How has the increase in digitization affected your role and collaboration with partners?

Certainly there were a major change in our IT headcount and strategy to keep up with the updates, it took us a lot of time to get accepted by major departments, resistance to change was always an issue but with the board support we were able to force the idea.
We are now more involved on most processes of other departments, we had to learn how everyone works, frequent meetings with departments and board to maintain the strategy.
Budgets were altered and increased. overall - it wasn't the best thing to do.

In every single way, the move to digital has effected our school and more specifically our "partners" or enrolling families. Beginning with our admissions process, parents are inundated with forms and information requests. This process used to be all paper and took a great deal of time and energy. It's now completely digital and much quicker to capture which eliminates errors and other issues. Onboarding families is just one area where digitization has completely changed a process and made it considerably better.

Teachers collaborate with parents via email consistently. Parents have access to grades, attendance, etc. and are made aware of the student's progress through our SIS system. Information sharing is so valuable as everyone is in the loop. Our preschool software is used in the way that parents and teachers can send text messages and communicate in realtime throughout the day (in a very appropriate way) for important communications and also for for fun things like pictures of student events. For a preschool, this is a huge deal as parents can stay connected with their little ones through the teacher - and this can only happen with technology.

Students use Chromebooks throughout the day and collaborate with one another on Google Docs. The days of working on paper "on an island" are behind us and students learning valuable skills working with others. Submitting work online using Google Classroom has drastically changed the process of paper management and makes the job easier on teachers.

We are living in a digital world, and in every area of our school, we find ourselves benefitting from the transformation to it.

Digitisation has brought our roles closer to our business partners; we are a much bigger part of the business processes, strategy and roadmap than ever before. Whilst it has increased shadow IT, provided vendors are properly vetted, processes understood, and SaaS is the tool of choice, it's a good thing for IT in general

Indeed, digitization has changed the role of IT in companies quite a bit. Increased digitalization has influenced business activities including companies’ business models by enabling new forms of cooperation between companies and leading to new product and service.

In this sense, many barriers between IT and business have been broken down. Today, cooperation is greater simply because IT is much more internalized in business processes, until now it was only seen as necessary in backoffice or more transversal processes.

The trend is an even greater growth in cooperation, making more mixed teams. This will reach a point where there will not be someone exclusive to IT or who is only considered business.

Digitization has created efficiencies that have enabled automation of numerous processes.
This has allowed me to provide more value in my role and collaborate at a much higher and more meaningful level. Also digitization creates more credibility with partners.