Industry Vertical: Education

Far more is hidden within universities' data repositories than simple keyword search methods are able to retrieve. For example, UK's 106 institutional university repositories alone hold over half a million artifacts. Some of those repository contents are visible to search engines such as Google, but many are not. Universities thus find it increasingly challenging to exploit their vast data and knowledge assets to drive academic and commercial innovation.

Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) can help educational institutions meet this challenge through its ability to understand the meaning of unstructured content across a raft of formats, geographical locations and languages, enabling institutions to automatically index, tag and classify data where metadata is poor or non-existent. Using Autonomy's IDOL engine can thus help researchers at schools and universities make the most out of their institutional resources and significantly shorten and simplify the research process through its advanced functionalities in automatic subject classification; dynamic clustering and browsing; term-based document classification and visualization approaches to search results.

Faster discovery of contextually relevant information from the widest range of repositories can considerably speed up the early, labor-intensive stages of research, as well as the overall innovation-to-discovery lifecycle. Ultimately, IDOL's advanced search capabilities can thus enable a researcher to efficiently transform hard-to-find information assets into innovation.

By nature of their operations, schools and universities keep very large libraries and archives of lectures, study materials, student records and other internal documents. As the standards and expectations of today's highly tech-savvy students increase, educational institutions are facing an unprecedented demand for these resources to become centralized and easily accessible in electronic form. At the same time, archiving internal documents in a consistent, secure and cost-effective manner presents a particular challenge to these institutions, as their student records multiply year on year.

For universities operating numerous faculties, each offering dozens of courses, centralized records management of study materials can prove costly and time-consuming. Constantly-increasing content can easily become unmanageable, and is often maintained in disparate information repositories. Students and staff thus loose the ability to search and access data across repositories, resulting in frequent duplication of materials that have already been written but which could no longer be located.

Autonomy offers a comprehensive records management solution that can provide schools and universities with a single, central environment from which to manage their electronic libraries of professional educational materials. The solution provides a shared environment for storing content and a system for tracking updates. Documents—both paper and electronic—are consolidated in a central library, making them easier to find, share, and reuse. The software features various advanced capabilities that simplify and streamline research for students and staff, such as version control, automated notifications, and advanced search options. The software's collaborative capabilities encourages knowledge sharing, while ease-of-searching has ensured greater re-use of existing materials and reduced product development time—both practices that educational institutions promote heavily, in their research and teaching operations.

The legal department at Deakin University in Australia chose to standardize on Autonomy to streamline the contract management process across its geographically-dispersed campuses. The department had historically spent a substantial amount of time dealing with document version control issues and tracking down critical content stored on individual desktops. Now, Autonomy software has enabled the legal department to streamline team-based collaboration and document-intensive processes across its offices and with outside parties. As a result, Deakin has enjoyed greater control over information assets, resulting in improved operational efficiency and increased compliance, since business-critical information can be more easily tracked and accessed.

Autonomy also offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to help educational institutions in the archiving of internal documents used by administrative staff. Autonomy Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) is the first and only archiving solution with advanced meaning based capabilities, able to form a conceptual and contextual understanding of over 1,000 file formats. EAS leverages Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), whose scalability, connectivity, and conceptual analytics provide EAS with an infrastructure capable of processing terabytes of content and providing intelligent filtering, automated classification, and real-time policy management of electronically stored information. EAS features advanced search and navigation techniques such as concept searching, information clustering, visualization, dynamic hyperlinking and automatic query creation greatly, which can greatly increase administrative staff's ability to find specific information and comply with internal processes for handing student requests and storing their credentials.

Large, public universities often receive more than 20,000 applications per year, each with multiple forms and supporting documents from thousands of applicants, which staff must organize and evaluate, usually in less than two months. This task is further exacerbated by the fact that applications and supporting document originals are oftentimes sent separately, requiring staff to manually match them up. The candidate screening process can thus become very cumbersome, expensive, inefficient and error-prone, compromising the uniform method that ensures the selection of the highest caliber candidates and making tracking application progress in real time virtually impossible.

Essentially the same challenge arises in the processing of all other internal forms, such as those for financial aid, course evaluation and accommodation. While some institutions still use the old paper folder method, more and more are finding that they can dramatically reduce their processing time, greatly enhance applicant experience and reduce costs by incorporating BPM technology.

Autonomy's comprehensive suite of BPM solutions provides the driving technology for streamlining the handling of paper and electronic application forms in schools and universities. Autonomy's solutions can seamlessly integrate paper scanning, electronic forms and legacy databases, reducing costs and approval cycles, and eliminating potential errors that oftentimes result from the manual filing and routing of student files.

Autonomy's solution captures information from electronic and paper-based sources and seamlessly incorporates it into secure, automated business processes, using unique meaning based computing technology. Thus, the software enables schools and universities to capture, archive and quickly retrieve electronic forms, such as applications and transcripts. Paper documents are simply scanned and converted to useable digital electronic forms resulting in faster processing time, easier access to data and less data entry. As a result, institutions can reply to applicants faster, certify student credentials quickly and accurately, minimize lost files and documents and even gain physical storage space by removing filing cabinets. Most importantly, institutions stand to gain monetarily by reducing the need for data entry clerks and redistributing the saved time and labor to other incumbent projects.

While Autonomy can help educational institutions with the storage of paper and electronic forms, it also provides a complete XML-based solution for automatically managing the routing, tracking and approval processes for these forms. Electronic forms created with the software can be customized with embedded business rules to validate data entered or trigger routing. Using Autonomy, an institution can instantly review the current status of the internal approval of a submission and automate information alerts to pertinent departments and compliance committees. In addition, by empowering faculty and staff with the ability to submit and process proposal data forms around the clock, from home or on the road, Autonomy provides a new level of customer service and efficiency. Autonomy can also help eliminate data errors by incorporating database validations, calculations and other intelligent features. A web-based, user-friendly solution, Autonomy can thus help schools and universities ensure that a uniform method in followed in the processing of forms, by standardizing several internal business processes with one intuitive interface. This functionality is especially valuable in light of the mounting pressure schools and universities face for providing equal opportunities to all candidates.

More than 1,000 school systems, colleges and universities take advantage of Autonomy BPM solutions—including some of the largest and most prestigious educational institutions in the world such as Yale, Princeton, University of Glasgow, and University of Zurich. In one case, Iowa State University used Autonomy to automate its grant submissions process, accounting for over $225 million of annual grant income to the university. The university chose to deploy Autonomy's technology as it "offered the only open-standards solution that would faithfully mirror [their] paper process, [...] was flexible, did not involve hardware or software investments at the department level, and would require little training of faculty and staff."

Today, a university's website is perhaps the most important point of contact with prospective students. It is based on information that students find on the website (on courses, accommodation, student life, etc.) that they make their decision to accept or reject an offer from a given university. Thus, in order to attract the highest quality talent, universities must make sure their website provides a compelling, straightforward and relevant experience to visitors.

However, maintaining brand image consistency and information accuracy online can prove quite challenging to education providers, as one institution typically comprises of numerous and dispersed campuses and departments, each with its distinct, oftentimes locally maintained web presence. Educational institutions must thus find the right balance between allowing each department to have its own identity, and maintaining brand consistency and accuracy, and efficiency in the web publishing process.

Autonomy allows educational institutions to effectively create, test, optimize, and analyze content across their web-based applications from within a single infrastructure. Autonomy centralizes and automates the control of site content, architecture, navigation, presentation, and deployment, providing an intuitive interface for content authoring, analytics integration, workflow, and archiving. The solution allows content authors, editors and reviewers to easily add, modify, test, and approve content through automated processes without ongoing IT involvement.

Deploying Autonomy can thus help educational institutions gain control and efficiency with their online operations in a highly cost-effective manner. Templates enable non-technical professionals from each department to author and edit content to ensure accuracy of information, while maintaining consistent branding. Pages can then be sent through an automated workflow for review and approval.

Numerous educational institutions have already chosen Autonomy's web content management (WCM) solution to increase current student satisfaction and attract the highest calibre candidates through greater brand consistency and information accuracy on their external-facing websites. The Education Management Corporation (EDMC), one of North America's largest providers of private post-secondary education, has achieved unprecedented brand compliance and efficiency through a distributed web presence with Autonomy. The University of Sydney, Australia's oldest university, increased student satisfaction by providing up-to-date and accurate information and a consistent institutional image across the 130 websites operated by its 17 faculties, thanks to Autonomy Interwoven's comprehensive WCM solution.

For more information on Autonomy Web Content Management Solutions, please visit www.interwoven.com

Public schools and universities rarely make profit on their teaching operations. The latter are oftentimes heavily subsidized by government funding and students are only charged a fraction of the teaching costs, in an aim to ensure accessibility to education for all. Yet, being unable to raise revenue through teaching poses a significant problem to universities, as they struggle to finance new developments and innovative research. For this reason, tapping into alternative channels of funding has become vital for these institutions.

One channel of funding that could potentially bring higher education institutions a significant and constant stream of revenue is paid subscriptions to their online publications and research. Currently, virtually all universities offer such a service to the general public; however, the maximum potential of this revenue channel on nowhere close to being reached.

Oftentimes, prospects who visit such portals look for research on a specific topic across many websites before deciding which one to subscribe to. In addition, the vast amounts of information available for free through search engines make this decision even less likely. Thus, the market for online subscriptions to academic publications is, in fact, a highly competitive one. Therefore, to achieve optimal conversion rates from online subscriptions, institutions must provide prospective users with a compelling and relevant online experience that will motivate the latter to subscribe to their website. This challenge is made even bigger by the fact that prospects who visit these websites look for content on various different academic topics, thus what one visitor may find relevant another may dismiss, and be driven off.

Autonomy's solutions offer a comprehensive set of website optimization tools that can help academic publishers drive online subscriptions. Autonomy offers the industry's most advanced, meaning based analysis, multivariable testing (MVT) and marketing optimization solutions for driving meaningful customer decisions and maximizing overall revenue. Autonomy MVT enables academic publishers to test—in real-time and with actual online customers—virtually limitless permutations of web content and layout including text, pictures, video, page layout, and banners to determine the winning combination that drives visitors to subscribe to paid publications. In addition, Adaptive Targeting, another unique meaning based Autonomy offering, can automatically detect groups of site visitors who take interest in similar academic topics. This information can be used to quickly create targeted online campaigns to influence key groups by offering them relevant content, and thus compelling them to take action.

Many educational institutions have already standardized on Autonomy's intelligent solution, and have experienced a dramatic and measurable improvement in online subscriptions as a result. New Scientist, the world's leading scientific current affairs magazine, chose to deploy Autonomy's MVT solution on their landing page and achieved a 26% increase in conversion rates. Similarly, Questia, the world's largest online collection of books, journals and articles, achieved a 112.9% increase in e-mail subscriptions as a result of MVT conducted by Autonomy.

For more information on Autonomy's Website Optimization solutions, please visit www.optimost.com

Higher education institutions are increasingly striving to improve students' learning experience by making teaching materials available outside the classroom. This initiative has often seen universities embarking on projects to record live lectures and make them available to students through a video library.

However, the archiving and use of such video collections often poses a significant challenge to educational institutions. University video collections often contain thousands of hours of video, yet much of it is not easily accessible, let alone searchable for specific content. Instead, faculty members, librarians, researchers and students often find themselves inching along miles of footage in hopes of finding just the "right" segment. As a result, staff and students are unable to make efficient use of video archives for study and research.

Autonomy Virage offers an advanced content management solution that can be deployed by universities to efficiently store, categorize, manage, retrieve and distribute digital content within their databases. Virage uses meaning based capture and analysis technology to automatically encode and index audio and video material from various sources and allocate metadata to those files, removing the need for manual tagging. The automatically created indexes enable immediate, accurate search and retrieval of video assets by students and staff. Virage automatically extracts information from the signal including visual storyboard, closed captioning and Teletext. Virage uses advanced technology to form a conceptual understanding of an analog or digital video signal, so when a student enters a specific search term, the solution will also return documents that are related, but don't necessarily feature the same keywords.

Thanks to these advanced functionalities, Virage technology has been used by many prestigious universities, including Harvard—the US's oldest institution for higher learning—to enhance the wealth of academic information available to students. In one case, following a Virage implementation at the University of Arizona, professors have been given the option of videotaping classroom lectures and streaming the video content in a searchable online format from the university website, where students can then search for specific course material and review lectures at any time. By including the content online, the University has provided an additional outlet for distributing learning materials and conveying information to students. According to James Austin, Project Director of the University of Arizona's Virtual Adaptive Learning Architecture, "Virage has allowed the University to use online video to transform the learning experience from a one-time event into readily accessible, on-demand reference and review material. The knowledge imparted on campus can now be easily re-purposed, widely distributed and quickly reviewed in a way that best meets the educational goals of faculty and students alike."

For more information on Autonomy's Rich Media Management Solutions, please visit www.virage.com

Arizona State University (ASU) reduced bottlenecks in the graduate admissions process by using Cardiff TeleForm to integrate document capture and workflow.

As ASU is constantly seeking to recruit the best candidates to its graduate programs, its number of applications had grown by over 2,000 over two years. However, due to physical space and budget limitations, the Graduate Admissions Office (GAO) sought to process an increased numbers of applications with the same number of staff. In 2001, the GAO issued an RFP soliciting a solution to handle paper and online forms in a uniform manner using a streamlined, flexible workflow.

Following a competitive tender, ASU selected Autonomy Cardiff, the leading provider of adaptive business process management solutions, to power this initiative. Cardiff's TeleForm information capture solution provided the GAO with a single processing engine for both paper forms and online submissions. The GAO can now reply to applicants faster, certify student credentials within a day of receipt, minimize lost files and documents and re-appropriate the space it gained upon removing now-obsolete filing cabinets. The new process will also improve ASU's ability to effectively recruit the highest caliber candidates to graduate programs.

Iowa State University streamlines the grant application process with Cardiff LiquidOffice. There's now less time chasing approvals and more time writing competitive proposals.

Like most academic institutions, grants are vital to the financial health of Iowa State University (ISU). Handling the administration of these grants in an accurate, timely and professional way is therefore of paramount importance. The grant application process at ISU is driven by an institutional proposal data form. Traditionally, ISU faculty hand-carried the form and proposal package around campus for approvals. Since the forms require from four to 20 signatures, this process would take up to several days to complete. Through interactions with ISU faculty and staff, OSPA determined that an electronic, Web-based internal proposal data form was the single most important process improvement it could implement.

ISU selected Cardiff's LiquidOffice, a complete XML-based business process management software system allowing universities and other organizations to design, route, approve and sign online electronic forms, to create an intelligent, electronic PDF internal proposal data form. Streamlining the grant application approval process has increased the time that could be spent on developing more competitive proposals.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center Implements Autonomy Email Archiving Software to Optimize Storage Management

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is a multi-location healthcare facility in Nashville, Tennessee, providing comprehensive healthcare to the community with a focus on innovation in patient care and physician and nurse education. During 2002, the IT department at VUMC migrated from Lotus Notes to MS Exchange, and for the two-year period following this migration, the healthcare network experienced exponential email storage growth. Quotas were quickly overrun and large mailboxes caused stability problems within the email system. The IT department began to evaluate email archiving software as a means to offload the MS Exchange servers and restore stability to the messaging environment.

In a competitive tender, VUMC chose Autonomy's Enterprise Archive Solution (EAS) to power this initiative. As a result of the implementation, VUMC is able to better manage its email storage growth and improve disk storage management and systems stability within its messaging environment. The growth rate of email storage has been from 8% to between 1% and 2% per month. Additionally, VUMC is able to better manage its backups as a result of the archive implementation.