Large organizations and multinational businesses understandably take centre stage in discussions around what needs UC and collaboration solutions serve. This is especially true for industries like financial services, healthcare, and government where even the average layperson understands that excellent communications, collaboration, security, and compliance services are essential to their day-to-day operations.
However, high-quality and innovative UC and collaboration technologies matter to every organization, no matter its size or prominence in the public consciousness. It also matters to the passionate business users who look after the tech stack for such organizations, including Eddie Nesbeth, a Collaborative Applications Analyst at Davidson College, North Carolina.
Nesbeth serves as the higher education institution’s product owner for all its collaborative apps and SaaS platforms. With Davidson numbering close to 4000 users across the student, staff, and faculty bodies, Nesbeth acts as “the middleman between internal stakeholders and the outside vendors”, he explained to UC Today. “My job is to identify business needs and translate those to technical needs and make sure that our vendors are providing those solutions.”
With Davidson using multiple Microsoft, Google and Zoom services, he is “satisfied” with its tech stack and the current offerings provided by vendors – especially their recent integration of Zoom Intelligent Director which has enabled more seamless hybrid working. Davidson has also adjusted well to the era of permanent hybrid working, with on-premises phones recently being upgraded to Zoom Phone under Nesbeth's watch.
However, if there is one request he’d like to make of vendors in the future, it’s the opportunity for smaller organizations like Davidson to be invited to test products in their alpha and beta phases.
“We’re a liberal arts college in North Carolina,” Nesbeth said, “just over 2000 students. I know (Microsoft’s AI-powered solution) Copilot is being tested right now. I think they said some Fortune 500 companies are testing it, and we’re never going to be among those.”
“We’re never going to be in those conversations, so sometimes, yes, that can be a harrowing reminder of where you are in that hierarchy of companies. My day-to-day work and what's important to me in my job; for some people that doesn't even register anywhere on their radar.”
Nesbeth stressed that this is not an emotional subject but a practical issue. Testing these products through massive organizations can help debug problems and help steer quality assurance before the product reaches general availability. However, there are potential applications behind a solution that only smaller or more specialized organizations might discover to facilitate greater innovation.
“A lot of these companies saw AI and their goal was ‘How can we use this to help our salespeople close better? How can we get more deals out of this?’" Nesbeth said. “We don't operate for profit, so we are looking at it from a completely different lens.”
How can we use this to make our stakeholders’ lives easier? We're thinking about students, we're thinking about faculty, we're thinking about staff. We're not thinking about a sales team. We're not thinking about it necessarily as CRM. We're not thinking about client retention. That's not our issue. We just want the best solution possible for our end users.”
Speaking of AI, it was 2023’s technology hot topic that caught Nesbeth’s attention at this year’s Enterprise Connect, which is where UC Today initially met him. While AI’s ground-breaking applications might not have particularly focused on higher education so far, they might prove just as revolutionary in the world of universities too. “I saw those announcements and my heart started racing because this is the future,” Nesbeth said.
However, integrating AI might be an exciting future, but it likely will also prove a significant challenge.
“There are different personalities in higher ed,” Nesbeth said. “There was a survey the other day that showed a lot of people are very apprehensive about this. Some people are willing to try it but unsure about its future. Some people have drawn a line in the sand, ‘I'm not using it. I don't want it to have my data or my information.’ Some people are just completely afraid of it.”
“So that is the next emerging challenge for us. How do we drive adoption to this wave that is coming? Being on the tech side, I can see that it's coming. I get the road map emails. I check the newsletters. There's nothing we can do to avoid it.”
“How do I get that professor that started here in the 70s writing everything down, then moved into faxing, and then got e-mail in the 90s but was still hesitant, and then resisted Wikipedia in the 2000s? How do I now get that person to say yeah, ‘I'm using AI in my daily workflow?’”
