February 1999

Volume 14
Number 11

The Best Reason For Converting to a New AIS

Hardly any college or university these days is faced with setting up its first automated system for processing campus data. The oldest systems are home-grown ones that in some cases have been around for twenty-five years, sometimes with the original builders of the system still around, keeping it going. In other cases, a school has a commercial software package that is on its last legs: either the company has fallen by the wayside, or the school dropped maintenance long ago and got stuck in a web of local modifications.

The looming threat of complications when the calendar clicks over to 2000 has motivated many institutions to look at replacing their current systems. But even if a college has dodged the Y2K bullet, there are many other motivations for moving on. For instance:

People keep complaining about the flaws in the current system and may even be using those flaws as an excuse to cover other kinds of problems not related to computing. Management is getting tired of defending the current system.

The keepers of the current system are approaching a time when they might leave or retire, leaving the current system unsupported.

From the top down, the mandate has come to improve the effectiveness of the information management system. Sometimes this is precipitated by a dramatic event that highlights the lack of adequate safeguards or monitoring abilities (i.e., A Really Big Scare), or by a demanding project such as a capital campaign, or by the arrival of a new administrator or trustee who places a high priority on information.

There is a creeping embarrassment about the dated nature of the current system. Sure it works, but it has begun to look more and more retro when compared with the software people use all day on their microcomputers. Oft-repeated phrases in the press seem like personal rebukes to the system: Aintranet,@ Agraphical user interface,@ Aclient-server,@ even Arelational database.@ It=s time to catch up.

Reasons like these may help stimulate a change. But, as anyone who has gone through a software conversion will honestly tell you, there is so much effort to doing it right, and so much pain to doing it wrong, that you need institutional motives strong enough to sustain you along the journey.

There are three important groups of reasons for converting to a new AIS.

Efficiency. A new system will help the institution do its business faster and more accurately, with less reliance on human brawn. Those most involved: institution staff who carry out day-to-day operations.

Management. A new system will aid the institution in planning, monitoring, and guiding its operations to make better use of its resources and more effectively move toward its goals. Those most involved: the institution=s executives and those who provide them with analytic data, such as institutional researchers and budget directors.

Service. A new system will improve the services the institution provides to its most important constituencies and even make new kinds of services possible. Those most involved: students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members, and those who concern themselves with delivering the services that are demanded by the institution=s mission.

The first two reasons, efficiency and management, have been clear for a longer time than the third. They arise out of the inner needs of the institution. This view sees a new AIS as a gift the institution gives itself, even if the goal is to help the institution ultimately do a better job. This is thinking from the inside outwards. To move to the third reason requires a flip in vision.

From the outside in
Service becomes the focus when you think from the outside in. Instead of asking what kind of tools we need to do our current job better, the service approach asks what kind of service do our constituents need and deserve, and what can we change to serve them better.

If you ask students what they want from a new AIS, you may hear this: to select courses without lining up at the registrar=s office, to check on the charges on my account, to see the status of my financial aid, to find out my grades. Faculty will answer: to find Aall about@ an advisee while the student is sitting before me in my office, to obtain up-to-the-minute class lists, to simplify paperwork by submitting it online. Alumni may want to have a direct way to change their address for the alumni magazine, to make a gift, or to get contact information about their classmates.

What many of these services have in common is the paradigm shift from administrative offices providing information to a self-service model where constituents can access vital information themselves. Vendors of new AIS systems will certainly make much of their product=s ability to create a self-service virtual campus. The institution itself, however, may have to do some thinking to decide whether these new features are really compatible with its core values.

Reasons to not change
One reaction that is frequently heard is this: Our institution has always prided itself on the personal touch. We don=t want to lose contact with students, substituting a cold, mechanical computer for the individual concern provided by our staff. Why, the registrar (financial aid director, bursar) even keeps a jar of candies on the desk just to lure students into the office! If we have online registration, for example, students will no longer get expert counseling from their faculty advisers. If students can remove an academic hold by paying a bill online, we=ll never get to talk to the student about the problems that might have caused the hold in the first place.

This is one of those fallacies-wrapped-in-a-truth. Of course individual attention is important. Smart institutions are finding mechanisms for providing it other than force feeding it by making students jump through red-tape hoops. These institutions have decided that this is not an either/or situation. The system can provide rich and up-to-date information to students when they need it, not just during business hours. Complementing this service, the campus staff can direct their personal assistance to those students who have more than routine problems.

A more practical worry is that self-service information systems will throw everything out of kilter by wresting the dissemination of information out of the control of the offices that are responsible for it. For instance, the financial aid office may worry that students will look at their information before packaging is complete, or a dean may worry that students will see that a class is not filling up and stay away for fear it will be canceled. There is an important principle to be established here: the flow of information should be controlled by institutional policy and not by the way the software is designed. Following this principle, making sure that the new package allows the financial aid office to determine when each student=s award becomes viewable on-line and making sure the registrar can control which course information is displayed is important. The goal should be to select a system that allows fine-grained control over who accesses what information, and when.

Another practical concern is the Mickey Mouse problem, the fear that allowing online data entry by students, applicants, and other clients will invite frivolous and fake data entry. A good modern system will protect you from this, permitting the use of PINs for known users and allowing review of input from unknown users before it is posted to the system.

Perhaps the most worrisome exposure for self-service systems is the danger of unauthorized access. But campus information systems can be protected by the same means that protect Web commerce sites. What if the system crashes, now that everyone is so dependent on it? Not skimping on technical staff, implementing best practices and proactive safeguards for operating the system, and establishing alternative processes so business can be carried on with manual methods while the system is unexpectedly down will help manage this risk.

Serious resistance to self-service systems may come from a less recognizable source. Such a change in service philosophy may seem to change some people=s jobs and responsibilities in an unwelcome way. Work may shift between departments and boundaries may get blurred. And some people will simply regret the greater reliance on computers. It is best to confront these effects head-on during a very participatory campus-wide selection and implementation process.

The payoff
Once you have set out on the path toward self-service, you can start to provide new services and combine old services in new ways. For instance, if students are maintaining their own directory information on-line, they can also be given the power to control the dissemination of that information with more refinement than was practical before when changes had to be made by campus office staff. By clicking check boxes on their own control screen, students could determine which bits of information they wished to allow others to see. They might want their campus extension to be displayed in the online directory, but not their home phone, for example. Students could also allow some of their information to be accessed only by people on campus. This access control would only affect the public directory, of course, and would not alter the ability of the appropriate campus offices to call up the information.

The integration of services from the client=s point of view that marks this new model also invites an examination of how services are parceled out among various administrative offices. Are there rules that only exist because of the way your institution is organized? For instance, has anyone on your campus ever told a student something like this: ANo, sorry, you=ll have to go to the registrar=s office to have that hold lifted after you=ve made the payment in the bursar=s office@? You may want to recombine responsibilities after you=ve looked at your activities from the point of view of the client trying to get something done.

Can an old information system learn new tricks?
It is easy to underestimate what it takes to convert an old-style, transaction-based system into the kind of self-service system we have been discussing. (This holds true whether you are thinking about retrofitting your current system or are evaluating a commercial system that has been quickly made over.) Simply adding a browser Afront-end@ to a database does not automatically create a system that allows clients to become managers of their own information. What ties together the database and the user interface is the most important element of any sophisticated information system: the business rules and processes. These are the underlying programs and algorithms that determine the chain of events that gets triggered when someone initiates an activity. In earlier systems, much of this logic was contained in the brains of those who used the software. These human wardens knew that if they changed something Over Here, there were three or four Over Theres that needed to be taken care of as well. Dropped a course? Someone was smart enough to check how many courses you had left and to make any necessary adjustments in financial aid, housing eligibility, and maybe even your meal plan.

If your system is going to be an effective self-service environment, all that awareness of rules and consequences has to be built into the system, and the results have to be effectively communicated to the client. An alternative design is that the system alerts a human counselor who then takes over in dealing with the consequences.

Trend or vital evolution?
Some of those responsible for campus information systems are duly skeptical of what seems like much ado about colored screens, icons, and mouse clicks. Often decades and whole careers have been invested in adapting software to campus policies, whether that software was developed in-house or purchased. Sober people are right to want more reason than mere good looks to change the whole fabric of information management on a campus.

But many schools have concluded that there is something to the new service model that touches their main mission. They have also come to understand that higher education now works within a larger context. The expectations our constituents bring with them are set by the range of services people use in their daily lives, off campus. Institutions of higher education, as examples of complex service organizations, are being judged by comparison with the best services that are offered in any field. And those are getting better every day. JS

John Savarese is a consultant with Edutech International.

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