SIS: Focus on Reporting and “Pre-habilitation” Activities

You may have seen the campus notice that the Request for Proposal (RFP) that we issued to Student Information System (SIS) vendors was closed without making an award. As a project team, we want to clarify how that impacts UC San Diego’s journey to a new SIS.

The Conference Room Pilot sessions were incredibly effective in that we now have a clearer understanding of our needs and the current state of the SIS market. Without that understanding, we could have found ourselves in a difficult implementation with a product that would have been unable to meet our growing university’s needs and campus strategic goals, at a time when there is already a high level of stress due to the many changes on campus.  

Although “no award” means we aren’t implementing a new SIS right away, we are moving forward with discussions with SIS vendors on how they might partner with us to address the gaps we uncovered in their systems and evolve their product to something we can implement in the near future.  The SIS project team will continue working to prepare for the change and pivot to the creation of a report inventory and the remediation of SIS-related reporting and downstream systems, with a focus on improving the student, faculty, and staff experience in SIS-related applications. This will lay the groundwork to make our move to a new SIS in the future as smooth as possible.

Ongoing "pre-habilitation" activities will become our focus, implementing or modernizing systems that will operate into the future independent of our SIS. We will improve current functionality and ensure compatibility after go-live with a future SIS.

A lot of work has already been done to build a comprehensive picture of business processes related to the SIS. This work was instrumental in developing Conference Room Pilot (CRP) scenarios that allowed the project team and subject matter experts to thoroughly analyze vendor offerings and will be immediately used in vendor discussions and downstream systems work. 

Note: You can still submit information about reports you’re currently using in your work in order to ensure that your data and reporting needs are met by a new SIS. Check out the ESR SIS January 2021 Special Edition Newsletter for directions on how to submit information to help us help you.