September 27, 1999
Replacing SIS
Project planners soliciting faculty comment on new Academic Information System
By Jim Burns
When four UCSC offices purchased the Student Information System (SIS) almost 15 years ago, the relationship between computers in general and their users was often tenuous. Computers back then were slow, the training required to use the more complicated programs was extensive, and the results were predictable: frustrated users all too often decided the effort wasn't worth the trouble.
One of the campus's primary database systems, SIS, was a product of those times: Its overly complicated menus and screens provided only users-in-the-know with direct access to important information about students and their academic records.
"SIS has been very successful for what it was designed to do," said Mark Cianca, director of communications and systems development for Student Affairs. "But it was purchased a year before relational databases became available. The reality is, unless you have an absolute need to use SIS, you don't use it."
Today, people on campus expect, want, and many times need immediate access to information. As the campus has grown, for example, it has become more important than ever for faculty and academic support staff to know precisely how many students are enrolled in courses during those critical early days and weeks of each quarter. And students, who have grown up on computers, expect to be able to go online to get everything from their course schedule to important financial aid information.
That's why Student Affairs is spearheading a campuswide effort to replace SIS with a state-of-the-art and newly named Academic Information System (AIS). With the support of Executive Vice Chancellor John Simpson, who allocated $500,000 in one-time and $100,000 in ongoing funds to support the project during this year's budget process, Cianca is leading a group that is designing SIS's replacement.
"As project sponsors, we intend to identify a new Academic Information System to serve the entire campus enterprise," said Francisco Hernandez, vice chancellor for Student Affairs.
The 26-person faculty and staff project team, working with Marketect, an outside firm, this past summer, already has prepared a survey and assessed nearly 100 users about the functions they would like to see in the new AIS.
This fall, the project team will expand that outreach to include many more faculty users. "We will engage faculty in focus groups, department meetings, and one on one," Cianca said. "We will be asking them: 'What do you want the new system to do for you?'"
That feedback will be included in the Request for Proposals, expected to be distributed to prospective vendors during the winter quarter.
Cianca's team, meanwhile, is monitoring the commercial world in an effort to ensure that the new system spans the desires of the users and the realm of the doable. "We don't want to 'blue sky' our new system in a vacuum," Cianca said. "We need to specify what features we want the new system to have and make sure that it's something that vendors really can provide us."
According to the project schedule, the new AIS would be online in the 2003 academic year.
For more information about the project, go to the following URL: oasas.ucsc.edu/ais/.
