Business Case For Drupal in #HigherEducation

  As a Drupal agency with more than a decade of specialized web projects in the higher education sector, ImageX has built a team of EDU experts with a diverse background working with major universities across North America. In this blog we pick the brains of two of our best -- Bjorn Thomson, Senior Business & UX Architect and Brian Pokojoy, Senior Project Manager & Business Analyst -- on the topic of why Drupal has been chosen by so many universities.       Tell me about your respective backgrounds in higher education? Brian:  I was with the University of Calgary for more than a decade, starting off as a developer on the initial implementation of Drupal for the institution. I did both front and back end development, from theme to module development and supporting the actual infrastructure. I worked with the CMS for about five years as a developer and then moved into a Project Manager role for an enterprise portal launch. I then became a Manager of Software Development and ultimately finished at the university as the Associate Director of Web Content Management Services. Simultaneously, I also taught web design at the Alberta College of Arts & Design. Bjorn:  In some ways similarly to Brian, I started as a developer with hand coded HTML sites and quickly moved over to Drupal. Started working with Drupal at UBC in 2008, evolving from a developer to team lead within the Central IT unit. The role’s evolution was from front end work and theme administration to a facilitation and coaching role. I also was an active contributor to various support groups at UBC around the areas of analytics and usability and was an instructor for 10 years or so on various subjects including Communications and Technology.        To what degree was Drupal utilized by the University of Calgary and UBC, respectively? Brian:  At the beginning of our CMS journey, we had static pages with each department doing its own thing. The purpose of Drupal was to have a common look and feel and there were 3-4 levels of templates to attempt to achieve that. By the time I left the university, we had 900+ production websites, with a vast majority of public-facing websites powered by our central Drupal installation. We were using a multi-site installation, so for the most part these were running on a single instance of Drupal. We offered the technology and services including training in a non-cost recovery environment. Our clients, which consisted of various departments within the university, would sometimes subcontract overflow work to outside agencies when faced with extreme deadlines or functionality that was complex and beyond the scope of our core service. Bjorn:  Within UBC, there's a very complex and distributed environment, which was becoming increasingly centralized to capture efficiencies. Groups within the university had two solutions to get a web property up within the UBC community: the team I worked with, which was an internal Drupal shop for complex sites that required more granular permissions or potentially a more complex look and feel, and a WordPress implementation for less complex needs. Those two services ran in parallel and spoke to different needs within the university. Between 2010 to 2014 the Drupal team went from one client to more than 200 sites in a cost-recovery business model. The team was never intended to capture every single use case on campus but for those that needed the more complex systems, Drupal made a compelling business case for those departments and the university as a whole.        Can you share insights as to why Drupal was chosen by UBC and UofC as their primary CMS? Brian:  I was actually part of the selection process which included various content management systems. We were looking at open and closed source products. Drupal (v.4), Joomla, and RedDot were the ones we considered most. Ultimately the evaluation committee felt that Drupal had a vibrant and supported community, and was flexible and customizable, which was an important consideration as we weren’t 100% sure what our needs were and we wanted ability to “grow into the CMS” as we evolved. Drupal was also more affordable than closed source products which required additional fees for scaling. Lastly, the idea we could have our own Drupal community at the university for collaboration and efficiency was a significant value add for choosing Drupal. Bjorn:  The WordPress service had been around for a few years at UBC with many sites on the platform, but the university had complex needs that extended past that platform's limits. The team I worked in had to be able to provide some presentation on the web that was richer and more complex. That Drupal unit came to be in 2010 and from the very beginning, it was intended to speak to groups that needed something more. A key goal was to avoid departments using outside vendors, which would happen when those groups felt they needed something a bit more complex or had the need for additional services that the university didn't necessarily have the capacity to offer at that point.

Our goal was to keep the look and feel unified across the university, lower cost, and have more control over architecture - Bjorn Thomson, Sr. Business and UX Architect

 It’s reported that 28% of all .EDU’s use Drupal, including 71 out of the top 100 schools and virtually all Ivy League’s. Why do you think it has been so rapidly adopted by the higher education sector? Brian:  For a lot of the same reasons why the University of Calgary chose it: it has a vibrant community, which appeals to the EDU environment, and is extremely scalable. Both Bjorn and I came from situations where we had to scale up to hundreds (and thousands even) of sites with brand cohesion. Drupal as a licence-free CMS makes a lot of business sense from the technology and cost perspectives. Bjorn:  A comparable structure would be a municipality or government agency. Brian:  Drupal also supports a decentralized authoring model which is typically the case in a university. Marketing and communication departments are scattered and there's rarely one team that controls everything that goes out on the web; Drupal’s core functionality supports that structure organically very well. Bjorn:  I agree with Brian. Cultural fit between the philosophies of higher education and Drupal is very strong. I think higher education leans toward open source for a variety of reasons. Universities have a lot of open source options but Drupal has some features that are helpful for common university challenges like scalability and governance. I also think that support for Drupal implementations is a major consideration and with so many universities using it, finding support with domain expertise is very attainable. Brian: To that point, it should be noted that Drupal uses common web technology like PHP, MySQL, Lamp Stack, Linux, etc. Many universities have these skill sets internally already. In terms of a business case, you can find people with these skills even if they don’t have Drupal experience and they will be able to contribute with a minimal learning curve. There’s also an amazing amount of customization available in Drupal without ever touching code, with 30,000+ contributed modules at your disposal.    What advice would you give to a university that is thinking about adopting a new CMS? Bjorn:  I would say the temptation is often to stuff as many requirements as you can in the first version and be hyper ambitious on things like workflow and multiple levels of permission. My advice would be to understand what the users need, and not just organization stakeholders but end users as well (students, alumni, faculty); what are the priority needs for the entire ecosystem? I would also say that looking for a CMS with scalability is critical. Most organizations that build a CMS system end up making significant changes the second time around, and that’s often because they try to do too much in the initial implementation. Prioritizing needs in a “must have” vs “nice to have” is a good way of going about that process. Structuring a project implementation will be 90% of the battle. Brian:  I think the first thing is understand your entire web landscape, to Bjorn’s point. Understanding the difference between public facing marketing web vs. internal, action based portals or specialized applications. Understanding how all these different things fit into your web ecosystem and what role your CMS will play in that. What problems are you trying to solve with your CMS? Particularly with a hyper-flexible product like Drupal it’s easy to “bite off more than you can chew” and try to solution every problem you have right out of the gate. Start off simple and evolve to complexities; tackle a single department or the main university website and then plan for gradual adoption and enhancement. 

I’d also say that governance needs to be defined early; how it will be used, who will be using it and why? - Brian Pokojoy, Sr. Project Manager and Business Analyst

Hosting is also a consideration. Platform as a service providers can offer a many cost savings and extend your development without having to do a lot of hardware or technology investment up front. These services are very scalable which makes starting off cost effective.  Having a partnership between IT and marketing will go a long way in the success of a CMS implementation. Those two departments need each other and the CMS will bridge the gap with IT managing the technology, and marketing utilizing it through communications to the public-facing website. Having both groups' stakeholders involved with which CMS is chosen should be an immediate priority. Lastly, establish a community within the institution. Invest back to those who author so they are aware of what the CMS can do so you get to leverage best practices from across the university. Have questions or need advice from our experts? Get in touch and let’s start a conversation.