Reengineering Babson College: Towards I/T enabled student services

AS PART OF Babson College’s continuous quality improvement (CQI) efforts, the administration regularly surveys their primary customers (undergraduate and graduate students, their parents and employers) to assess the degree to which the institution meets or exceeds customer requirements. Surveys conducted during the period 1989 to 1992 indicated in unambiguous terms that the College’s educational programs were highly regarded, but that customers were generally dissatisfied with the quality of administrative support services, including: admission processing, registration, financial aid packaging, student billing and student loans processing. During this same period, Babson substantially redesigned its educational programs to prepare students for the management challenges of the twenty-first century. With an emphasis on interdisciplinary team teaching and enhanced field-based learning, this effort required additional resources at a time when the overall cost of College operations grew at a higher rate than inflation, and revenues remained static. Recognizing that radical change was required to improve administrative services and simultaneously reduce expenses, Babson committed itself to the reengineering of its student administrative support services. This study chronicles the effort through which the College transformed these business processes to achieve enhanced customer service performance and associated cost reductions. It also discusses in some detail the information resource management and information technology strategies deployed to enable these sweeping changes.