College announced as a winner at the Digital Technology Leaders Awards in London

@BordersCollege now has an enviable reputation as a centre of collaborative growth in the tech sector thanks to a pioneering Digital Transformation Project.

Such was the success of the project, the College was recently announced as a winner at the Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2022 in the Digital Transformation of the Year – Large Organisations category, presented to the company that had best modernised or simplified its systems to increase efficiency.

Work on the project started in 2021 when Borders College teamed up with digital transformation specialists Agenor, who helped managed the workstreams of this mammoth undertaking. Prior to the project, many of the College’s systems were outdated and expensive. The goal was to enhance the user experience for students, staff, and stakeholders, bringing systems up to date, making them more user-friendly, efficient, resilient, cost-effective and sustainable.

The transformation consisted of 3 main projects; an infrastructure transformation, the implementation of a new Management Information System (MIS), and a new website build.

The infrastructure transformation included updating and futureproofing internet connections across all campuses allowing the College to manage them from the main campus in Galashiels and then migrating the servers that host all the College system data to Datavita, a multi-cloud data centre provider near Glasgow who, importantly for the College’s sustainability ambitions, use 100% renewable energy.

The new MIS, ProSolution, is a one-stop shop for keeping student records, enrolment, course data, timetables and its implementation means that the College now have data dashboards that can be reviewed in real-time. It was thoroughly mapped out by our Head of MIS, from data fields, data sources and automated processes, to complex web forms for payment processing and as well as allowing the College to use existing data to improve processes it also saves massive amounts of time and resources.

Alongside the MIS implementation, the College rebuilt their website as the two needed to be fully integrated. As well as a fresh, modern look and feel the website included a payment gateway, streamlining the enrolment process and making it easier than ever for students to complete their journey from finding a course, through their initial application, to paying for the course, all via the website.

The website and payment gateway were successfully launched along with ProSolution in August 2021.

Jane Grant, Executive Director of Enterprise and Business Innovation at Borders College commented on the win, saying: 

“The digital transformation programmes at Borders College are all about bringing the best systems and digital environments to our teams and students. There is real ambition here to demonstrate digital best practices for the sector and beyond. Our hard-working teams have delivered this for us.“

A new Virtual Learning Environment, Canvas has also been implemented alongside the digital transformation project and is due to go live this summer – another major step forward for the future of learning at Borders College.

The outcomes of the project have allowed the College to harness the power of data to streamline operations and enhance the user experience across their platforms and they are already reaping the rewards, as are their collaborators and stakeholders.