Selected Media Coverage: March 22/2007

Think ‘360’
03/21/2007 - Campus Technology (cir. 50,742)

N.C.A.A. Wants Athletes to Avoid Online Pools
03/20/2007 - New York Times - Online (cir. 833,333)

An interconnected world
03/15/2007 - Economist - Washington DC Bureau, The (cir. 504,590)

Attention Deficit Hvperactivitv Disorder
02/12/2007 - HEALTH & MEDICINE WEEK

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Think ‘360’
03/21/2007 - Campus Technology (cir. 50,742)
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NO LONGER DO universities have to decide between off-the-shelf and custom programs, or between standalone constituent relationship management (CRM) applications and ERP-integrated solutions. Instead, today’s mantra is “360”—an upclose, 360-degree view of student interactions. Whether the processes and technologies employed to achieve this are called constituent interaction management, e-mail management, content management, or any combination thereof, administrators are looking for systems that enable them to monitor individual interactions throughout a student’s lifecycle with the institution. And the solutions universities choose rarely are traditional CRM programs that work alone or within an enterprise application; increasingly, colleges and universities are turning to third-party vendors to find more nimble programs that are highly targeted to the needs of a specific institution, department, or even course offering.

Making It Personal

At Kansas State University, administrators were looking for a system that would go beyond traditional, static CRM, and give admissions staffers more versatile tools to attract students. According to Jan Elsasser, associate director of admissions and technology at KSU, because higher ed institutions operate in a “highly competitive market for students,” schools are looking to grab students’ attention with personalized technology such as podcasts, personalized e-mails, and highly targeted content based on their interests. “A lot of institutions have customized their ERP systems for this purpose,” Elsasser says, noting that such customization is not always an option for every school. “It depends on whether you have the time and resources [to optimize your existing ERP system]. If you want to put in the time, modifications can make it work, but our ERP didn’t come out of the box as robust as we would have liked.” The CRM component of the KSU’s existing student management system “really didn’t meet our needs for recruiting,” says Elsasser. “We had been processing data on a mainframe that was not designed around a recruiting system.”

In February 2006, the school implemented Talisma’s Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) CRM solution, a highly configurable, internet-based system that includes e-mail, chat, self-service, and other channels of contact with constituents. According to Dan Vetras, president and CEO of Talisma, the program “offers a 360-degree view of historical as well as real-time interactions with students, and can funnel the data into an existing back-office environment, whether that be a traditional CRM or ERP system. Every interaction that has occurred is visible.” For KSU, this deep insight into interactions has proven invaluable because it enables highly personalized service. For instance, Elsasser says, during a marketing campaign, the system allows administrators to sidestep generic copy. “Instead, it pushes targeted content to existing constituents or prospects, based on the information those individuals have already provided.” She notes that the system’s highly proactive and flexible chat function is another benefit. “It can be configured so that if a prospect is on a web page for longer than, say, 30 seconds, it triggers a chat event with a live college representative.”

Empowering the Recruitment Office

The University of Alabama, another Talisma customer, is somewhat further along with its use of the same application, which the school installed in November 2005 after a two-year search for a comprehensive constituent management suite. Says Teri Terry, director of technology support services in the university’s Office of Enrollment Management, “We have 400,000 records in our system. We were looking for a provider that had everything to offer in one package; whose representatives didn’t tell us, ‘It’s in the next release.’” Terry found that the Talisma solution offers myriad channels and opportunities for customer contact, including phone, e-mail, a portal, web chat, telecounseling, and, in its most recent release, event registration. It affords the university insight into all interactions with students, and “recruiters enjoy it,” she says. “They can see every phone conversation with the office; every e-mail and every conversation with the counselor. It empowers the recruiter.”

The cost of the system varies, depending on whether customers purchase a point solution or the whole suite. But for Terry, the true return on investment (ROI) lies in the value of the business intelligence she receives. “We can track where we’re spending our money, from application to admission, from suspect [someone who may have expressed a slight interest in attending the university, but is not yet a real prospect] to prospect. It’s a huge source of information that we didn’t have before. For example, if an event is not yielding enough student enrollment, we can cut down on the number of times we do it. It enables us to see what’s successful and what’s not.”

Currently, administrators are in data-gathering mode for the university’s first full recruitment season using the new system. “We’re fine-tuning and using more and more of it as we go along,” Terry says.

Consolidated Contact Center

Investment in advanced technology is solving constituent management issues for Segar Annamalai, CIO of Alta Colleges (CO), the parent company of Westwood College, Westwood College Online, and Redstone College and Redstone Institute. (Westwood College and its online sister institution offer two-year, four-year, and specialized programs in business, industrial design, criminal justice, health care, and technology; Redstone College and Redstone Institute are a joint institution offering hands-on vocational training for the aviation and HVAC/R industries. Altogether, the colleges comprise 20 campuses across California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, and Texas.)

When the time came to upgrade Alta’s three contact center locations—which are dedicated to assisting prospective students with the enrollment process as well as handling queries from Westwood’s online students—Annamalai chose to move from a simple PBX system to what he calls “the latest and greatest technology.” In June 2005, Alta began deploying a self-hosted version of CosmoCom’s (www.cosmocom.com) CosmoCall Universe, an enterprise IP-based unified communications solution that includes automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, computer telephony integration, predictive dialing, multimedia recording, interaction history, and administrative tools. Now students can dial a local or national toll-free phone number, send e-mail, or visit Alta’s individual college websites, and CosmoCall Universe seamlessly routes thd not to enter any brackets this year. I did not submit one this year because the N.C.A.A. was being really ignorant about it, Holmes said. There are all these posters all over our athletic areas warning about gambling, and they are trying to get tough on it. I dont want to get into any trouble heading into my senior year, so I guess I will wait a year. I imagine if you got everything right and accepted a $10,000 prize, you would be taken off the roster, he added. As much as colleges urge athletes not to participate, there is little they can do to prevent them because it does not violate any rules. Sterrett said he was not sure what he would do, or what N.C.A.A. rules would permit him to do, if one of Lehighs players won money.

Facebook, in a written statement, said that participants should contact their athletic departments before entering and that the site would remove an individuals bracket at their request if there is concern around eligibility.

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An interconnected world
03/15/2007 - Economist - Washington DC Bureau, The (cir. 504,590)
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THE leading nations of NATO are at odds, be it over Iraq or the future role of the alliance. Russia accuses America of misusing NATO territory to advance its own missile defence. And the world's leading industrialised states struggle to set up international bodies that will regulate everything from internet protocols to the genetic manipulation of food. The experts fighting in the trenches over such issues must sometimes ask themselves Why bother? Why create the fig leaves of international accords and institutions when, in reality, a few powerful states call the shots?

Two right-of-centre analyses address these questions in very different ways. In The End of Alliances, Rajan Menon, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University, does so with a bullhorn. In Rumsfeldian language, Mr Menon argues that permanent security institutions are obsolete and the United States should pick up its military toys and go home. I believe that our alliances in Europe and Asia are dispensable. Even worse, they have become impediments that inhibit creative strategic thinking at home, while infantilising our partners who live under the American shadow. What, he asks, is the logic for deploying troops and retaining a network of bases in countries that are now wealthy enough to protect themselves...? Concluding that there is none, he calls for the end of America's military alliances with Europe, Japan and South Korea. Mr Menon is to be applauded for putting the issue so clearly. Unfortunately, his clear questioning is not matched by convincing, or even detailed, analysis. If Mr Menon thinks that international relations have evolved at all since the time of Hobbes, he does not admit it. Obvious counter-arguments to his view receive hand-waving dismissals. There is no need for the United States to stay in South Korea because North Korea is not really a danger, since things are not going its way. He predicts the North's demise without acknowledging that such predictions have repeatedly failed, or even that its death throes might be painful indeed.

If Mr Menon's book is too shrill and not analytical enough, Daniel Drezner's All Politics is Global is too nuanced and academic for easy readingbut ultimately much more rewarding. Mr Drezner, an associate professor of international politics at Tufts University, focuses on the international institutions and accords that regulate trade. Such regulation, though seemingly arcane at first, in fact determines how to treat workers, how much to pollute, what can go into our food, what can be accessed on the internet, and how much medicine will cost. Like Mr Menon, Mr Drezner believes that what really matter are the domestic preferences of powerful governments States make the rules. This directly contradicts Thomas Friedman's flat-world notion that globalisation has emasculated the state. Mr Friedman's ideassuch as that capitalists worldwide now form an electronic herd that tramples down bordersare, according to Mr Drezner, simple, pithy and wrong. As evidence, Mr Drezner provides case studies ranging from internet protocols to anti-retroviral drugs. He shows that great powers cajole and coerce those who disagree with them into accepting the same rulebook. Unlike Mr Menon, however, Mr Drezner does not call for the end of such international accords. Rather, he finds that the challenges of the future will be increasingly transnational. As globalisation intensifies, the rewards for co-ordination will increase as well. To achieve success, it is essential not to eliminate international institutions but rather to understand their utility. They are at heart a means for great nations to exert their will in concert. The key to their success lies in convincing the leading governments of the gains from acting in co-operation, rather than isolation, in a volatile but interconnected worlda message that surely applies well beyond the esoteric world of trade regulations.

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Attention Deficit Hvperactivitv Disorder
02/12/2007 - HEALTH & MEDICINE WEEK (cir. )
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Research from Lehigh University has provided new data on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children

(NewsRx.com) — Scientists discuss in Consultation-based academic interventions for children with ADHD: effects on reading and mathematics achievement new findings in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. According to a study from the United States, The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the relative efficacy of two consultation- based models for designing academic interventions to enhance the educational functioning of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children (N=167) meeting DSM-IV criteria for ADHD were randomly assigned to one of two consultation groups: Individualized Academic Intervention (IAI; interventions designed using a data-based decision making model that involved ongoing feedback to teachers) and Generic Academic Intervention (GAI; interventions designed based on consultant-teacher collaboration, representing consultation as usual).

Teachers implemented academic interventions over 15 months. Academic outcomes (e.g., standardized achievement test, and teacher ratings of academic skills) were assessed on four occasions (baseline, 3 months, 12 months, 15 months). Hierarchical linear modeling analyses indicated significant positive growth for 8 of the 14 dependent variables; however, trajectories did not differ significantly across consultation groups, in the IAI group were delivered with significantly greater integrity; however, groups did not differ with respect to teacher ratings of treatment acceptability, wrote G.J. DuPaul and colleagues, Lehigh University.

The researchers concluded: The results of this study provide partial support for the effectiveness of consultation-based academic interventions in enhancing educational functioning in children with ADHD; however, the relative advantages of an individualized model over consultation as usual have yet lo be established.

DuPaul and colleagues published their study in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (Consultation-based academic interventions for children with ADHD: effects on reading and mathematics achievement. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 2006;34(5):635- 48).

For more information, contact G.J. DuPaul, Lehigh University, Dept. of Education and Human Services, Bethlehem, PA 18015 USA.

Publisher contact information for the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology is: Kluwer Academic, Plenum Publ, 233 Spring St., New York, NY 10013, USA

Keywords: United States, Bethlehem, Abnormal Child Psychology, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Developmental Disabilities.

This article was prepared by Health & Medicine Week editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2007, Health & Medicine Week via NewsRx.com.