Information Technology

The classic registration scenario of bouncing students from their advisor to select classes, to the Business Office to check for holds, and finally to the Registrar’s Office to stand in line is so 20th century—but hard to escape. Everyone at Catawba College (N.C.) agreed it was time to modernize, but faculty advisors did not want their role in the process diminished or to lose a touch point with students. “Advising is an important part of Catawba’s mission to give every student the personal attention needed to be successful,” shares Joanna Jasper, chief information officer.

As students “swirl” through higher education, taking classes at multiple institutions either consecutively or simultaneously, the need for institutions to quickly receive and process transcripts becomes more important. To comply with accreditation standards, Houston Community College was supposed to have all transcripts evaluated by the end of a student’s first semester, a goal their paper-based process was not allowing them to meet in 2008.

Buying computers for a college campus is no small feat. In addition to requisitioning and specing them before the purchase, there is the configuration and instillation after the purchase to worry about.

Like many institutions over the last several years, Salisbury University (Md.) paid handsomely for an enterprise resource planning system. Also like many institutions, Salisbury discovered that while its ERP solution handled larger functions just fine, there were gaps in the system—in areas such as housing, medical and athletic records, course evaluation, and human resources search management—that required the purchase and implementation of third-party products to fill.

Although the University of Virginia has approximately 200,000 living alumni, until recently, the university was only communicating electronically with a fraction of them; 43,000 had email addresses on record. Because the university consists of so many campus organizations—11 schools and 30 foundations—creating and managing a central alumni database for online communications proved difficult. Each school and foundation managed its own list of email recipients. The information “was very siloed,” explains Deke Shrum, assistant director of interactive media at U.Va.

Students have enough on their plates without having to worry about properly receiving their work-study hours from their financial aid packages. But, paper time cards and siloed systems were making life difficult for students and staff alike at Catawba College (N.C.).

New students understandably want to get going in their studies as soon as possible. So as soon as a new student’s data was recorded in SunGard Banner, its ERP system, NorthWest Arkansas Community College issued a temporary password providing access to an online portal with class information, registration capabilities, and so on.

Like many institutions, Murray State University (Ky.) paid a vendor to back up its data regularly and store it off-site for retrieval in case a disaster struck campus and wiped out hard drives and servers. But university administrators found the service lacking for a variety of reasons: It was pricey in lean times, recovering information was too lengthy a process, and effective testing was practically nonexistent.

You can’t just toss an old computer into the corner trash can when it has outlived its usefulness.

Because of the environmental issues involved, special care must be taken in disposing of such equipment. Often, that involves paying for proper disposal. If you do choose to trash aging PCs in a Dumpster, you need to wipe any sensitive data from each one’s hard drive for security and privacy reasons.

You need something done. What are you told?

“Fill out a form.”

Western Washington University officials figured there had to be a better way. The use of hard-copy forms to request services, they believed, was a waste of paper and time, as the requisitions had to be sent via campus mail to the appropriate parties, who in turn had to review, copy, and file them. Each person in the approval chain needed his or her own copy, and there was no central repository where the forms could be accessed easily.