Joy Walton

Joy has more than 24 years of experience assisting colleges, universities and research institutions with information systems design and implementation, research administration, and operational improvement. She is a founding member of the firm and currently serves as a managing director as well as the talent and culture executive sponsor within Huron’s education business.

About Joy

Joy has over 24 years of experience leading strategic, operational and technology transformations, including serving as a leader in growing the firm’s cloud and enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities for Huron’s higher education and healthcare clients. Throughout her career, Joy has:

• Led numerous universities through software selection and implementation projects, including applications for pre-award and compliance functionality, financial systems, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
• Managed a comprehensive PeopleSoft Grants 8.4 implementation and process redesign project at a large, public Midwest university, impacting the research foundation, university and health system.
• Overseen the development of a financial system strategy and system readiness assessment for a large private research university and academic health center, focusing on the business needs of senior-level financial and academic officers, department managers, and principal investigators across the institution.
• Conducted a diagnostic review of the contracts and grants accounting function at a public research university, focused on compliance, organizational, process, personnel and technological issues of the post-award process.
• Led a management review of administrative processes for a major multicampus, state-governed university system, which resulted in detailed recommendations for administrative areas such as business services, purchasing, facilities and planning, human resources, payroll, information technology, grants and contracts, auxiliaries, and public safety.

Joy is a frequent speaker at the National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) and Oracle/PeopleSoft higher education user meetings.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in accountancy from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.