Ellucian is the world’s leading provider of higher education software and services. With more than 2,500 institutions in nearly 50 countries, Ellucian enhances the education experience of over 18 million students. Ellucian Technology Management Services (ETM) specializes in helping customers manage the information technology that delivers core services to students.
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Skills throughout the ETM team are wide and varied, and employees are distributed over different geographies. When a team member needed to draw on expertise from their colleagues they would generally have to approach their manager or send an email out to the entire department asking for assistance.
Within the organization, we probably have an expert that can solve any problem. We needed a way to connect that expertise with staff at the customer level who needed it” John Wilder, Director, Application Services
Ellucian had some skill tracking capabilities, but there was no formal tool or process for skills management.
Above all else, Ellucian required a solution with a “zero learning curve” and intuitive user interface. It had to be simple and not require an extensive training program to implement. The solution also had to be specific to skills management and not include ancillary functionality that would increase its overall complexity and implementation cost.
A number of solutions were evaluated. Some did not adequately address the requirements, and others were found to be too cumbersome for the task.
Ellucian settled on Skills Base for its ease of use, effectiveness, and simple deployment. “The fact that Skills Base is a SaaS application made it very easy for us to deploy”.
Skills Base has empowered individual team members with the capability to reach across the organization when confronted with a unique challenge for a customer. This has helped lower internal barriers including perceived social barriers.
“Skills Base has helped us better leverage the entire organization in delivering value to our customers. It’s helping our teams work more cohesively by allowing team members to more easily connect with each other, even when they may be located in different parts of the world”.
Ellucian has been able to roll the service out to over 500 employees without having to run formal end user training.
“The Skills Base assessment process is very simple. We’ve had really no issues. Everyone has said ‘This is simple; We understand this’”. The service has also been reliable and robust. “Skills Base support has been outstanding, and from a system stability standpoint there have been no issues.”
