Is it too late?
One Stop student service integration has been around for over twenty years now, so if you haven’t done that yet, you are not ahead of that curve or operational innovation. And the integration can be costly in development time or money, or both, so many institutions have had to put it off for years. However, it’s one of those things, it’s really not too late. The questions remain, however, if you haven’t done it to date, why do it now? Will you still reap the value added you are looking for?
Map the User Experience
How can you tell if students on your campus really need a One Stop? Trace on your campus map the actual journey a student must make when faced with existing student service transactional scenarios. Literally, trace how a student gets a transaction done that requires sign off from multiple offices, for instance, by scribing the actual steps that student must take on a campus map. Then bring the right players together around a table to talk through the best and worst case scenarios you discovered and bring your map! Your leadership may be shocked at the challenges students face to get some simple things done!
Co-Operative Model First Step
That student-as-customer pathway mapping might make a clear case for service integration, and a first step can be the simple relocation of critical offices in the same office space, although the individual staff and processes are not actually restructured in any other way. Even moving the offices together into the same spot will improve the student’s experience considerably, and when staff are collocated, they begin to improve the underlying bottlenecks they share to streamline the user experience. Once silos are co-located in the same office with strong leadership at the helm, there will be many ah-ha moments that lead to additional process and procedure mapping improvements.