The planned shift to online course registration is now slated for April 2006, a year later than Computing and Information Services originally projected.
Still, CIS is on track to institute a comprehensive replacement of the computer systems for all major student administrative services. The new system will integrate the systems currently in place in 11 campus offices.
When CIS began planning the enterprise computer system in 2002, the system was originally envisioned to replace and integrate all University departments and agencies, but the plan has since been scaled back to focus only on student-centered services.
The new system, powered by SCT Sunguard's Banner program, will integrate 11 current systems over the course of the next two years: those for undergraduate, graduate and medical school admission and financial aid; records and registration; student billing; miscellaneous billing; loans; and cashiering.
Currently, information entered into the system at any one office is not necessarily communicated to systems at other offices, said Registrar Michael Pesta. For example, if a student told one office that his or her address had changed, other offices would not find out, he said.
Administrators agree that Brown lags behind other schools on this issue. Among Ivy League universities, only Brown and Harvard University still lack online course registration.
Terri-Lynn Thayer, assistant vice president for administrative information services at CIS, said many schools used the Y2K scare at the end of the last decade as an opportunity to upgrade to integrated systems, which include computerized course registration. Brown, on the other hand, "remediated (its) system at very low cost" to prepare for Y2K, but chose not to upgrade the computer system. "Unfortunately, now we are behind the curve," she said.
CIS Vice President Ellen Waite-Franzen said the University "had to start moving forward" on an integrated system, because the 11 current systems that have been implemented over the past two decades are aging and are not as integrated as they should be. The necessary systems "have been on the market for a while," she said.
Waite-Franzen specifically cited the "idea of having the online registration system" for classes as "a driving force" for the upgrade, but she emphasized that the enormous scale of the project will affect every major student service in the University.
"There will be other things beside registration that students will notice," Thayer said, such as the smoother integration of different departments and easier access to billing information.
Such a large project comes at a cost - Waite-Franzen estimated the initial cost of the capital project to be about $10 million, with the annual cost of running the software to be between $250,000 and $300,000. Neither she nor Thayer could say whether this would be more or less than the current cost, with Thayer calling it a "complex question" since there are currently 11 different systems instead of a single integrated one.
Thayer defended the new spending, saying, "It's not just a money thing. ... It's a usability and functionality thing."
Following a suggestion from the product vendor, the University decided it needed "to implement these pieces in order," Pesta said, starting with recruitment and admissions, followed by financial aid, then course registration, then billing. According to the project schedule, the Banner system will be installed in April 2005, with the various elements going online in sequence until the full academic records are transferred to the new system in January 2007. Because of the order, registration will go online in April 2006, one year later than an earlier target date.
"It's a very, very complicated system," said Waite-Franzen, who also noted, "It's all new technology for us." She said the program's registration element could be implemented sooner, but rushing implementation would be unwise due to the complexity of integrating the 11 different systems.
"We're not going to rush this. We can't rush it. We have to be careful" to protect academic records, Pesta said.
Thayer said CIS has been training intensively for implementing and managing the Banner system, and that "we're as prepared as I think we can be."
