Page 44 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

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higher education institutions, and as part of the company’s charitable giving, it also has a grant program called “Force for Change” focused on innovation in education and work- force development.
In fact, in 2016 Maryville won a Force for Change grant to create its admissions software and then allow other schools on the Salesforce platform to install it in their own environ- ments. EASY was released in December 2017. Maryville, which has approximately 6,400 students, is collaborating with the Salesforce.org Higher Education Advisory Council, a community of Salesforce users from higher ed institutions across North America and Europe, to get input and to share the model across organizations.
Developing EASY involved a partnership between the ad- missions office, the offices for online and graduate programs, the IT department and Lueckeman’s Office of Innovation. “We brought in partners from Huron Consulting because our own IT team is still developing the Salesforce skills they need to do something like this,” she added. In addition, through its Pro Bono Program, Salesforce.org recruited and managed volunteers who helped with technical assistance.
One of the development challenges was that the Force for Change grant required the program to be finished in one year. “Most software companies take a long time to develop software,” Lueckeman noted. “We are not a software com- pany. We had less than a year to develop and release this. That was part of the grant we agreed to, but it was a chal- lenge to get all that done. It really required a commitment from our community.”4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019
Maryville University