While it is best to look at the components of what we offer from an integrated perspective — since they are inherently interdependent — it is useful to examine them separately for a clear picture of specifically what we offer.
We provide a fully-customized curriculum for your training needs. Our Training & Documentation uses concrete examples from your users' context, relevant to their specific environment using their own data in illustrations and examples. Our Providence MethodologySM requires that we fully customize any training — and documentation — to your institution's individual situation. This means curriculum development tailored to users' department-specific infrastructure and data, ensuring that the concepts are immediately applied.
With Documentation, as with training, context is everything. Given the investment required to undertake any training, it is vital that the trainees be able to directly apply the concepts that they learn immediately to their own situations. Serensoft views Documentation differently than most organizations. Often times Documentation is seen as an afterthought — something you have to do, without much thought for actually how someone will actually use it.
Serensoft sees Documentation as a strategic asset that should assure optimal use of the system. When you look at Documentation this way, you realize the importance of context. Each user goes through different stages in her/his learning; trying to cram everything into one document ignores the importance of context for the learner. Since any institution and/or office will have different levels of user, Serensoft requires that Documentation not only be fully customized, but that it be broken out into three separate and distinct levels:
With this documentation structure, filled with examples and data from your own institution, your personnel can pick up the basics easily, and then gradually ease their way in to using the more advanced tools — when they're ready.
This approach to Documentation also minimizes the impact of employee turnover: new employees can glean a great deal from this multi-tiered approach, making it a simpler task to bring them "up to speed" on the tools at hand.
Your current Administrative Computing system can be used more effectively by utilizing the Web for capturing and distributing information — directly to and from your enterprise data.
Web based capture and distribution can enable:
Using the Web to enhance both data capture and distribution leverages the institution's previous investment in their Administrative software. Access to data is significantly expanded and available from anywhere via the Web. Most importantly, the Institution's constituencies benefit.
For our distribution tool set (a.k.a. Business Intelligence reporting), Serensoft has partnered with the world leader in Business Intelligence and Reporting; Cognos®. As a Cognos® Solution Provider, we can offer the full suite of business intelligence solutions enabling you to extract the information most meaningful to your individual offices.
Serensoft can work with institutions on a varying degree of levels regarding support. We usually offer this as an option linked with a more comprehensive customized solution. For example, if we build a multi-dimensional analysis solution for the Development office in an institution, we will provide full end-user and IT support for the solution that we develop for a period of time following implementation.
Serensoft can act as the single point of support (or clearinghouse) for all Administrative Computing issues for the entire institution — as we have for one clients as part of a much larger Administrative Computing upgrade project spanning multiple years.
While higher education institutions have unique information issues — distinct from those of corporations — they also have significant characteristic differences from each other. A tuition-dependent private college will have information requirements distinct from those of a public or research university, whose needs will differ from a two-year community college. Even two seemingly similar schools will have differing indicators to track in order to ensure the continued success of the institution. It's unrealistic to expect one piece of out-of-the-box software to be viable for the highly-specialized needs of all types of higher education institutions.
When the Administrative System interface does not meet department-specific workflow requirements, the offices often revert to using familiar means to capture and otherwise utilize data. Examples include desktop database applications such as FileMaker, or in spreadsheets such as EXCEL. This results in what is known as "islands of information" — data that is siphoned away from the central enterprise data, preventing departments from "cross-pollinating" each other's data. Serensoft provides a fresh perspective on institutional or department-level workflow: we customize the interface to better meet the unique workflow issues of your institution. The goal here is to increase usage of the enterprise Administrative System and eliminate "islands of information".
All of these areas are connected with one another in some way. You can't effectively address any one of them in a vacuum. By simply realizing their interconnected nature and addressing them concurrently, institutions will be taking the first step toward realizing the maximum value of their Administrative Computing investment. Serensoft can help — that's what we do.
