One of my favorite parts of working with higher education institutions is visiting clients on-site. Every time I visit a campus — without fail — I learn something new or insightful, or just downright useful. This proved true once again when I visited a school about a week ago.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that this institution has a team of admissions officers using Intelliworks to help drive and support their enrollment plans. By any measure, they are achieving their targets and growing fast.

They had indicated in earlier meetings the need to grow their staff to keep pace with demand for their programs, but now confided that this was no longer necessary. The reason: the efficiency they had seen as a result of deploying our system. Obviously, this was the kind of client visit I dream about. But, while it made me feel good, it didn’t qualify as ground-breaking new learning.

No, what caught my attention was the term that was used in describing the manner in which things had changed. According to our champion, they had achieved “Stealth Efficiency.” Stealth Efficiency was explained as the users of the system becoming far more efficient in their daily jobs “without even realizing it.” In other words, people’s daily lives got easier without their having to go through a painful learning process / training program or dramatically altering behavior.

Wow…now that was something worth really considering and trying to replicate. We’ve all heard of the need to “Do More With Less,” to the point that it has become almost a meaningless cliché. To me, though, this seemed to have real substance – they were actually doing “A Whole Lot MORE with the Same” – which seems like a much more practical approach.

And that is when it hit me: not only should Stealth Efficiency be an objective we have for all of our clients; it is actually something to strive for in managing our own business at Intelliworks. I can envision the internal planning meetings now:

Does it make our existing resources better, faster, more efficient, more effective without a ton of upfront pain? Does it pass the Stealth Efficiency Test? If so we’ll gladly consider investing in it. If not…I’m sorry, but it likely won’t make the 2009 budget.

I can certainly see myself frequently using the “Stealth Efficiency” test much like our engineering team uses an initial “smoke-test” on newly developed code, or our sales team uses the “red-face test” to see if a selling point credibly passes muster, or we deploy a “sniff-test” to see whether some quantitative analysis holds water. All of these are rules of thumb that allow us to make quick, but educated, decisions about an important topic (consistent with the thesis in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink – more on that later).

That said, I will freely admit to liking numbers. And data. And, to whatever degree possible, certainty in decision-making. So, the only question that nagged me throughout the visit was how to test for Stealth Efficiency? How to quantify it? And even more challenging…how to determine “Stealth Efficient” projects BEFORE undertaking them?

Alas, I don’t have the answer to this one. But I will definitely be thinking about it more. Perhaps the next visit to that campus will offer more answers.