Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Mystery Content
Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together
10/7/2004
Lansing Community College
As with Cal Poly, looking ahead at the big picture drove the move to new collaborative software at Lansing State Community College.
Lansing, just an hour outside Detroit, wanted to save money by consolidating and simplifying its systems. A quick move and immediate savings characterized the school’s move to Oracle Collaboration Suite. Lansing immediately cut direct IT costs by $600,000 a year by consolidating its infrastructure.
CIO Glenn Cerny says the school also wanted to enhance the quality of its data,
and allow different aspects of the school to work together. Whatever software
choices the school made needed to drive its strategic plan as well. That meant
all decisions needed to feed into “using data more wisely, having it more
accessible, and having quality data in general,” Cerny says.
The data needs were important—the school registers 20,000 students a semester,
and as a community college, sees lots of turnover.
Lansing’s multiple databases in the previous system meant that collaboration between systems was impossible. “We had multiple systems, and obviously with multiple systems you’re getting multiple answers to the same question,” Cerny says. For example, Lansing had over 4,000 Access databases querying the same information but getting different results.
Now, Lansing couldn’t be more please with its solution. The integrated system means data is accessible by different people at Lansing with different needs—meaning that collaboration between various workgroups who need to share data can happen. E-mail, calendars, and files are all stored in the same database. That also makes maintenance much easier. “Integration was our key,” Cerny says. “We wanted things to be simple and integrated for the user and also simple for our staff to be able to maintain.”
As an example of how the collaboration possible with file-sharing is saving
Lansing time and money, Cerny cites monthly board meetings. Documents can now
be distributed electronically by pointing all attendees to a central shared
document, where they can review and comment on them well before the meeting.
That saves someone having to pass out paper copies by hand at the last minute,
and allows comment and discussion beforehand. That kind of collaboration “has
been a tremendous win for our campus,” Cerny says.
USD: Reaching Students Early and Often
At the University of San Diego, a 4,800-student private Catholic university in San Diego, the desire to make a dramatic change in how the school reaches out to prospective students was a key factor in moving to new, collaborative software. The school was looking for nothing less than “the ability to change how higher education d'es business,” says Director of Admissions Steve Pultz. After extensive research, the school selected Oracle Collaboration Suite, and is gradually implementing more and more modules.
Before moving to the Oracle system, USD was running a number of individual homemade systems on a mainframe. “We had [separate] systems for admissions, financial age, records—all sil'ed,” Pultz says. Although some of the systems were best-of-breed vendor products and did their individual jobs well, USD lacked the ability to integrate completely, to grow effectively and efficiently, and to provide an all-important Web interface.
Recommended Reading
- MANAGING EXCELLENCE: Campus Management Offers Another Choice for ERP
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations don’t have to take years and cost millions. Just ask Campus Management Corporation. The Boca Raton, Florida-based firm offers robust but rapidly deployable ERP solutions for colleges and universities focused on student services.
- REINVENTING HISTORY
Sometimes the best way to respond to technology challenges is to innovate.
- Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms
- Creating Tomorrow’s Classrooms
- Industry Resources
- Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together
