At the recent Workday Rising conference in Orlando, I had the chance to talk with Samantha Earp, CIO and VP for IT at Smith College. Samantha has a background in linguistics and a fascinating perspective on the ways that language and communication influence how she works with her IT team and the larger community at Smith. We spoke about the decision to partner with Workday to help streamline the college’s systems and get closer to a single source of truth—and how Workday’s emphasis on user experience helped support Samantha’s efforts to use technology to help improve campus culture and enhance collaboration between students, staff, professors, parents, and others who make up the Smith College community.
Smith College and Workday Reimagine the On-Campus “User” Experience
The Big Themes:
- Looking beyond the walls of IT: As the CIO and VP of IT, Samantha obviously fills a specialized role at Smith, but she says that her “team” is everyone at the college, and that achieving the IT department’s goals requires input from many other departments.
- Continuous iteration as a North Star: Samantha shares a favorite quote of hers, which comes from the center for teaching and learning on campus but that she applies to IT: “There are many ways to teach well, and all teaching is improvable.”
- Prioritizing user experience with Workday: Students today have high expectations for digital experiences, and many academic platforms do not meet those expectations. Samantha talks about how Workday’s UX tools are helping her deliver for Smith students.
The Big Quote: “Partnership isn’t just delivering utilities. Partnership is being in conversations, it’s bringing people together. It’s calibrating, is this a big problem or a small problem? Will this solve something that’s been bothering us for three years? So I think that has helped me be positioned as a strategic partner.”
