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Grand Rapids Community College: Enabling the Collaborative Campus
9/13/2002
Initiatives promising major change can often strike fear in even the most
mature organizations. A significant transition in an information management
system brings with it problems of cost, capacity and culture change. Add to
that the anxiety that comes with the unknown, and that’s what we faced
at Grand Rapids Community College.
Just five years ago, GRCC was using legacy systems and applications to provide services to students. The College’s data was spread across disparate databases, many of which were homegrown. Services were labor-intensive and provided one-on-one and face-to-face. Students were shuttled from one department to another to do business with the College.
As a growing community institution, GRCC recognized the need to modernize its campus operations. We embarked on the technology overhaul of a lifetime, investing in a scalable, pure Internet system that would grow with our institution. In so doing, we discovered the secret to IT implementation success—a formula that includes careful needs assessment, planning and leadership.
Needs Assessment
With the Year 2000 looming, the college’s information technology office began a project with key campus departments to identify and assess the data, functionality and reporting needs of the college. This 27-member cross-functional team was made up of administrators, support staff, faculty and students. Together, they created a campus-wide needs assessment survey to solicit ideas from every area on campus. The results were used to develop a request for proposal that defined the vision for services and information management at the College. Vendors that responded to the RFP were invited to demonstrate system functionality and features to the entire campus community, which then had the opportunity to provide feedback and make a recommendation. The response was overwhelming, and in 1998, Grand Rapids selected PeopleSoft as a partner to replace its student, human resources and financial systems.
Planning
The success of the needs assessment and selection process also led to our decision to implement the system ourselves. Because GRCC had the right combination of in-house technology and departmental expertise, we believed we should invest in our own staff’s learning rather than a part-time consultant’s. Cost entered into the decision as well. At the time, we simply couldn’t support the price of an implementation partner.
We established a leadership team to manage the implementation. From the start, this team determined that end-users needed to drive the work, and implementation teams were established in all service areas. Facing Y2K deadlines and a short time frame, these teams committed to a rapid implementation plan. They also agreed to re-engineer processes as needed and to “stay vanilla” in our solution choices. The decision to not customize our applications offered us flexibility in how we chose to do business, which significantly lowered our cost of ownership and enhanced our return on investment.
Leadership
Executive leadership and support are critical to any large organizational change, a lesson we learned first hand.
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