Building a Student Information System: Strategies for Success and Implications for Campus Policy Makers (review)

When I first looked at this monograph, I thought it seemed a little thin. After checking other recent issues in the New Directions for Higher Education series, I determined that this issue is a bit undersized as other recent issues average over 110 pages. Of course, quantity does not correlate with quality, and what does appear in this monograph is certainly important for anyone involved with implementing student information systems on college campuses. At the same time, there are some oversights in this volume (discussed below), that reduce the monograph's potential value.

Don Hossler has been working with and writing about technological issues related to student information systems for years; and given his recent work as an administrator involved with the implementation of the Peoplesoft® student information system at Indiana University, he is a perfect editor for this issue. In addition to the Editor's Notes, which include a little background on Hossler's involvement in the implementation of the system as well as some definitions of key systems terms, the monograph consists of five chapters written by administrators and consultants who have been involved in student systems implementations.

The first chapter (co-written by Hossler and William Gore) provides some background on the development of computerized information systems in colleges and universities. The authors make some claims with which I do not agree, such as: "Most faculty and administrators are unaware of the extent to which computerized information systems have become the foundation for the management of college and universities" (p. 9). I think faculty and administrators would have to be totally unobservant not to realize how much computerization drives our management systems. However, the authors do a good job of outlining the advantages and disadvantages of building your own system or buying a pre-packaged system from a vendor but were not equally clear in explaining the types of vendor-based systems. Do we have a choice beyond Peoplesoft®?

Also in this chapter, the authors attempted to provide a review of administrative systems technology used over the past 50 years, but this review was minimal at best and basically used only one source for the information. A detailed review of systems used over 50 years is certainly unnecessary for such a monograph, but a more thorough review over perhaps the last 15 years would have been worthwhile if the review were focused on the use of large student information systems. The various publications of EDUCAUSE and College and University have devoted much space to these issues over the past decade; and a review of these writings could have actually warranted an entire chapter in this monograph.

The second chapter (authored by Evelyn Babey who is a consultant and former enrollment services administrator) deals with the costs associated with implementing a student information system. Excepting the somewhat redundant list of terms that were included in the Editor's Notes, this chapter provides some very useful information about the costs, many of which may be overlooked at the time of purchase, of implementing a student information system. Babey details such unanticipated costs as hiring more systems staff, buying new hardware as well as software, providing customizations to the software, and paying for post-implementation support.

The third chapter, written by Laurie Sullivan and Rebecca Porter, administrators at Indiana University, describes some of what they consider to be necessary steps in the successful implementation of an information system. They focus on the development of planning stages (including a timeline for phased-in implementation), leadership management, staffing, communication with constituencies, and project governance. I think that...