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About Procurement

REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL

A Request for Proposal (RFP) was issued in Spring 2020, inviting vendors to bid to provide UC San Diego with their Student Information System (SIS) solution. It contained questions designed to capture what we need to know to assess the capability of their software, contract terms and conditions, around 200 detailed questions, and Conference Room Pilot (CRP) scripts with detailed business scenarios. 

Understanding and insight from business process landscape and mapping sessions were used to create these materials. For the SIS and other ESR projects, the ability of each vendor to execute crucial processes and meet the needs of our students is critical, as is total cost. 

Vendors sent us their RFP responses, which were scored by the SIS project and procurement teams. Next were the virtual CRP sessions, held November 2020 through January 2021, when finalists spent two weeks each showing exactly how their software would meet our needs. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from across the university participated and scored with the project team and technical experts on how well the software handled our real-life scenarios.

RFP CLOSED WITHOUT AWARD

After a rigorous and inclusive one-year process of proposal, review, consideration, and discussion, the current Request for Proposal (RFP) for a new student information system (SIS) has been closed without award. 

The SIS project was launched in February 2019 as part of our campus Enterprise System Renewal (ESR) effort, and is intended to support academic and business transactions throughout a student’s academic lifecycle. SIS data will provide analytics to help improve the student experience and educational outcomes. 

The project to date has included the participation of over 200 subject matter experts who have contributed to business process landscape and mapping sessions, have framed the ideal state of a new SIS, and have served as scorers during the thorough Conference Room Pilot (CRP) sessions.

Once the Conference Room Pilot (CRP) sessions with three Student Information System (SIS) vendors were complete and scoring was tabulated, the project, procurement, and ITS teams worked together to determine viable paths forward which were then presented to project governance, Academic Senate representatives, and the executive sponsorship. Although the need to replace the current student information system is still critical, we did not identify an existing and currently available software solution among the RFP respondents that sufficiently aligned with our progressive vision for an SIS. In other words, no existing system could both provide all of the functionality we need and also do this in the context of modern cloud-based solutions. This is why we have closed the RFP without award.

Instead, we will be using what we learned from this RFP effort as a foundation to continue working with suppliers to enable the creation of a solution that meets our vision. The information, strategies, and feedback gathered from our subject matter experts during the Conference Room Pilot sessions will be invaluable in guiding this work.

The campus community has remained resilient through a period of extraordinary change and stress in the past year, and that was taken into account in making this decision. While this means we will not select and begin implementing a new SIS immediately, work will continue both to prepare our university to implement a new SIS, with a target date of December, 2023. The project team will also continue working to identify opportunities to either improve or enhance our existing systems and business processes to ensure a smooth transition to a new SIS.