University upgrades its computer system: UI-Integration
Change is currently underway for the computer systems at each of the three University of Illinois campuses: Chicago, Urbana-Champaign and Springfield.
All of the modules for the University's brand new, all encompassing computer system have been implemented and are currently running in the second year of production.
"It's been a real challenge, not only for the team that was responsible for implementing this Banner software, but also for our staff who assisted in that process and now have to learn an entirely new set of business rules and systems for their work," said Chet Gardener, vice president of academic affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Approximately 10,500 core users of the system will undergo some form of training as new department modules are implemented into Banner.
In the September of 2001, the University launched its UI-Integrate project to incorporate Banner2000 as a central computer system between the three University of Illinois campuses.
Banner2000 is a program that was created by SunGard SCT, a Malvern, Penn., based information technology company that is currently the leading software supplier to universities throughout the world with more then 2,000 clients.
"We and SCT have worked very closely together for this project. In fact, Steve Rugg, the Vice President for administration, Rich Mendola, our chief information officer for the University, and the UI-Integrate Executive, and Margaret Krol, who's the director of the UI-Integrate project, met this past Tuesday up in Chicago with the senior executives from SCT; we have been doing that roughly, every four to five months, as we've moved through the implementation process," Gardner said.
"The reason we met was to address any problems that were occurring with the implementation and to make sure that the highest levels of management in SCT were aware of it, and would assure us that those problems would be addressed," Gardner continued.
The old systems were ready to break down and were archaic in structure said David Ruzic, associate vice president of administration.
The University has had three major costs within the implementation process: one was the personnel costs; the second was the cost of the SCT software; and the third was the cost of providing consulting assistance from Accenture, formally Anderson Consulting.
The cost for all three University campuses, including software, hardware, wiring buildings, consultation and data warehousing amongst other things cost the University an estimated $37.2 million a year.
At the peak of the project, we had nearly 400 people working full-time just implementing, said Gardner.
"We had to have a pool of funds in the project to pay these 400 people. You can imagine that these are programmers with maybe an average salary of $50,000 a year, that's $20 million dollars for one year," said Gardner.
"Where a lot of projects like this fail is they don't do a good job of communicating and assessing unit readiness in kind of the middle tier," said Rich Mendola, UI project executive and associate vice president of administrative information technology services.
We've got to have people out there telling us what needs to get done for certain areas, and we've got to be sharing with them all of the information that's relevant to the implementation, he said.
The new system is a suite of integrated software programs and business processes that are being implemented in a University wide attempt to update and consolidate its current decrepit computer systems.
We have lots of separate computer systems and a number of them are quite old. That makes it difficult when somebody wants to change the way the university does something - sometimes we're constrained by those old systems, said Margaret Krol, UI-Integrate Project director.
The software package was designed specifically for higher education by SCT, but has mostly been used in smaller institutions, focusing human resources and payroll into a central unit. This basic principle contrasts with how the university operates, simply because of its size.
As a resolution to the problem, SCT offered to modify their baseline product in order to insure that the University will get all the features it needs from the Banner program.
"It's rather an expensive project, total cost about $187 million dollars for a five year project, we're in the last year now," said Gardner.
"There are a number of reasons why we had to initiate this implementation: we had close to 150 different business software packages which were used on the three campuses to conduct our business. Used to keep student records to keep employee records, to do payroll, to issue financial aid and none of them were integrated. That is, if you made a change in one, it only affected that one set of software," Gardner said.
Now, whenever a student tells us that their telephone number has changed, their address has changed, every piece of software, that we use that might be related to that student knows about that change, Gardner said.
Prior to the implementation of the Banner system, grades had different numerical values from one University of Illinois campus to the next, so with the implementation of the Banner system, each University of Illinois campus adopted the same grading system.
Before Banner, an "A, B, C, D, E, F, G, you know those grades up in the Chicago campus meant something different then they did at the Urbana campus, and also meant something different at the Springfield Campus," Gardner said.
"Furthermore, we had plus and minus grades, the numerical values for the plus and minus grades were different on the three campuses. So what our faculty decided was to have a common system on all three systems. ...So say you get a grade of "R," that "R" grade will mean the same thing at all three campuses," Gardner continued.
The benefit to this method of grading is that, "a perspective employer can come to our Chicago campus and understand what a grade point average and a grade means at Chicago, and it means the same thing when they come down to recruit at Urbana or at Springfield," Gardner said.
In addition to equalizing the grading system, the Banner system also allowed the University to also restructure it's course numbers so that if a "Urbana student decides to take a summer course at the UIC that will transfer grade credit at Urbana, when that appears on the transcript a perspective employer will see that course level and know that it was, say, a 300 level course, or a junior level course," Gardner said.
One of the reasons Banner was chosen to implement, was because of the student the software for student services said Nicole Udzenija, communications coordinator for UI-Integrate communications and project office.
"We knew that the human resources portion that enables us to appoint employees and also to pay people wasn't as good as some of the other software packages that were available, but unfortunately, those other packages didn't have as good a student services functionality," Gardener said.
"Now I understand that student's at all three campuses are registering with the new system, and I think we're close to having some 20,000 students registered already," Gardner said.
"We chose banner specifically because it was the best from the perspective of serving students, and they're helping to pay for the implementation, so we thought that [they] would appreciate putting the students first," said Gardener.
The way we trained our staff to use Banner was by having a lead consultant for the university that helped manage the other consultants, said Bob Andersen, associate director of student financial aid and former UI-Integrate lead for financial aid implementation.
"The payroll program has completely been implemented, it's finished, working and complete," said Stephanie Dable, UI-Integrate project manager of the payroll team.
"Each area as it was being developed and implemented, had at least one consultant for each area, and if it was a really large section, they might have more," Andersen continued. ""there were so many questions and so much to handle and so much to do, you really needed an expert right there."
"We had started developing training materials in the September and October of 2002, and we wrote training manuals for all the modules, and started training people at the end (in the Banner system by the end) of January 2003," said Andersen.
One of the problems with training people on new computer systems is that, "you don't want to train people too early before they get it, because they're forget it all, and you'll have to retrain them," said Andersen.
The training group at UI-Integrate gave us a training database that looked just like a production database, and it contained some 200 fake records in it, and it allowed us to play, practice and figure out how things worked on the new system, Andersen said.
We even created, in the back of our file room, a computer lab so groups of people could get together and research how they would go about certain tasks, Andersen continued.
Our training sessions in Banner were held twice a week, and we did it over the course of almost two months, starting in February, and going over almost all of March into April, Andersen said.
We began training in the order that "our processing here works; so we did the early sessions (covering what our employees) would use right away. And then we started building on that the next thing they would use. So we stacked the training, making all of our training modular and additive," Andersen said.
The general Universities staff's lack of familiarity with the system has created some challenges, but in all fairness to our staff, it is true that in the payroll end it's not very efficient to enter payroll data into Banner, said Gardner.
"There's no question that the system isn't an easy process to manage... but change never comes easy. In retrospect there might be things that the university could have done differently," said Tom Hardy, executive director for university relations.
The University wants to build faculty experts so that when new employees come to the University, officials do not have to seek outside help said Udzenija,
"Once certain department modules were implemented, the offices that fell under those departments began to hold open lab hours for those who needed help," said Udzenjia.
"Now we have an action line where you get answers that are web based over the telephone, because the consultant for the financial aid office had his last trip here in January," said Andersen.
"That's working out just fine as well, but it would be nice to have someone every other month to help us out with special projects, but we've learned a lot, we can do most everything we need ourselves now," said Anderson.
If you stacked our training manuals up, all of them together would be about two and a half feet high, since we offer 30 classes, and each manual is about one inch thick said Andersen.
"Each one was pretty comprehensive, it had how you did all the things on every application, it gave you handouts -- like cheat sheets -- on how to do certain processes," he said. "Everything in Banner consists of a lot of coding"
"I think SCT has spent all their time on the registration site, and I think anyone that has registered in Banner for next year will find out that it's really cool," said Anderson.
"It's a very simple process" Andersen said.
The web based interface makes it easier for users if they're at all familiar with online shopping, it's quite similar.
SCT formulized the registration sites for students like an online shopping cart. Students can search for the classes the want, and register simply by checking a check box and clicking register.
A student collects their classes into a sort of online shopping cart, and then is allowed to change their selection with ease.
"We're hoping sometime we'll have more like a portal where a student can go and have everything connected," said Andersen. "Now that's another problem with the banner product, is that I have a self service for financial aid, accounts receivable, and every other department."
"Now, while you're in Banner, you can go see all of [your information], but we don't have a ... portal page to say, 'here are the things that are happening in banner, here is your professor's syllabus, you need to sign this promissory note, and come in and get it done, and here is everything else you need to accomplish,' but that's a future thing," Anderson said.
"A lot of people at the university want it, but that's still a pretty expensive operation, no matter how we do," Anderson concluded.