After more than a year-and-a-half in development, having been worked on by a team of more than 65 people, the first phase of the new student information system is finally complete. On Sept. 9, Enrollment Services went live with PeopleSoft, software that will process all student data by fall 2009.
Dubbed Project Orion, in keeping with UTD's celestial nomenclature, implementation is on schedule and on budget, said Jim Gary, the university's chief information officer. So far, the only data being handled by the new system are admissions applications for next fall, though even this is a challenge when you process more than 19,000 applications each year, said Gary.
"We've just finished our apps cycle for fall of '08, so we're kind of in our 'let's take a breather time,'" said Alison Rackler, who oversaw implementation for Enrollment Services as a member of Project Orion. "This is the perfect time to go live. We put a few applications in; see how it goes. You don't jump in head first, you know."
The new system will be faster and more efficient than the previous student information system, which was implemented in 1998, Rackler said. Besides a different login and slightly modified navigation to check application statuses, applicants will see no changes.
"Anytime you implement any new software product, there's going to be a little bit of change," she said. "But there will be no impact to our applicant population."
Enrollment Services is the first of four major phases of Project Orion. Financial Aid is slated to switch to PeopleSoft in February, Student Records in April and the Bursar's Office in June, Gary said.
Student information will be housed on a server in Fort Worth alongside data from UT Arlington and UT Tyler, who have also switched to PeopleSoft.
"The idea is that by combining essentially the same product, you can have one set of hardware and one server group instead of three," Gary said.
The adoption of PeopleSoft is part of a larger effort by the UT system to save money and improve efficiency by consolidating data processing, Gary said. It has purchased software for all of its constituent universities, but UTD is among the first to actually make the switch.
"I am sad to say that we are definitely at the forefront of this process," Gary said. "When you take the lead in these kind of things, you get to find all the 'gotchas' for everyone else."
As a result, implementing Project Orion has been much tougher than anybody anticipated.
"It's turned out to be 'crawling through glass hard," Gary said. "We have 10-plus years of institutional memory. People's intuition will have to change. There's a lot of training that needs to be done."
There have been only minor problems since PeopleSoft went live in Enrollment Services.
"As you can imagine, implementing a new student information system is quite an undertaking," Rackler said. "We have to maintain for a while and make sure everything is working as it should be, but so far everything has gone really smoothly."
"The new system will be good," Gary said. "It might not be great at first, but we have to have patience."
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