Borrow Not Build – Adopting best-of-breed solutions from other institutions
In many cases, the needs for administrative systems to support academic decision making is the same across not only colleges in our university, but across higher education institutions. As each institution can have different priorities for the development of administrative tools or customer-facing systems, we can use these as opportunities to share the burden of system creation by partnering to adopt tools that are built elsewhere.
The benefit of doing the outreach and management of an inter-institution agreement can be a significant reduction of the resources needed to provide a new service to a set of customers. In addition, by adopting a service that has already been successful, time to deployment is reduced by providing a bug-free, proofed version that needs less quality control prior to customer engagement.
One such example is the College of Human Ecology (CHE) collaboration with the University of Michigan (UM) to adopt their Academic Reporting Tools (ART) system, which displays course related demographic data for student, faculty and administrative consumption. The University of Michigan, through multiple versions of this system, has built a sustainable system that provides a course, instructor, and major-based search tool that presents student grade distributions and demographics, as well as associated course information, for review through a web-based interface. Based on the desire to respond to student assembly resolutions requesting more transparent information about courses, our college decided to adopt this well tested system rather than developing and troubleshooting a new system.
This is not to say that adoption of a new service from a non-related institution is without integration effort. Issues such as branding requirements, and varying terminology for common items (i.e. major vs. plan) plays a part in the User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) expectations of the consumer. Just as important, the warehouse ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, hosting environment options, and authentication procedures must be adapted to Cornell standards for the new system to be technologically sustainable. It can hardly be expected that these would already be in perfect alignment.
Of course, there also has to be a benefit to the creator to stay engaged. Otherwise, one just gains a system that is an unsupported black-box system that could be worse for long term support than the development of something new. With their ART system, UM agreed to accept a modest yearly fee to support our peer implementation of their system. In the process, UM has gained an external partner that can share in the development of new functionality and provide additional user feedback. This partnership will build increased value on a developed platform without duplicate development for future additions by either institution.
The ART system is an excellent example of how Cornell can realize significant savings, in both dollar costs and staff allocations, while providing excellent new tools by looking for systems outside the typical on-campus collaborations. It just takes a willingness to open new dialogue, understand how another institution is meeting a common need, and invest in project management and integration support.