Information Technology (IT) departments in Higher Education community face a common problem: Rapidly growing demand for IT services and applications from the school community far outstrip the delivery capacity of school's internal IT resources. As a result, the IT leadership is forced to make hard choices and abandon high impact projects and services. This negatively affects the institution's ability to meet its strategic goals in the areas of teaching, research, innovation, collaboration and administration.
Learn how IT departments in higher education community have overcome this predicament by using Orbees Higher Education services:
Orbees assists in the development of new applications for Research, Teaching, Collaboration and Administration. Orbees acts as an extended organization of the IT departments in higher education institutions and offers the following:
Development and customization of administration applications such as Student information systems(SIS), human capital management systems(HCM), financial applications, client relationship management(CRM) applications.
Custom applications for cutting edge research and teaching projects
Custom applications for online marketing, subscriber management, event registration etc.
Business intelligence and data warehousing applications for CRM and school administration
E-Learning and collaboration tools that leverage social networking and web 2.0 concepts. We develop collaboration applications using commercial platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint as well as open source platforms such as Sakai.
Maintenance of Legacy Applications: By taking ownership of the maintenance and enhancement of legacy applications, Orbees frees-up the in-house IT resources who can focus on high impact projects. Legacy applications can be custom applications as well as commercial/open source applications. We also enable porting of legacy applications to standard frameworks such as Microsoft SharePoint as well as enhancing of older applications to leverage newer technologies.
Application Integration for Enhanced Business Flows: Orbees helps enhance the institutions business processes by integrating legacy applications with new applications. We also help to integrate the applications with web services such as payment gateways, social networking sites, external data services etc.
Strategy, Process Improvement, and Best Practices:
IT departments benefit from Orbees's extensive expertise and knowledge of best practices gained from solving unique problems faced by higher education community. Orbees provides strategic and process consulting services to IT departments to help streamline the workflows and to improve the efficiency of the IT services such as project management, quality assurance, help desk services etc. Orbees also works with IT departments to provide functional consulting in the areas of CRM, data management and analysis.
Deployment and Customization: Orbees assists the IT department in the customization and rollout of commercial and open source applications in the areas of school administration, learning management (LMS), web content management (CMS) and others.
Web Enablement and Re-architecting:
Orbees web-enables the legacy applications for better access by the school community. We also help the IT departments to redesign and migrate the school websites to web content management systems such as SiteCore and Plone. Additional services include upgrading the older internet applications to the latest web 2.0 standards.
Orbees has a mature delivery process that utilizes a combination of highly skilled on-shore and off-shore resources that brings speed and cost advantages. At every step, we work alongside our clients.
Prolific Relationship:
As the first step, we understand the business and strategic goals of the customer to structure a prolific relationship between Orbees and the customer. If required, our teams of experts perform an extensive study of the existing systems and practices. Based on our findings, we work with the customer to introduce best practices and technologies. This helps in designing the most efficient solutions. Our emphasis is on improving ROI, reducing the total cost of ownership and simultaneously ensuring highest quality of service.
Extended Organization Model:
Typically as the next step, our on-shore project manager will act as the bridge between the customer and the offsite resources ensuring a virtually seamless extension of the customer's capabilities. In the Extended Organization concept created herein, our pool of customer dedicated resources will be focused on the customer's needs. This also ensures consistency and continuity.
Knowledge of Customer:
Fundamental to Orbees' organizational philosophy is our commitment to provide value to customers by designing solutions that perfectly fit to customers' business goals, their IT and business process environment. To achieve this, Orbees experts will work to understand the macro and micro issues of the customer and design the solutions accordingly.
We have internal tools and processes to manage customer specific knowledge we gain through our projects, which in turn helps us provide better and cost effective solutions.
Responsiveness:
We have the capability to mobilize additional resources if the customer schedule demands, or to meet the ad-hoc needs. We maintain constant communication and provide projects' status on a continuous basis. Finally, customers have direct access to key executives to discuss concerns and resolve issues immediately.
Our technical and project management expertise includes handling complex n-th tier and Web-based applications. Our technical strengths include but are not limited to:
