Minimizing Disruptions and Supporting Report Access

After the original request for proposal (RFP) for a new student information system (SIS) was closed with no award, the project team refocused their efforts on two key next steps for the project: 1) issuing a new RFP for a vendor partner and 2) pre-habilitation work.

Pre-habilitation, or pre-hab, work means doing everything possible to prepare the university for the upcoming change to a new SIS, even before any work on the actual new system begins.

Preparing for the New System

The goal with pre-hab work is to minimize the amount of changes happening at one time for end-users and stakeholders. Jonathan Whitman, Solutions Architect for the SIS project, describes this process as “updating the plumbing” of the existing systems that will continue to be used in the future, alongside the new SIS.

When the new SIS is implemented, the project’s technical team will then only need to disconnect the “pipes” connecting the system in question to the old SIS and then connect them to the new SIS. Because this “re-plumbing” will happen behind the scenes, end-users should see little to no changes in the existing system as the new SIS is implemented. Canvas, uAchieve, and the UC San Diego mobile app are a few examples of systems that will continue to be used but will have their plumbing updated with the implementation of the new SIS.

Supporting Report Access

A key area where this type of work is currently happening is in the area of reporting. To date, the SIS project’s business process analysis and design team has worked with subject matter experts (SMEs) across the campus to collect, review and analyze more than 530 reports currently in use.

Reports can range in scope from a simple list of students who meet certain criteria to complex visualizations of information pulled together from varying systems to provide University leaders support in decision-making. These reports currently exist in many different systems, but in the future state, student reports will be created with analytics and reporting tools using data housed in the Student Activity Hub, the Extended Studies Activity Hub and other Activity Hubs.

The team met with SMEs to understand how the reports are used and to gather requirements related to the reports. Now the project team will begin working with SMEs to rework reports currently maintained by IT Services to run using data from the Activity Hubs. This includes working with end-users to test the reports and verify they function as expected, prior to deploying them.

For reports maintained by distributed IT in departments, support and advice on re-working reports will be available.

Report users, or consumers, will be able to access deployed reports through the Business Analytics Hub website, bah.ucsd.edu, even after the new SIS is implemented. The SIS project team understands the importance of accurate reporting to the ongoing business of the university. The current work to move the reports now will ensure access to accurate reporting during and after the SIS implementation.