The Top 5 Higher-Ed Insights We Heard Loud and Clear at SmartPath’s 2025 UGM
The SmartPath User Group Meeting (UGM) is always a valuable pulse check on the state of faculty affairs. This year, professionals from across academic institutions — research, teaching, and clinical — came together to share challenges, successes, and priorities. Their candor gave us a clear view of the road ahead. Here are the five insights that stood out.
Insight 1: Complexity Persists — Simplicity Remains the Expectation
Across academic institutions, complexity is the rule, not the exception. Faculty affairs professionals are navigating a volatile environment shaped by rapid policy shifts, declining enrollments, hiring freezes, and financial scrutiny. These external pressures often distract staff from their core mission: supporting faculty success in teaching, research, service, and leadership.
The faculty model itself is shifting. While some schools are redefining or even moving away from tenure, others hold it as central to their identity. Meanwhile, enrollment challenges are reshaping budgets, forcing tighter oversight, and fueling freezes or reductions in hiring.
At the same time, faculty titles and tracks remain highly complex — with some institutions introducing new frameworks like “domains of excellence” to simplify. Promotions, reappointments, and reviews continue at high volumes, and staff turnovers mean new hires must be trained quickly to keep things moving. For medical and dental schools, growth adds another layer of difficulty, since many faculty are distributed across hospitals, clinics, and community practices, each with unique requirements.
This fragmentation extends further when multiple schools or units within one university need distinct policies, offer letters, and workflows. For faculty affairs teams, the workload is sustained and unrelenting.
Key idea: Complexity is inevitable, but cognitive overload is not. The call from UGM is clear: institutions want configurable systems that absorb and automate the complexity while presenting faculty and staff with clean, guided workflows that reduce friction and keep the focus on people, not processes.
Insight 2: Demonstrating and Driving Value Is Essential
In today’s financial climate, every dollar is under scrutiny. Budgets are tightening, enrollments are difficult to predict or declining, and academic institutions are under pressure to prove the value of their systems and processes. Faculty affairs teams aren’t just expected to keep things moving — they’re expected to show, in measurable terms, how their work drives efficiency, compliance, and institutional success.
That means moving beyond anecdotes to metrics. Teams want to capture baseline measurements at go-live and then track improvements over time. The measures that matter most? Time saved in onboarding and review cycles. Accuracy and compliance rates. Risk reduction and efficiency gains that reduce delays and free faculty to focus on teaching, research, and clinical care.
Institutions also see value in going beyond ROI calculations. With the right data, faculty affairs teams can spot bottlenecks, surface trends, and highlight opportunities for improvement — all of which strengthen their case for resources and demonstrate their strategic importance to leadership.
Key idea: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved — or defended. Faculty information systems must provide built-in ways to document their value while surfacing insights that drive ongoing efficiency and effectiveness.
Insight 3: Prioritizing Ease for the Occasional User
For most faculty, engagement with a faculty information system is infrequent—a few key points each year such as annual reviews, activity reporting, or promotion packet preparation. This creates a design challenge: the experience has to feel intuitive and welcoming even without frequent use.
At SmartPath’s 2025 UGM, the message was clear: Faculty want workflows that minimize effort, reduce clicks, and guide them directly to what matters next. Administrators also emphasized the need for tools that allow them to instantly “see what faculty see” so they can troubleshoot without lengthy back-and-forth.
The good news? Faculty already report that once they’re in the workflow, “it just works.” Clear design has already improved adoption and reduced training needs. The opportunity now is to keep building on these strengths—simplifying navigation, adding clarity, and continuing to make every interaction friction-free.
Key idea: Design for the once- or twice-a-year user. In higher ed faculty data management, success isn’t about teaching faculty new vocabularies—it’s about removing the need for them altogether.
Insight 4: AI Is Moving from Curiosity to Practical Sidekick—But Some Non-Negotiable Guardrails
The conversation around AI has evolved. What was once “Should we use it?” is now “Where is it safe and valuable to use?” Institutions are eager to explore AI’s potential, but only in ways that align with campus policies, governance standards, and strict data classifications.
Faculty affairs professionals see real promise in AI for reducing repetitive tasks like drafting and summarizing, navigating complexity by orienting reviewers to large dossiers, and improving data quality through enrichment and normalization. Done well, these capabilities could save time and sharpen focus.
But the enthusiasm comes with clear caution. Institutions are rightly wary about data governance, the use of only campus-approved tools, and the wide range of user aptitude. Built-in safeguards, transparency, and training are as essential as the AI itself.
Key idea: AI belongs inside the faculty information system—not bolted on beside it. The demand is for secure, criteria-aware, explainable assistance that streamlines work without compromising rigor, privacy, or trust.
Insight 5: Integrations and Configurability Are Non-Negotiable
Faculty affairs doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Every institution already has a complex mix of systems and policies. A faculty information system succeeds only if it fits into that environment.
That starts with integrations. Whether it’s Workday, Banner, Interfolio, Scopus, ORCID, or other campus systems, schools expect their platform to pull trusted data in, prevent duplicate entry, and publish clean records out. The guiding principle is simple: authoritative source in; single source of truth out.
It also requires configurability. Higher-ed processes are rarely flexible. Accreditation, compliance, and governance rules drive rigid requirements. Departments need those requirements reflected in workflows, letters, and forms, and they need a system that makes this easy to achieve without slow ticket cycles or costly customization.
And finally, it takes partnership. Institutions want experts who understand faculty affairs and can collaborate to align technology with the way they actually work. Support isn’t just fixing bugs. It’s ensuring the system continues to fit their evolving environment.
Key insight: Integration + configuration + partnership = adoption. Institutions embrace systems that adapt to their ecosystem — not ones that expect them to adapt instead.
The Final Word From SmartPath’s UGM on Navigating Faculty Data Challenges in the Near-Term
A modern faculty information system must absorb complexity, elevate clarity, and prove value with data. That’s what our community told us, that’s what matters, and that’s the way forward we’re continuing to pursue.If you’d like a deeper dive into any of the themes above—we’re happy to share more specifics and examples of what’s worked well for institutions with similar scale and challenges as yours.
Let’s have that conversation. Reach out to an expert or request a demo today.
