How Georgetown University Modernized Campus Workflows to Drive Student Success

Key takeaways for higher ed leaders

• The student "time tax": Routine paperwork delays in housing, financial aid, and admissions degrade student satisfaction

• Proven impact: Georgetown cut gift processing from 3–5 days to 2.5 hours by connecting Docusign with Salesforce and finance systems

• The 4-part friction audit: Assess system integration, student journey friction, data accuracy, and approval velocity

• A 3-phase roadmap: Modernize campus operations incrementally via Pilot, Scale, and Optimize phases

Students live in a digital world of instant gratification, but college administration can feel very different. Housing agreements may take days to process, financial aid paperwork can involve multiple steps, and routine approvals often move slowly between departments and systems.

Over the course of a student’s college experience, these points of friction add up to what I call a “time tax,” creating frustration for students while consuming hours of staff time.

At the 2026 EDUCAUSE Digital Summit, I joined Georgetown University CIO Doug Little to discuss how institutions can reduce that friction. During our session, “Operational Efficiency as the Foundation of Student Success,” we explored Georgetown’s transformation and the lessons it offers institutions looking to modernize campus operations.

The student time tax: Reframing campus efficiency around student needs

Georgetown’s approach to campus transformation has centered on faster and more reliable tools, simplified operations, and a seamless digital experience.

Rather than simply converting paper forms into digital ones, the university examined the processes behind them with the student experience in mind. That meant reducing unnecessary steps and creating workflows that provide mobile access, single sign-on, visibility, and the speed students have come to expect.

Streamlining these processes also reduces the time staff spend reentering information, routing documents, and chasing approvals, giving them more time to focus on the people and priorities that matter most to the institution.

Starting small: Georgetown’s phased deployment of connected workflows

Georgetown intentionally avoided a campus-wide technology overhaul. Instead, they started with a focused eSignature deployment in the School of Continuing Studies, allowing the university to learn, refine its approach, and build internal support.

Adoption expanded organically as departments saw what was possible. Georgetown eventually connected Docusign with Salesforce, StarRez, and Workday, allowing information and agreements to move more seamlessly across campus.

This incremental approach also provided measurable evidence of progress, including time savings, fewer errors, and increased capacity. Those results helped make the case for further investment, with each success building support for the next.

Case study: Slashing gift processing turnaround from 3 to 5 days to 2.5 hours

Gift processing became one of Georgetown’s clearest examples of the impact workflow modernization could have. The university redesigned a process that had taken three to five days and required significant manual effort from advancement staff.

• Eliminating repetitive data entry: Donor information already available in Salesforce could automatically populate agreements, eliminating the need for advancement staff to manually enter it into Word documents.

• Automating routing and signatures: Agreements could be generated and routed digitally to donors and the appropriate university officials, with signatures collected in parallel or sequence depending on the requirements.

• Connecting the completed agreement to the next step: Once signed, agreements could be automatically filed and relevant information synced to finance systems, eliminating additional manual handoffs.

The efficiency gains were immediate and substantial. Average turnaround dropped from three to five days to approximately 2.5 hours, while gift volume increased with the same staff handling the additional activity. As a result, advancement officers had more time for donor stewardship and relationship-building rather than preparing paperwork and chasing signatures.

Georgetown’s experience shows how improving a single workflow can create greater capacity with existing resources while giving staff more time to focus on people and relationships.

How to conduct a campus friction audit across 4 key areas

Every institution will have its own opportunities for improvement. Finding them requires a systematic look at where students and staff are losing time.

One approach Doug shared at EDUCAUSE is a “friction audit” built around four areas: system integration, the student journey, quality and accuracy, and process speed.

Institutions can look for forms that require information to be moved manually between systems, processes that send students across multiple portals or offices, workflows prone to errors from repeated data entry, and approvals that routinely sit for days when they could move much faster.

At Georgetown, this kind of thinking revealed opportunities across housing, HR, advancement, compliance, and other areas. It also helped create a broader shift in how departments viewed their own operations. Processes that had existed for years simply because that’s how it’s always been began to receive greater scrutiny, and teams started identifying manual work that could be done differently.

A 3-phase higher ed modernization roadmap: Pilot, Scale, Optimize

A practical transformation strategy does not require an institution to tackle every source of friction at once. At the EDUCAUSE session, Doug shared a three-phase roadmap that he utilized to help Georgetown build on results as they developed.

• Pilot: Start with one meaningful, high-impact workflow and establish baseline metrics around processing time, error reduction, user satisfaction, or other measurable outcomes. A focused pilot can provide concrete evidence of what is working and where improvements are needed.

• Scale: Use those results to build leadership buy-in, then expand into additional workflows across adjacent departments. Each implementation will provide more experience with workflow design, integration, and change management while demonstrating the value of the initial investment.

• Optimize: Continue refining workflows based on feedback and introduce more advanced capabilities as needs evolve. Over time, individual successes can become the foundation for broader operational transformation across campus.

For Georgetown, full system integration did not happen on day one. They were able to make progress, demonstrate results, and build momentum without waiting for every element of its technology environment to be transformed.

People-centered change management: Using automation to augment staff, not replace them

Operational transformation depends on the people who use these processes every day. Georgetown involved staff early, giving those closest to the work a voice in designing better workflows.

The university also made clear that AI and automation were intended to eliminate unnecessary manual tasks, not human positions. After gift processing was automated, advancement staff could spend more time on donor relations and stewardship, and Doug noted, “What excites people is being in a community with one another, figuring out where passions overlap, and working together to see it come to life. We’re using AI to repurpose that time to higher value work, simplifying things so people can actually spend more time with one another.” 

Bringing employees into the process also helped with change management. Staff contributed their knowledge and experience to workflow design, giving them greater ownership of the changes.

Conclusion: Why frictionless operations are essential to student success

When institutions eliminate operational friction, it gives staff time back, and students feel the difference right away. Cutting routine administrative burdens gives staff and faculty the bandwidth to step away from paperwork and focus on meaningful engagement, mentorship, and relationship building. When staff are empowered to provide proactive, high-touch support rather than troubleshooting backlogs, institutions create an environment where students spend less time navigating red tape and more time thriving in their education.

Georgetown’s journey shows how transformation can build over time, starting with a focused use case, measuring the results, and expanding from each success.

As Doug told higher education leaders at EDUCAUSE, legacy scale should not paralyze progress. Start with one meaningful workflow, demonstrate what is possible, and build from there.