The flood that set Unisabana on the path to digital transformation

Universidad de La Sabana

In 2011, a flood hit the campus of Universidad de La Sabana (Colombia), causing considerable losses in both infrastructure and records and disrupting classes and academic operations. The university had three months to recover from all the damage, and success would only be possible if everyone at the university worked together as a team. Everyone threw themselves into rebuilding academic services, which meant making major changes to internal and strategic management. One of these significant changes was migrating its data to the cloud, so that an event like the flood could never again disrupt the university from within the way it had that time.

The strategy

The university started by defining three core pillars:

1. Safeguarding learning.
2. Implementing new management models.
3. Ensuring service quality, by strengthening continuous improvement across all processes.

To achieve this, it took an analytical approach, making data-driven decisions and grounding every future action in data.

The main goal of process optimization was to ensure service quality and add value for students from admission to graduation, preparing them to enter the workforce successfully.

AI in support of a good experience

As part of its digital transformation, Universidad de La Sabana set out to use its physical infrastructure more efficiently, given the constant rework in room assignment and the manual, repetitive work done by its schools. Academic units spent a great deal of time managing schedules and kept asking for more physical space. Yet when the university monitored its infrastructure, it found that classrooms were sitting empty.

As part of its new management approach, in 2014 the university decided to implement Darwin, a tool with AI engines designed to optimize infrastructure and support growing demand, ensuring a better experience for both students and instructors.

Problems solved! "With Darwin, we eliminated manual processes and have finally been able to assign 96% of our physical facilities." Sandra Giraldo, Head of Innovation and Technology Development.

The main success factors identified in the Darwin implementation were:

Governance and sponsorship

The digital transformation had to be led by the university's leadership, who had a complete view of the goals and could deliver success by getting the different units to work together. They listened to people's experiences, analyzed procedures and results, and developed an action plan together with Foris, building a project roadmap tailored to the institution's needs. The goal was to make it easier to access curricula, academic records, instructor availability, and other relevant resources. This information was pulled from the university's academic system (SIS) and then integrated into Darwin, which produced indicators for the schools with dashboards that offered a complete view of the data, enriching decision-making.

Living digital transformation means seizing the opportunities you identify to develop strategies and take on challenges that let the university achieve its highest goals.

Institutional analysis

Darwin has allowed the university to consolidate its data, which has made it easier to analyze classroom capacity and section size, contributing to more efficient academic planning.

Leadership, working with the schools, has taken the first steps toward optimizing its spaces. This means they have set up checkpoints and action plans based on the information gathered from every academic program. That way, they can make the necessary adjustments to curricula and get high-quality information to support decision-making.

They analyzed every position in the academic units and defined the role each would play, to determine who should be involved in each process and ensure the project's success.

Culture

Change is hard at first, because it means transforming the organizational culture to achieve high-impact results.

It is crucial for these changes to be backed by the university's leadership, who must act as influencers and champions of change. They need to acknowledge both the difficulties inherent in the process and the benefits that will come at the end of the road.

The university made everyone involved aware of the existing difficulties and showed the impact that integrating new technologies, driven by institutional strategies, can achieve.

To support faculty through the transformation, backing from the vice rector's office was essential. Its role was not to impose the old way of working, but to motivate faculty and raise their awareness. The goal was to strike a balance in the action plan chosen to start the transformation, especially when it came to scheduling class time and hours devoted to research.

As for students, the university wanted to offer quality service. To do that, it was crucial to identify what was causing dissatisfaction among the student body, so it could pinpoint exactly which issues needed to be addressed to resolve students' concerns.

Timely information

In the current enrollment process, every student can visit a customer service center, where they are given the communication channels they need to address any question or concern about their enrollment. This lets the schools quickly access the relevant information to take action and respond more efficiently.