Higher Education & Research

KU Leuven, visiting Newcastle from Belgium have offered to share an unusual application of SAP technology, with a proof of concept for using block chain to provision students with, and validate independently, certificates and diplomas. Then they will describe how they use agile principles in the real word of Higher Education and share some of their best practices for a more effective way to deliver SAP services.

After lunch, we will host a workshop on the SAP Model University – capturing SAP use cases from HERSIG attendees and SAP, to build a reference for how a HE institution could use SAP, to compare and contrast with how our members actually are using SAP. This is a starting point for work over 2019 to develop the HERSIG community’s information sharing and self-support network – something we believe will be useful to each member institution and worth investing time in developing.

• A description of how a “University” could sensibly maximise their use of SAP’s tools and how they relate to the various business activities of a “University”
• A framework to compare your institution’s use of SAP’s tools vs the model, and understand the gaps
• A definition of the gaps in SAP’s toolset, actual or practical

Colin Colegate from SAP will deliver an SAP Update.

Ellen Lerouge Leuven University will present Provisioning and verifying certificates and diplomas through the KU Leuven student self-service and through SAP blockchain services.

Currently the most specific and promising blockchain use case for higher education: issuing credentials/degrees on the blockchain and make them available in a personal wallet ready to be shared. The current system of degree certification is simply not efficient and not particularly safe. Degrees are crucial “documents” which follow the entire life span of a student, hence ownership, security and privacy is important. A paper system is an easy subject to loss, even fraud. KU Leuven and SAP jointly worked on bringing this use case alive and have conducted a successful live proof-of-concept between KUL’s student information system (SAP SLcM) and the cloud based blockchain service and application from SAP. In this presentation we will present on the POC, the details, the outcomes and the possible next steps.

Jan Scheerlinck & Barbara De Bruyn will speak about Sw3ll!: lean and agile best practices at the KU Leuven.

The Sw3ll! Transformation started 1,5 year ago at the KU Leuven and turned into a never ending continuous improvement process towards a lean & agile company culture. In this break-out session the KU Leuven wants to share some of the best practices that are used ‘in real life’ and prove to contribute to a more effective way of delivering ICT services. Amongst others feature refinements, planning poker, retrospective techniques, the planning cadence and the big room, priority councils, S3 meeting principles, S3 circle design, … will be discussed.