Clients - Wayne State University
Banner and Luminis Solutions Make it Easy to Interact with Wayne State University
Wayne State University (WSU) is ranked among the top 50 public research universities in the nation. With approximately 33,100 students enrolled in 13 schools and colleges, Wayne State prides itself in providing students with a “world-class education in the real world,” based on excellence in teaching, learning, and research. These qualities alone, however, are not enough to be successful and competitive, according to John S. Camp, the CIO at Wayne State University. “We also need to be a university that is easy to do business with. We need to give people positive experiences every time they interact with us, whether applying for admission or registering for courses.”
Admittedly, “being easy to do business with” was not part of WSU’s vision when it began exploring vendor-supplied administrative systems in the ‘90s to address upcoming Y2K issues. “We had multiple legacy systems at the time, and they were aging and hostile,” recalled Dr. Camp. “They were not compatible with one another, and maintaining the interfaces was becoming increasingly difficult. It was apparent that we needed to implement a vendor solution rather than upgrade the systems we had.”
As WSU began exploring vendor solutions for new administrative systems, it became clear that built-in system integration would be the foundation for providing better service to prospects, students, employees, alumni, and others. “One of the overriding principles in our decision to select Banner was that it offered an integrated suite. Integration was, and is, key to us. We did not want to buy products from multiple vendors and then have to enable the integration ourselves. The Banner integrated suite gives us assurance that when new versions or releases come out, the components within the suite will be tested and certified to work together. Without SunGard Higher Education’s support, we would have had to have very deep pockets to maintain integration among various solutions,” said Dr. Camp.
David Brisbois, IT director for administrative information services, said, “Off-the-shelf integration lowers our costs and lessens the technical resources required to support integration. It also increases the ease of operation across all our systems.”
Building out beyond Banner
As Wayne State progressed with its Banner implementation, it began exploring portal solutions. WSU adopted Campus Pipeline’s Web platform, which was later purchased by SunGard Higher Education. Today, the next generation Luminis product family is providing the University with its portal capabilities and underlying integration.
“A light really went off when we saw the portal for the first time,” recalled Dr. Camp. “It showed us how we could tie together all our services and make them available to our students and employees as an integrated whole. Before, if a student wanted to register for classes, she had to find an advisor in one location, register at another, and then pay tuition and fees elsewhere. It was pretty difficult to do business with us. Many of our processes for students, faculty, and staff involved paper forms, manual intervention, and time. Now, the Internet, Banner, and our Luminis portal solutions have changed all that. Much of what we do is online, self-serve, immediate, and in one place.”
The integrated foundation provided by Banner — coupled with the data integration framework and platform provided by Luminis — continually enables WSU to build out its services as a Unified Digital Campus to students, faculty, alumni, and staff.
“Integration of information across the enterprise is crucial,” explained Mr. Brisbois. “It lets us maintain relationships with our customers. For example, our Alumni Relations office needs to know when a student graduates to offer that student the benefits of being an alumnus. To create and maintain this functionality ourselves would have required at least three times the staff if we didn’t have SunGard Higher Education’s integrated suite. This is not an uncommon experience.”
“We’ve talked to many individuals at other institutions,” Mr. Brisbois continued. “And they can’t keep up with the delivery of new services because they have to enable the integration themselves.”
For example, Wayne State has integrated the Blackboard learning management system with Banner and the Luminis Platform. Previously, Blackboard was a stand-alone system that required students and faculty to enter a separate ID and password to access it. Now, after logging in to the campus portal, they can go directly into Blackboard without having to log in a second time. In addition, data such as course and student information now need to be entered only once into one system — Banner.
“The information is then fed from Banner into Blackboard,” explained Patrick J. Gossman, Ph.D., IT director of academic technologies and customer services. “This eliminates duplication of effort, introduction of errors, and confusion on the part of students and faculty. It really does make it easy for our students and faculty to do business with us.”
“Luminis enables us to integrate third-party systems easily,” added Morris Reynolds, IT director of e-services and strategic technologies. “That is essential. For example, the University has a multi-use OneCard for bookstore purchases, library services, parking fees, and a host of other services. Because the OneCard application is integrated with Luminis, its corresponding data are available through the University portal. Students and employees can click the OneCard icon to view their current balance and account activity, and also add funds to their account electronically.”
Added Dr. Camp, “The underlying infrastructure is hugely important to adding new self-services at Wayne State. Luminis is the unifier. That was its promise, and we’re actually seeing it happen.”
While the Banner and Luminis solutions make WSU’s applications easily accessible, system solutions from Sun Microsystems enable continuous service. Wayne State is a designated Sun Center of Excellence for Administrative Systems, one of a small number of Sun Centers of Excellence worldwide. In partnership with SunGard Higher Education and Sun, WSU has designed an integrated solution to optimize the Banner suite of administrative applications in a Sun computing and storage environment. The center also plans to sponsor research and development projects that can benefit other colleges and universities using Banner solutions.
“Our Sun model is built on clustering. This enables us to keep our services up and available without interruption,” explained Dr. Camp. “For example, if we’re doing maintenance on Banner, our technical staff can roll the system over to another server in the cluster so services remain up all the time. Continuous availability remains a challenge. We’re pleased that SunGard Higher Education is making its solutions ‘cluster aware’ to support this effort.
“SunGard Higher Education has been great to work with,” added Dr. Camp. “We have a very professional and constructive relationship with SunGard Higher Education. They have been open to involving WSU at a number of levels related to influencing product direction, and they have been willing to respond to our needs as a large research university. These innovations trickle down to other SunGard Higher Education clients.”
Satisfying students and increasing their participation
WSU’s gains in enabling continuous self-service access to its information and services are definitely making it easy to do business with the University.
“We don’t have a way of measuring the savings in time and energy enabled by self-service, but it has to be tremendous,” said Sally Roberts, assistant professor in the WSU College of Education. “Our students are primarily commuters. Now, they no longer have to drive to campus just to have a 15-minute meeting to get information they need.”
“Students feel as if they are getting more personalized attention,” said Dr. Roberts. “Customer satisfaction for students has increased greatly in the two semesters since we integrated Blackboard into our campus portal and made single sign-on with one ID a way of life. Students’ frustrations with the institution’s processes are greatly relieved.”
And students are participating more in the University community as a result. “We are now up to five million hits per month in Blackboard,” noted Dr. Gossman. “This is over a 60 percent increase in use since we added it to our integrated suite.”
“The ease of access enabled by Luminis is one reason for the increased use of many of our services,” said Mr. Reynolds. “Before we upgraded Campus Pipeline to Luminis, it took seven clicks for students to get to various self-services. The same was true for faculty. We’ve reduced that down to one or two clicks, so they now gain immediate access to needed services.”
The ability to interact with the University anytime from anywhere is especially important since WSU students come from 115 different countries. And a significant number of students live in nearby Canada. Shortly after 9/11, the wait at the border crossing was often three hours long. Many of those students residing in Canada chose to work online during that period to avoid the tiresome wait, recalled Dr. Camp.
Online access also is a buffer in bad weather. For example, classes were canceled the first day of one semester due to snow. Yet Dr. Roberts’s students were able to go into Blackboard and retrieve and complete their first assignment.
Even in good weather, online access is providing students and faculty with more time in the classroom. “As a faculty member, I am always looking for more time and efficiency,” said Dr. Roberts. “By logging into Blackboard, students are coming to the first day of class with their syllabus printed out and textbooks in hand. I feel like I’ve gained a whole class period; and I’m having interactions with students before the course even begins.”
Access to up-to-the-minute enrollment information in Banner through Luminis is making course planning more efficient, too. “We can see as soon as a course is filled and make decisions about adding more sections,” explained Dr. Roberts. “And we have the capability to let students know these decisions right away. It helps students plan, helps the dean plan, and helps the faculty plan.”
Direct access to enrollment data through Luminis also ensures that Dr. Roberts — and all faculty members — have accurate class lists on the first day of class. “Before, I was lucky if I had a class list three weeks into a course. Now I have it on the first day. And I can monitor my class load from day to day prior to the start of class.”
Getting grades to students faster is another benefit of systems integration, according to Dr. Roberts. “Now, students have access to grades 24 hours after I post them. These self-service capabilities have freed me up and given me more time to do things that are important. I have more control now.”
Also, Dr. Roberts is confident that students are getting her e-mail messages. In the past, students used a host of e-mail applications and their addresses were unknown. Faculty and others had access to only 10 percent of students by e-mail. Now, students use WSU’s central e-mail service, which they can get to quickly with the click of an icon in Luminis. “I have 100 percent access now,” said Dr. Roberts. “Sometimes, I get back to my students so quickly, they think I’m using instant messaging.”
These online capabilities also make it possible for Dr. Roberts to advise more students than she had in the past. “I can help many more students online than I did in the past and much more efficiently. Moving into an online environment has really been an important marketing strategy for us.”
“The biggest benefit of our integrated online environment is what it provides for the students,” said Dr. Camp. “They are the primary people we need to serve. Many requests that had to take place face-to-face can now be done electronically. It’s revolutionizing how we interact with students and how we deploy people. By off-loading routine tasks to self-service, WSU employees can devote face-to-face time to more challenging requests for complex help or service.”
Added Dr. Gossman, “We are touching a huge piece of our student and faculty population through Blackboard now. The number of courses taught using Blackboard jumped by a factor of four when we integrated Blackboard with the Luminis portal. Students now know that they can access everything they need from this one Web environment. It frees up students and faculty to spend more time on what they’re ultimately here for: teaching and learning.”
WSU’s integrated environment also has improved services for staff and faculty, said Gary Dent, associate vice president for human resources. “Rather than having faculty stand in line to do a transaction with our benefits department, or to get a pay stub from payroll, they can do these tasks and more online. Employees feel like we care more about them now.”
Also, having everyone work from a common portal and from the same administrative system helps the institution keep training costs down. “When employees move from one area to another, they remain on the same system, so our training costs have gone down. We also have common terminology now. We underestimated the value of all this. The technology has become so easy to use that we’re communicating better across all departments,” said Mr. Dent.
It would seem that Wayne State is achieving its vision of being easy to do business with. Enrollment has exploded. It climbed to over 33,000 students in fall term 2003 and is expected to reach 35,000 by fall 2004. This growth is three years ahead of projections, according to Ted Coutilish, executive director of WSU’s Office of Marketing and Publications. “People are realizing that this is the place to be.”
“Our vision is to make it so easy for folks to interact with us that they are pleased to come to school here or work here and stay here,” emphasized Dr. Camp. “SunGard Higher Education is providing us with the means to achieve our vision with the Banner integrated suite and the ability to integrate other services with Luminis. These systems are absolutely critical to supporting teaching, learning, and research, as well as the day-to-day business of Wayne State University.”