By Tammy L. Aagard, Ed.D, Managing Consultant, AACRAO Consulting
Dear AACRAO Consultants,
Our campus was an early adopter of a vendor-provided student information system (SIS). Over the years, we have moved further and further from baseline functionality with modifications and add-ons to meet our campus's nuanced process or policy needs. When combined with the proliferation of niche technology products to support various functions and processes (e.g., advising, CRM, student success, online education) that require integrations with the SIS, the complexity of our technology ecosystem is limiting our ability to modernize our SIS. Some on our campus are pushing to move to a cloud-based system. What do we need to consider in preparation for the adoption and implementation of a new system?
Signed,
AACRAO Member
Dear AACRAO Member,
Planning to implement a new SIS is much like readying yourself for a cross-country move. Time spent prioritizing items' importance, determining their continued functionality, purging outdated, broken, or unnecessary things, and cleaning/repairing the ones that you need to bring with you can streamline the move to a new system.
Before packing and moving all of the current policies, processes, data issues, and historical modifications from one system to another, systematic and thoughtful housecleaning is critical. The results of this planning approach will yield benefits in time and resources, and prevent scope creep regardless of the SIS product chosen.
This planning exercise includes:
- Establishing a set of guiding principles to provide a structure for decision-making, prioritization, and allocation of resources
- Working with the academic side of the institution to conduct a policy review (e.g., academic standing, grading scales, repeated courses)
- Conducting a business process analysis for each core function to identify essential and unnecessary steps
- Creating data cleanliness reports and beginning the process of cleaning historical data that would be migrated
- Mapping your curriculum structure and data fields
- Identifying integrations with other vendor-provided systems to include data fields, type of integration (i.e., real-time or batch), and timing of data synchronization
- Cataloging reports that are dependent on data from the SIS
- Creating or enhancing the data warehouse/lake to house historical data to allow for longitudinal reporting across the old and new SIS
- If not already in place, establish a strong data governance structure with its first task to develop comprehensive data definitions
AACRAO members, do you have a question for our team of higher education consultants? Send your "Ask a Consultant" question to consulting@aacrao.org.
For more information on how AACRAO Consulting can assist your campus with SEM planning, visit our website or contact us via email at consulting@aacrao.org.
For more information on SEM planning and the power of LinkEx as a tool for managing planning fatigue, visit the AACRAO Bookstore to order the SEM trilogy of books: