At William Woods University, an admissions CRM administrator had a peculiar problem. He had a modern software platform, Salesforce, and very little time to administer it. Joe Enright said legacy data consumed about 95 percent of his working day. The university’s application workflows and integrations needed attention. Manual work had become the routine. The machine was there; the room to use it was missing.
- SIG fixes the work around the software: admissions, financial aid, reporting and the connections between them.
- Its tools are mostly other companies’ platforms: Ellucian, Salesforce and Slate.
- The payoff to look for: fewer manual tasks, clearer ownership and systems staff can maintain.
SIG redesigned application processes, improved integrations and worked with William Woods on testing and ongoing improvements. Enright’s description of the result was refreshingly modest. In a market fond of transformation, getting someone’s Tuesday back is a rather good place to start.
“It allowed me to do my actual job.”
Joe Enright / Admissions CRM Administrator, William Woods University
The system outside the system
SIG, short for Strata Information Group, is a consulting and technology services company serving higher education. It helps institutions choose, implement, connect and support the administrative systems behind campus life. Think student records, admissions, finance, fundraising and security. These are the systems that make an institution function when nobody is looking at its prospectus.
Its position is unusually revealing. SIG does not need to invent a replacement for every platform. It can work between a software vendor and a university, helping translate technical capabilities into departmental routines. Its market is the distance between owning a feature and making useful work happen with it.
The 30 steps nobody missed
Consider San Mateo County Community College District. Rising financial-aid demand exposed a cumbersome, inconsistent process across three colleges. SIG ran a three-day workshop, mapping tasks and identifying workarounds. Staff were maintaining shadow systems while available ERP functions went underused.
The redesign reduced a process of more than 50 steps to 20. A review one year later reported 12 automated financial-aid processes and a reduction in tracking documents from 120 to fewer than 40. These are SIG’s published case-study results. The interesting achievement is the subtraction: fewer places for work to wait.
Financial-aid processing steps
The first thing to buckle was the working method. Increasing demand made its limitations harder to tolerate. The response was to examine the route an application took, with the people responsible for moving it along in the same conversation. That makes a different shopping list from simply asking which new system to buy.
A campus translator, with a bill
SIG sells expert time and continuing support. An institution can bring in specialists for a defined project, supplement an internal team or arrange managed services. Database administration, cloud transitions and application support sit alongside process redesign. Strategic advice can lead into implementation, and implementation can lead into an ongoing relationship.
This is consequential spending. An October 2024 Valencia College proposal put the annual ceiling for SIG’s technical support at approximately $1.6 million. The same proposal allocated about $1.1 million to CampusWorks. Those were proposed limits, not invoices. They show both the scale of one institutional engagement and the presence of a credible alternative.
Proposed annual ceiling for SIG support at Valencia College, October 2024. A client-specific budget, not a price list.
CampusWorks also offers higher education managed services and application support. Vendor implementation teams and an institution’s own employees provide other options. SIG’s case rests on combining campus operating knowledge with expertise across several platforms. The buyer should judge that combination against the particular job, rather than assume a specialist label settles the comparison.
Buying the missing pieces
SIG’s expansion has followed a recognizable map. The 2022 akaCRM acquisition added Salesforce capability. Triaxiom Security followed in 2023. RHB brought Slate and institutional marketing expertise in 2024, and BHA added Colleague depth in 2025. Each purchase supplied another piece of the administrative puzzle.
Fort Point Capital recapitalized SIG in 2021 to support succession and growth. It says revenue more than doubled and EBITDA increased more than fourfold during its ownership. Ridgemont announced its investment in January 2025, with Fort Point retaining a minority stake. The growth story belongs partly to acquisitions and partly to the economics of specialist services.
The part you can copy
The practical lesson turns up again at Northeastern Illinois University. During its move to Banner SaaS, SIG helped evaluate integrations rather than reproduce everything. Some could be replaced by functionality already available in Banner. Reports were examined for whether they should survive, merge or disappear. Moving a system created an occasion to question its accumulated baggage.
Portland State offers another example. SIG helped replace a default Slate status page with a graduate applicant portal serving more than 100 programs, including international student document workflows. The team could use applicant activity to identify when a personal conversation might accomplish more than another automated reminder.
Copy the sequence: map one troublesome workflow, identify its owner, test what existing software can do, then decide what to remove. Count handoffs and repeated entry before promising savings. This approach depends on people having the authority to change routines. SIG’s recent guidance on stalled ERP projects makes that constraint explicit: technical expertise cannot resolve every leadership gap.
Its AI and data practice extends the same reasoning to governance, analytics and readiness. An institution still needs dependable information and agreed responsibilities before it can use a new tool sensibly. The next purchase may be justified. First, it helps to know why the last one left so much work behind.