Renee Ballenger
Editor
Within two years, the NU system as well as the three state colleges will be operating under a new Student Information System (SIS) provider. After more than 24 months of interviewing, analysis, and negotiation, as well as meticulous work with CedarCrestone Consultants, the Executive Steering Committee for this project recommended Oracle/PeopleSoft as the new provider of the state’s SIS. The Board of Regents endorsed the Committee’s recommendation at its September meeting. PeopleSoft will replace the existing SCT-SIS Plus program that UNK has been using for the last 18 years.
Many agree that the current system—void of a relational database environment and with a 30-year-old architecture, is long outdated. In fact, the company that promotes SCT-SIS Plus has announced that as of 2010, it will no longer offer any kind of service, maintenance or support on the product. In less than two years time, this version of software will be functionally obsolete.
UNK’s Campus Lead and IT Lead have already been designated—Kim Schipporeit, Director of Student Records and Registration, and Andrea Childress, Director of Systems and Programming, respectively. Soon, there will be extended Core Implementation Teams at each campus which will move to proactively address and manage all conversion, implementation and functionality issues in areas like Admissions, Financial Aid, Finance, Student Records, Housing, Institutional Research and other departments as they are affected.
CedarCrestone will continue to conduct in-depth studies of the different business processes and models on each campus, leading to their composition of a Master Work Plan to include timelines and various charters for successful implementation of the Oracle/PeopleSoft system.
The new students of Fall 2009 will be the first admitted on the two parallel systems. Sometime in 2010, but certainly by the first of 2011, NU will be operating solely on the new Oracle/PeopleSoft SIS System.
For more detail on the background of the Steering Committee’s charge and student information systems, see “NU, State Colleges recommend Oracle and CedarCrestone to provide new Student Information System” at nebraska.edu/media-resource-center/newsreleases.
