For one reason or another, every school undertakes the research process for a new Student Information System at some point in time. The right system can be a major value for the entire school community, but the wrong one can quickly demoralize faculty and frustrate parents.
Knowing what you’re doing and how to approach it will ensure that you’re looking for the right thing. To help with this, we’ve created some tips to help you as you prepare to evaluate vendors.
- Do a full systems assessment before talking to vendors. Think beyond the SIS here – look at LMS, Admissions, Enrollment, Tuition Management, Development and Accounting. Find out what systems you have, how much they cost, how they’re sharing (or not sharing) information, and what the major pain points are for each department.
- Identify your technical staffing. Do you have a dedicated systems administrator? Or do have each department manage their system with the IT Director providing basic oversight. What capabilities and skills do your team members have? Can you afford to restructure or hire if needed? Can you afford training?
- Define a budget. Set realistic goals of what you can afford. Look beyond the basics of the cost of the software and implementation and consider if you’ll save money long-term with more tuition or donation revenue or by reducing your overall staff size or not having to hire more staff (this goes beyond IT).
- Consider your software structure across campus. Would you rather have the best fit and most feature-rich software for each department regardless of vendor, or sacrifice some features to bring everyone under the same vendor umbrella? Going with a “best-in-class” approach means you’ll spend more time moving data between systems, while an integrated approach may cost you in feature sets or capabilities but keep data in sync easier.
- Consider timelines and don’t delay. Fiscal years, admissions years, academic years all have different needs for going live with a new system. Plan on the assessment, evaluation and implementation to take twelve months, and then another twelve months to get comfortable and tweak the system to your needs.
With a change like this, don’t skip steps to save time or money. A systems change is a major investment of time and money, and you don’t want to shortchange this investment by cutting corners on the front end. The reality is that features or components not implemented at the start often never get implemented at all.
LeadershipOne Technologies is here for you if you need some outside help or assessment. Let us know how we can bring the most value from your new system!
