Taking the Bull by the Horns

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Taking the Bull by the Horns

7/20/2006

By Mary Grush

Whether raising blue-ribbon livestock or developing the latest community source software, Lee Belarmino’s success is based on tackling new challenges.

Belarmino on community source:
"What’s important are your ideas, your ability
to produce and get along with the community."

Lee Belarmino isn’t timid about embarking on new adventures, and his career reflects that. At Educause 2005, he gave a talk called, “Community Source ERP: What? Are You Crazy?” Belarmino and his peers at San Joaquin Delta College (CA) have since been instrumental in the development of Kuali financials, the first bold step for community source administrative software.

You’ve worked in information technology for many years. Could you tell us about your background? I’ve been at this for 40 years, starting in California’s Silicon Valley working for a large development service company. But I was ahead of my time with Silicon Valley burnout: I personally had to lay off a lot of good people, and that took its toll. So, I retreated over the Altamont [pass], bought a farm, and went to work at San Joaquin Delta College. I didn’t know much about farming or academia, but I was looking for a better quality of life for my family—I have four kids—and me.

Most of my tech friends said that I wouldn’t last long in academia, that I would be bored and come back with my tail between my legs. But that never happened; I’ve always been super-stimulated. I’m in charge of all the technology at the college—not only the business problems, but the academic. It’s been wonderful. And our family ended up raising rodeo bulls, which keeps me well balanced, between working with technology and living on the farm.

Is there a connection between learning about farming and jumping into higher ed? Is it all about “taking the bull by the horns”? It’s true! You just have to learn to be aggressive and learn the hard way.

What transferred well from your experience in industry? My orientation and foundation is built on development, on providing services to our customers. And I still believe in a very strong ethic of service. Being in charge of instructional as well as administrative IT at Delta, I figured out that ultimately, everything— from registration and computer labs, to back-end processes—has to help the students.

You developed an in-house administrative system for the college, which earned a lot of recognition. Can you tell us more about how that came about? The business systems were not working, and that had to change. But we weren’t just interested in the latest technology for technology’s sake, so we protected our legacy investment in processing on a very large mainframe Unisys system while we did our research on all the major players in the administrative world. We found the choices extremely pricey for what they were delivering. So, we developed our own administrative system—almost a full suite: a student information system, a human resources system, and a payroll system. As the first large-scale administrative system based on objectoriented development, it took a number of industry awards. We do have an off-the-shelf Oracle financial system, though.