FACULTY SENATE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Minutes of September 12, 2007
(unapproved)

The Faculty Senate Executive Committee met at 2:00 PM on Wednesday, September 12, 2007 , in 120 Commons to discuss the following agenda:

1. Report of the Chair
2. Report of the President/Provost
3. Student Systems Transformation Update – Kara C. Saunders
Assistant Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education (CAS)
4. Executive Session: Committee Reviews
Adjournment

 Item 1: Report of the Chair

The Chair reported that Professor Baumer, Vice Provost Ryan, Kara Saunders met with Mick Thompson last Friday to discuss Senate actionable items concerning the upgrading of the student information system which Kara will be presenting on today.

Our grading committee is about to begin discussion on any relevant issues raised here.

The Faculty Student Association Board (FSA) met last Wednesday morning. Peter Nickerson explained that the FSA is doing business as “campus, dining, and shops” but is legally called FSA. The Board is composed of 12 individuals: 6 students, 6 faculty, administrators and staff. There are two faculty members representing the faculty, including Peter Nickerson. The FSA is responsible for a number of things: manages the UB card office, Campus Tees in the Student Union, and as the Spectrum mentioned, FSA is also responsible for the various places around the University community where one can use one's UB card to buy various items. Tops Supermarket is now on board (the UB card can be used there) but Wegmans is not. Peter Nickerson then said that if anyone knew of places that the FSA could contract with, they should contact him. The FSA meets once a month.

Third item: The annual meeting of the Voting Faculty is confirmed for October 2 at 2pm at the Center for Tomorrow in lieu of the regularly scheduled FSEC meeting.

The chair announced that he was in the process of scheduling a joint meeting between the Academic Planning and the Budget Priorities Committee to allow each to know what the other is doing as they progress on the Master planning. The meeting will probably take place early to mid October.

Because some senator suggested that the FSEC brainstorm about which issues the FSEC should tackle, the chair has scheduled the second half of the meeting to discuss committees, possible charges for committees, and to air out some of the issues that the FSEC wants to discuss this semester and next. The chair indicated that he had a list of 10 topics so far that people had suggested to him already.

Lastly, prior to this meeting, the Chair met with two representatives of one of the design consultant firms that are playing an integral role in the Master Planning process: DEGW, known worldwide, that are particularly interested in space program, design, innovative learning environments. They want a lot of input from the Faculty Senate and from the Faculty as a whole, and will probably be attending one of the FSEC meetings in late October (24 or 31) to ask for ideas about faculty needs for future learning environments.

Item 2: Report of the President/Provost

Provost Tripathi reported that he had attended the AAU provost meeting where one of the main topics was “conflict of interest.” This concerned both the Student loan conflict of interest and recently the Study Abroad issue whereby in certain institutions third parties are used to send students abroad in exchange for a kick . While the argument is that the third party use helps make for a better program that is cheaper for everyone, the perception outside is that universities are taking money from the students and these third parties take advantage of it. The provost mentioned Syracuse University as an example of a university that has 6 or 7 locations abroad, but not every university has the resources or capabilities to do study abroad programs and make arrangements with third parties so they can send their students. Because of the money transfer here and there, the question is whether universities are making money off of the whole transaction.

Other issues that came up were the issue of books used by faculty and campus royalties. If a faculty member teaches his or her own book or a colleague's, there might be a conflict of interest. The concern is about collecting royalties for a book that one may not otherwise use for the course. A Reporter article was mentioned according to which some universities have their own university-approved books and all the students had to buy the books that their own faculty published. President Simpson interjected that he would have trouble with this because he knew many of the people whose books he assigned simply by virtue of networking in the field and of scientific professional context. The provost explained that on some campuses, the policy is that if a book is used, royalties go to scholarships for students. The issue is what kind of deals third-party bookstores and vendors give universities, and more discussion needs to take place.

Item 3: Student Systems Transformation Update – Kara C. Saunders

Assistant Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education (CAS)

Kara Saunders, project manager for the Student System's assessment (with Mike Ryan and Beau Willis as project sponsors), explained what the “Student System” is: the IT systems that support the academic activities and service needs of all UB students - undergraduate, graduate and professional (both international and domestic). This includes:

•  Admissions and Recruitment: financial aid, student accounts

•  Advising

•  Career Services

•  Course Scheduling and Curriculum

•  Degree Audit

•  Data Warehouse (reporting)

•  Grading

Concerns Regarding the Current Student System:

•  Lack of system flexibility

•  Limits of system functionality

•  Lack of integration: because of all of these separate components

•  Costliness of operations

•  Management of risk : risky to run a system built on older technology

•  Need for capacity to support anticipated growth: the system has to support the growth

Current operations tend to be in a mode of crisis management, rather than strategic planning.

Instead of reacting to frustrations, now the focus is on planning. So the group talked to a number of peer institutions who had gone through this process to figure out how to approach this very large task.

The Process for a New System includes:

Three phases:

•  Phase I - Review and assessment of our current system, future needs, and process re-design options : understand our needs + student needs

•  Phase II - Software evaluation, acquisition and implementation planning

•  Phase III – Implementation : which is the most time consuming process

Student Systems Assessment: Committees that have been operating this summer

Executive Steering Committee charged with setting the guiding principles for the project and ultimately making the decision about which system to go with. Representation from all the different offices involved

•  Beau Willis, Chair and Executive Sponsor, Office of the President

•  Satish Tripathi, Executive Sponsor, Provost

•  Michael Ryan, Project Sponsor, Undergraduate Education

•  Elias Eldayrie, Project Sponsor, Chief Information Officer

•  Dennis Black, Student Affairs

•  David Dunn, Health Sciences

•  John T. Ho, Graduate School

•  R. Nils Olsen, Dean, Law School

Project Team group of people that are assessing the business processes, determining the direction to go in, doing the detailed evaluation of the proposals received from different vendors:

•  Kara Saunders, Project Manager, Undergraduate Education

•  Paul Giebel, Project Manager, Moran Technology Consulting

•  Sue Huston, Technical Lead, Administrative Computing Services

•  Kellie Kostek, Functional Co-Lead, SARFS

•  Cheryl Taplin, Functional Co-Lead, SARFS and Student Advising Services

•  Pat Armstrong, Admissions

•  Bill Baumer, faculty representative, Faculty Senate

•  Jeff Dutton, Institutional Analysis

•  Sandra Flash, Dental School

•  Jennifer Hess, Pharmacy

•  John Grabowski, Purchasing

•  Robinette Kelley, Human Resources

•  Mark Molnar, Academic Planning and Budget

•  Barb Ricotta, Student Affairs

•  Charles Severin, Medical School

•  Steven Shaw, International Education

•  Mick Thompson, Graduate School

•  Lillie Wiley-Upshaw, Law School

•  The only member who is not from UB on the Project Team is Paul Giebel, Project Manager, Moran Technology Consulting, because the group felt that someone who had been through the process before could help.

Phase I: Process Review and Needs Assessment

•  Deliverables:

•  Identify and evaluate current business processes

•  Identify existing and future needs

•  Prepare and engage campus regarding process re-design

•  Process:

•  Change Readiness and High-Level IT Assessments that Moran Technology Consulting is doing

•  Workshops to address student systems strategic planning, process re-design, change management: 16 different groups dedicated to the different functional areas: e.g. daylong workshops for undergraduate admissions, graduate and professional admissions, records and registration, professional records and registrations, financial aid etc. where we went through the processes one at a time, how to recruit? How to track that information? So as to understand where improvement needed, where strengths that can be worked with.

•  Decision Director survey – a web-based stakeholder voting, brainstorming, and decision support system that is designed specifically to help universities plan for and select ERP systems (ERP = having one software system that solves all of the administrative needs of the institution; the ultimate goal of every university)

Peer institutions consulted: Purdue University, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia Community College System, Arizona State, but now that we are in the choosing process, we are working with 30 to 40 institutions

Results so far:

Change Readiness Assessment: involving discussions with people from the functional side of the house: associate vice-provost, different vice provosts, different directors within student academic records and financial services and other people throughout the university. The issue is how do these people approach the SIS and what that says about where we need to go. Results were:

•  Positive thing: Feeling that “we're all in this together”: we all have problems and not a lot of blame going around. Strength to foster and work with

•  Negative thing: Historical lack of commitment to quality communication and training: a lot people didn't know how to use things, they didn't feel they were optimizing their time

Solution:

•  Developed and followed through on strong communication plan

•  Emphasis on training while working with vendors during implementation planning: training is what people skip once in a while as budgets get tight, a huge mistake

•  Cultural issues – Staff resistance to change, the distributed nature of responsibilities which is a strength but also a weakness, need for participation in decision making

•  Communication plan

•  Participatory, open campus-wide process

•  Human Resources representative on Project Team added

•  Frustration concerning Ownership of and access to data

•  Emphasize in Guiding Principles and implementation planning: the goal is that people have ready access to the data that they need

•  Support from Information Technology: feeling of lack of support from Professional Technology people

•  Conduct IT Assessment and act on results

•  Skills and staff assessment across the university

•  Commitment of executive leadership to a new student system

•  Communication plan so people realize that this is indeed going to happen

IT Assessment

•  IT Communications

•  Tactical and Strategic Planning

•  Staffing Constraints and Skill Sets

•  Change Management/Controls

•  Customer Service/End-User Support

•  Collaboration within CIT

•  Security

•  Facility Capacity Planning

Guiding Principles developed with the help of the Executive Steering Committee and the Project Team

that will guide the student system selection as well as the implementation

Regarding our processes and system needs, recognize whether students or staff are the customers to be served:

•  For every student-related process, we will: identify the customers of the process; work with them to determine their real needs; and strive to provide them with outstanding customer service.

•  We will maximize our use of new student system self-service functionality.

•  We will collaboratively develop common student processes and data across the entire institution, while still supporting the truly unique and compelling needs of our schools.

•  We will become an institution that makes "data based" decisions through the use of “easy to use” management reporting processes and technologies.

•  We will treat information as a strategic asset that is: commonly defined; electronically captured once at its point of origin; and appropriately shared across the entire institution.

•  Students, faculty and staff should have easy, well-supported electronic access to the data and information necessary to perform and manage their university functions, thereby eliminating the need to create shadow systems.

Guidelines for implementation:

•  Customizations (changing the code so the system does something different from what it was supposed to do) to the new student system will be kept to an absolute minimum. Any request for a customization will be subject to a thorough business case review to justify its necessity.

•  We will establish decision due dates to keep our projects on time and on budget. If these due dates are not met, the delayed decision will immediately be escalated and made by the appropriate decision maker – the project will then move on.

•  We will work as a "silo-free" team to solve the problems of our students, faculty, staff.

•  We will create customer participation opportunities and two-way communications channels to ensure that our project choices meet real user needs.

•  Full participation is expected – non-responsiveness or non-engagement implies agreement.

•  All new information technology purchases related to student information and student systems must be reviewed and approved by the university CIO.

Phase I: Process Review and Needs Assessment

•  Change Readiness and IT Assessments – April and May

•  Workshops – May and June

•  Over 200 participants from all the different colleges and schools as well as different administrative offices

•  Results: Thorough Process Documentation, Opportunities (for change), and Requirements translated out of the processes we go through to support students

•  Survey – July

•  Over 350 participants completed some portion of the survey

•  Approximately 90,000 responses to individual items were received: the company that did this and had done it over 150 campuses, reported that UB had the record # of responses

•  Results: 3600 Requirements in the survey with those that applied to faculty excerpted out, Opportunities, Level of Need

•  Updates to the campus throughout through the Reporter, Spectrum, soliciting feed, offering updates, soliciting feed

•  Request For Information for Software Vendors: ask them to provide info about who they are as a company, what their technical platform is, to respond to the 3700 requirements and telling us how their software solutions meet each one of their needs

•  Request For Proposals for Integration Firms: implementation of a student system necessitates an integration firm

Phase II: System selection and Planning

Deliverables:

•  Highly structured and scripted vendor demonstrations: each is given 40 scenarios and has to explain how they do the same scenario, how they track students they are recruiting etc.

•  Evaluation of RFI responses, including fit/gap analysis for each software option: how each vendor fails to meet the needs: team of about 75 subject matter experts that are sifting through the requirements and will provide us with their feed on the different vendor responses

•  Selection of software and integration firm

•  Implementation plan, including needed resource commitments and implementation timeline: more peer reference interviews

Process:

•  Vendor demonstrations:

•  Banner September 18-20 run by a number of SUNY institutions

•  SAP September 25-27

•  PeopleSoft October 1-3 run by Albany and Stonybrook

•  Subject Matter Expert analysis of vendor responses, demonstrations, and fit/gap analysis

•  Cost of ownership analysis

•  Peer institution references

•  In-person interviews

•  Integration RFP and Evaluation

Anticipated Timeline: Continued faculty support needed

•  Early October – Project Team software vendor recommendation to the Executive Steering Committee

•  Late October/Early November – Project Team integration firm recommendation to the Executive Steering Committee

•  November and December – Contract negotiations and beginning of implementation planning

Engagement

•  Project Team representation: Bill Baumer faculty representative

•  Areas where input and opinion is needed

•  Improving the mid-semester evaluation process for undergraduate students

•  Needs and desires for Web Grading

•  Policies and policy changes needing Faculty Senate approval

•  Drop/Add/Resign dates which have been a topic of conversation at the faculty senate: the new system should have different flexible dates for undergraduate or graduate students

•  Grade change policy needed: when appropriate to change grades or not

Support and patience needed

•  Reengineering of processes

•  Delay in other projects

•  Things will get worse before they get better

•  Potential for loss of some current capabilities

In response to questions, Kara Saunders emphasized the importance of being able to load information from SUNY and do away with the paper applications that are currently submitted for every undergraduate who applies here; vendors have been asked specifically about the best ways to help UB eliminate these paper applications. Kara Saunders also spoke to the ways in which the system is being integrated so that migrating historical data will remain. She also confirmed that this process would indeed be university wide. Alumnis have not been included in the scope however. To a question about the safety and security of information, Saunders explained that vendors have specifically been asked to address the issue.

SICAS Center is a SUNY wide center that Banner campuses participate in, staffed by IT staff. When one signs up with a software vendor, one signs up a support services agreement with them. Usually that relationship is directly from the campus to the vendor. SICAS also writes some of the customization. Part of the Banner NY State contract agreement they have with NY State is that there would be one central unit that provided the service support for all the SUNY Banner campuses and they would be the ones that would communicate with Banner.

Updates and project deliverables are on the Web site at:

http://www.buffalo.edu/ub2020/itst/ssa.html

Item 4: Executive Session: Committee Reviews

Item 5: Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 3:19 PM .

Respectfully submitted,

Carine Mardorossian, Secretary of the Faculty Senate

 

Attendance

(P = present; E = excused; A = absent)

 

Chair:
Robert Hoeing (P)

Secretary:
Carine Mardorossian (P)

Arts & Sciences:
Melvyn Churchill (P)
Kenneth Takeuchi (P)
Stanley Bruckenstein (P)

Architecture & Planning:
Scott Danford (P)

Dental Medicine:
Peter Bradford (P)

Educational Opportunity Center:
TBA

Engineering & Applied Sciences:
Stella Batalama (E)

Graduate School of Education:
Thomas Schroeder (A)

School of Law:
TBA

Management:
Hodan Isse (P)

Medicine & Biomedical Sciences:
William Fiden (A)
James Hassett (A)
James Springate (E)
Merril Dayton (A)

Nursing:
Cynthia Curran (P)

Pharmacy:
Gayle Brazeau (P)

School of Public Health and Health Professions:
Peter Horvath PA)

Social Work:
Barbara Rittner (P)

SUNY Senators:
William H. Baumer (P)
Peter Bradford (P)
Henry Durand (P)
Marilyn McMann Kramer (P)

Parliamentarian:
William H. Baumer (A)

Ex-officio:
Peter Nickerson (P)

University Libraries:
Dorothy Tao (A)

Guests:
Satish Tripathi (Provost)
Claude Welch (CAS/PSC)
Gay Lynne Samsonoff (Graduate Student Association)
Jayme Wortley (Undergraduate Student Association)
Rezwanul Islam (Undergraduate Student Association)
Janiece Kiedrowski (Professional Staff Senate)
Mofei Liu (The Spectrum)

© Copyright University at Buffalo Faculty Senate | UB Home | Accessibility | Legal Notices | Website Acknowledgements