JLL, a prominent real estate service provider, notes that higher education is facing the largest demand for capital investments they’ve ever seen. By upgrading their facilities, schools can recruit students to innovative programs that support teaching and learning in exciting and engaging ways. However, universities are also feeling the pressure from reductions in federal aid, due to defaults on school loans. JLL states that 40 percent of student loan borrowers are expected to default on their loans by 2030, which is a data point used for federal aid qualification.
So the challenge for schools is this: how to approach its building projects in a cost-effective way as they deal with the pressures of losing the support of student loans.
Gain Business Intelligence
Once a higher ed school upgrades or builds a facility, reductions in cost can be achieved with the right technology platform in place. A platform, like AVI-SPL Symphony, can bring tactical and strategic business intelligence to these institutions. Let’s look at a pre and post platform deployment example.
Pre – No Actionable Business Intelligence: A building has 100 rooms with 450 technology devices, ranging from video conferencing to projectors to displays and everything in between, all from a multitude of manufacturers. A teacher, who needs to use the equipment in one of the rooms, discovers the systems don’t work. She makes do without them, runs her class, and may or may not reach out to IT. Because the solutions didn’t work, she stops using that room or technology. IT eventually finds out about the problem, sends out a technician, fixes the issue and moves on to the next issue.
Post – Tactical Business Intelligence: This same building’s rooms and devices are loaded onto a managed services platform like AVI-SPL Symphony. Let’s say there is an issue with technology, from anywhere in that building. Through auto-detection, thresholds and ticket creation, IT can proactively resolve this issue before it affects the teachers and students. When issues cannot be resolved quickly, IT can inform the teachers, who can then move their classes and minimize disruption.
Post – Strategic Business Intelligence: As device data is collected through the monitoring and management platform, schools can analyze what is happening within their spaces, including which ones are being used and why, which technologies are generating the most tickets, and what are the root causes of those tickets. This enables data-backed decisions to be made on how to repurpose and upgrade those areas.
“Rather than turning to new construction to accommodate academic needs, colleges and universities continue to make better use of the facilities they already have,” says David Houck, co-leader of JLL’s Higher Education practice. “Campus utilization studies, occupancy planning tools and centralized management of shared spaces can unlock significant efficiency and savings opportunities.”
Work with AVI-SPL to learn more about Symphony and how it can do for your university what it’s doing for Australia’s RMIT: