Mount Holyoke College
Paul Dobosh
Senior Technology Planner LITS
Williston Library

A. Introduction

The Library, Information, and Technology Servicesdepartment at Mount Holyoke is trying to establish a culture ofplanning, assessment, goal setting, and deliverables where nonehas existed in the past. We are developing a long-range technologyplan this summer, which will represent phase two of our planningto support the College's long range plan. This plan will be aninstitution wide information plan and will include plans for infrastructure,and both administrative and academic technology and informationneeds. Since we are a small college, we do not have access tothe major planning resources available on large campuses. We feelthat taking a small and exemplary part of our plan and workingwith others who are engaged in the same process will be of greatbenefit in helping us to focus on the planning, assessment, andimplementation of a small part of the plan.

Our focus for the IWIS project is on building webbased forms for administrative work and building a culture whichuses web based forms as a vehicle for accessing, finding and deliveringinformation both campus wide and off campus. That work includestraining faculty, staff and students and enhancing our on-lineinformation system structure so that it is easy to add forms andother kinds of information to it. We are going to concentrateon training students who can then support the work of staff andfaculty to see if that works better than having faculty and staffmembers do all of their own work. At the end of phase one of theprocess, we hope to have a good suite of secure and easy to useadministrative applications for the purchase and payment of goodsand services, which are widely used by faculty, staff and students.

This particular aspect of an overall informationstrategy developed in an ad hoc but effective manner. Infact, it may be one of the strongest examples of planning we havedone. The IWIS study will allow us to examine how we might makethis process a standard model and move away from using customerrequests for programs and reports as the basis for administrativecomputing planning. In other words, how do we wrap day-to-dayadministrative computing work in a strategic vision and keep thatvision informing the work of all of the staff.

The ad hoc process that produced our currentweb focus was based on two successful grant applications. Thefirst, in the spring of 1996, was to the Davis Foundation forsupport of learning how to do work restructuring using informationtechnology. The grant is for consulting help in a work restructuringproject with the added requirement that several managers and staffmembers are being trained in how to do work-restructuring analysisthemselves for future projects. The grant was a joint productof our information technology organization (LITS, see below) andthe financial office, which was to be the focus of the first work-restructuringproject

Closely related to the Davis work was a college decisionto purchase a new financial system. The common focus providedby the Davis grant preparation and implementation helped preparethe way for good collaborative decisions on the financial system.All of the new financial systems that were scrutinized as possiblechoices placed a heavy emphasis on user access to data and workflowissues. This supported the Davis grant concepts and emphasizedour need to become expert in ways of adding much more on-linecapability to our database systems.

This thinking led to our second grant proposal, tothe Mellon Foundation. In this proposal, accepted and funded thisspring, we bundled both academic and administrative web supportneeds. The request was for funds to hire a web specialist whocould keep our web infrastructure up-to-date, select good webproduction and maintenance tools, build forms and incorporatethem into our administrative processes, and train faculty, students, and staff in the use of web technology for developing their own contributions. As one might suspect, this position turned out to be spread over two people.

The status of the project is that the first phaseof the Davis grant has been completed with a pilot work restructuring study done of the college's buy/pay processes. The study has targeted large potential savings if the appropriate on-line computer processes can be developed.

B. Problem Statement

B.1. The Institution

Mount Holyoke College:

Private, undergraduate, liberal arts college

1850 students, 180 FTE faculty

A combined library, computing, electronic servicesorganization (including both academic and administrative computing)called Library, Information, and Technology Services (LITS). LITSreports to the Dean of the Faculty/Provost.

Member of the Five-College Consortium, with AmherstCollege, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the Universityof Massachusetts at Amherst.

The College has just drafted The Plan for MountHolyoke 2003, a college-wide planning document aimed at strengtheningboth the financial and academic soundness of the institution.Throughout the plan are explicit and implicit requirements forsupport from LITS. The most important implicit need for supportfrom LITS is where the College says it must "contain administrativecosts." This means our own internal administrative costs,i.e., there aren't going to be new people to throw at all of theexplicit support needs, but it also means LITS helping othersto manage their administrative costs.

B.2. The Situation

Our current administrative computing environmentis based on an AS/400 running a home-grown student system (admissionsthrough alumnae/development) and a commercial payroll system,and a new commercial financial system (replacing an older purchasedsystem) now being installed on a Unix host. The new financialsystem will allow more direct client access to data, but the oldersystems are very much the "put in a request to administrativecomputing and it will be put in the queue" model, with littlein the way of overall development planning.

There are also numerous specialized departmentaldatabase systems such as financial aid, dining services, and room-scheduling.Support for these programs range from completely vendor supplied(typically at a minimal maintenance level) to extensive involvementof LITS support staff in upgrades, trouble-shooting, and so. LITSdoes not generally provide report writing or database modificationfor these systems.

Even with the peripheral databases, computing atMount Holyoke is very centralized with all database programmingdone by the administrative computer programmers. Our network hasgrown mostly from one initial small academic network out to encompassadministrative offices and all academic departments and now theresidence halls. It, therefore, has a uniformity to it that seemsto be rare at comparable institutions. LITS is responsible forall of it, even a couple of small Novell networks which squeezedin, but are now almost gone. Desktop computing equipment is purchasedby LITS from a central reserve fund, allowing much uniformitythough Macintoshes and PCs both are supported. As part of theplan for 2003, the College has committed itself to providing thesehardware resources in a timely and stable manner, helping us maintaina stable information and technology infrastructure.

The benefits of having as much of our computing centralizedas we do are obvious. The negative can be a vision that lacksthe stimulation that interaction among competing groups can provide.We are attempting in our overall LITS planning this summer, withthe help of consultants, to form a clearer picture of our informationtechnology strategy beginning with scenarios about each of majorcampus groups:

Students, as a matterof course, will graduate with the information finding and assessmentskills to allow them to learn for life and the technical skillsto be successful in their first job or in graduate school.

Faculty will be able tofind the information, technical support, tools and infrastructurethey need to support their teaching, course administration andto perhaps a lesser extent their research.

Administrative staff willbe able to perform administrative functions effectively and efficiently.They will have ready access from their computer desktops to aseamless suite of administrative tools to support their work.

Senior staff and institutional researcherswill have easy access to data for decision making.

LITS staff will have theresources they need to provide good curricular and administrativesupport for the College, including tools, training, timely informationabout curricular, staff and administrative changes.

We have made strides this year in involving otheradministrative groups in priority setting for administrative databaseneeds. A long-standing user committee this year, for the firsttime, began to set hard priorities among project requests, whilethe senior administrative staff (provost, treasurer, businessmanager, chief development officer, Dean of the College, and LITSdirector) sorted out departmental priorities when demand overwhelmedresources. Work is also progressing on having the group of collegemiddle managers become active in setting directions.

B.3. Strategic Significance

The strategic significance of the project comes attwo levels. At a concrete level we feel that more informationhas to be made available directly to students, faculty, and staff,for easier access, for faster report writing, for direct usermaintenance of their own information, and for elimination of paperprocesses. The common thread is to eliminate intermediate stepsthat do not add value to processes. Containing administrativecosts provides the only leeway the College will have to pursuenew educational initiatives. This addresses many of the issuesimplicit in the above scenarios.

At a more abstract level, the significance of theproject is that it will be an example of how LITS plans, and howLITS plans within the College's strategic plan, now that one exists!

C. Objectives: Desired Outcomes

• Real web products for the buy/pay process.
• Community acceptance of, and perhaps even excitementabout, the web, or other on-line technologies, as the standardfor administrative work flow.
• A sustainable development model for implementingwork restructuring using the web or other technologies.
• An explicit planning model for setting directionsfor administrative computing.
• A start towards more user self-sufficiency indeveloping reports and on-line information.

D. Approach

D.1. Financial Resources

• Mellon Grant - principally to provide a staffmember who will focus on web needs and training faculty, studentsand staff in web construction.
• Davis Grant - provides consulting help and stafftraining in work restructuring.

D.2. Human Resources

A systems librarian with extensive experiencein web training

A Web technician with strong programming skillsin C and Perl and much experience with the MHC web site.

A potential new programmer with experience inusing web tools with the AS400.

LITS staff members trained via the first Davisgrant project in work restructuring.

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