What have you wanted your orientation program to do, but something keeps getting in the way?
I’ve heard versions of the same sentence from orientation professionals for years:
“We’ve always wanted to do this, but…”
But our registration process works this way.
But we’d have to build another spreadsheet.
But our students have too many different requirements.
But our schedules are too complicated.
But advising needs different information.
But families have a different experience.
But we’d have to get data from another system.
But our staff would have to manage it manually.
Those “buts” matter.
Sometimes they represent a legitimate institutional decision that technology should respect.
Sometimes they’re a workaround that has quietly been deciding what the orientation program is allowed to become.
This is where the distinction between an orientation model and a workaround becomes important.
Every institution operates orientation differently.
There are different people involved, different responsibilities, different systems, different student populations, and different decisions about how the experience should work.
Those differences aren’t problems for technology to eliminate.
They’re part of understanding the institution.
But when a good idea repeatedly gets pushed aside because implementing it would require another spreadsheet, another manual handoff, or another process for staff to maintain, it’s worth asking whether the limitation actually belongs in the orientation model.
Or whether the team has simply learned to work around it.
VZOS® is VisualZen’s Orientation Management Platform for colleges and universities.
It is built around something we’ve learned repeatedly from orientation professionals:
You shouldn’t have to design your orientation around our software.
An institution may need technology to participate in registration, student preparation, personalized schedules, participation, advising preparation, family programs, student leaders, communications, or other parts of its orientation operation.
That does not mean VZOS needs to own all of them.
The appropriate role depends on the institution.
VZOS can take on the parts of the orientation operation where the institution needs it while working alongside other institutional systems that should continue owning their part of the work.
Our job is to understand the orientation model an institution is trying to operate.
What should happen?
Who owns the work?
Which institutional decisions need to be preserved?
Where should another system remain the system of record?
Where are staff compensating for something their current process doesn’t handle well?
Only then can we make a useful decision about where VZOS should participate.
Sometimes that means replacing a manual process.
Sometimes it means connecting information that currently lives in different places.
Sometimes it means giving staff visibility they didn’t have before.
Sometimes it means supporting a population or experience differently.
And sometimes it means bringing a back-burner idea forward and finally asking:
“Could VZOS help us do this?”
As orientation professionals begin thinking about another cycle, I think that’s a question worth asking.
Not:
What does our current process allow us to do?
But:
If you weren’t designing around the limitations of your current process, what would you want your orientation program to do differently?
Then we can figure out what belongs in the institutional model, what belongs in another campus system, and where an Orientation Management Platform like VZOS can appropriately help.
That’s the kind of problem we built VZOS to help solve.