higher education sector is ripe for technical optimization. The cloud has become a viable solution for colleges and university boards looking to make the most of their budgets as they implement IT services — not just improving the IT department, but actually optimizing the way these colleges work on a process management level.
What is cloud-based BPM?
Amazon Web Services (AWS), among others, is an example of a cloud provider that stores and manages information. An on-premise solution means that your IT infrastructure is tied to physical equipment. To give a real-world example, instead of saving your spreadsheets and photos on your PC’s hard drive, you can now store that data online without any hardware needed. That is cloud computing in a nutshell. Now, apply cloud computing to business process management. BPMInstitute.org business process management (BPM) as the “definition, improvement and management of a firm's end-to-end enterprise business processes in order to achieve three outcomes crucial to a performance-based, customer-driven firm: 1) clarity on strategic direction, 2) alignment of the firm's resources, and 3) increased discipline in daily operations.” The difference between cloud computing and BPM is that BPM is a methodology, while the cloud is a deployment method of BPM. BPM is a discipline used by enterprises to improve the way they work, typically deployed in one of three ways: cloud, on-premise, or hybrid. BPM is traditionally an on-premise solution for businesses and higher education alike. The problem with an on-premise BPM solution is its inability to scale with as much flexibility as a hybrid or entirely cloud-based option. Equipment needs recurring attention and requires replacement due to general wear-and-tear, theft, or damage. On the cloud, a university can avoid costs and lost time associated with hardware system maintenance that is typical of on-premise software infrastructure. Since everything operates online, a university can then scale up or down easily to meet ever-changing needs without worrying about hardware maintenance. What might have taken months or years to implement across a university system now happens instantly, with the ability to automate process management. There are many benefits associated with moving your college’s BPM to the cloud. , a leading ERP management suite for the higher education industry, suggests that cloud-based BPM can provide value in multiple ways: leveraging an intelligent workflow platform to better understand student needs, keeping colleges agile to new market changes, provides greater configurations to increase the flexibility to add new programs easily. The processes come together on an orchestrated platform to provide automated, real-time updates to spot inefficiencies, increasing the functionality of the entire university. The benefits of are vast. If cloud is all the rage, then what’s holding some colleges back from making the switch?
