North Shore Community College: Blueprint for Technology Implementation

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North Shore Community College: Blueprint for Technology Implementation

2/12/2002

When North Shore Community College (NSCC), a public college in Massachusetts with more than 95 degree programs, wanted to integrate its campus business on the Internet, it decided to use Campus Pipeline Inc.'s Web Platform solution. In doing so, it envisioned a single sign-on platform to connect its five campus locations, streamline back-office work, develop a self-service system for student services, and enhance interaction among campus users.

The building blocks of the integration were the platform and SCT Banner's online student information system, including Web-for-Student and Web-for-Faculty. Gary Ham, the college's chief information officer, says, "It was like discovering gravity. Campus Pipeline provided a single context from which we could confidently achieve all we had set out to do and more."

NSCC has now been live with Campus Pipeline's platform for one year. Students have access to online course registration, payment features, transcripts, financial aid, course schedules, e-mail, calendars, chat and discussion board areas, and even full-time online tutoring.

Developers said the successful Campus Pipeline platform implementation was directly related to extensive planning conducted before and during the project. The NSCC Information Systems group developed specific objectives to ensure campus teams would be working toward the same goal. Ham demonstrated the features of the system to campus stakeholders. The decision to move forward was made during a meeting of faculty and management.

Inviting users to form teams to make functional decisions about portal implementation was critical for gaining consensus. Three teams were then formed as a means to split the project into logical segments.

First, an SCT Banner Web Functional Team was charged with configuring SCT's Web-for-Student and Web-for-Faculty products to reflect the college's actual practices. Team members represented all of the service areas using the Banner Student Information System.

Then, a Web Technical Team, which included Information Systems staff, was responsible for the installation, initial configuration, and maintenance of the SCT Web products, as well as Campus Pipeline's platform. Finally, a Pipeline Advisory Team was charged with defining procedures and creating the look of the platform environment.

During the fall 2000 registration period, NSCC piloted the solution into the Web-for-Student product. The success of the pilot led to a complete commitment to the product's use for business process changes. At the same time, there were a number of issues identified that were challenges to wider use of the product, including the absence of prerequisite enforcement in the system and the lack of services for the part-time evening population.

According to Delbert Brown, director of financial aid and a member of the Web Functional Team, using the Web for registration "required that we re-examine enrollment procedures. We had to ask, ‘Why are we doing things this way?' We found that in many cases we were just following procedures because we had always done them that way. Many of the procedures did not have any service value whats'ever to the student."