Tuesday, May 14, 2002

In North Dakota, State Colleges and the Government Plan to Share an Information System By FLORENCE OLSEN North Dakota higher-education and government officials have agreed to pool their resources to buy and share a consolidated information system that could cost the state more than $30-million. Higher education will pay 60 percent of the cost, and the government will pay 40 percent. The new system, which is being purchased from PeopleSoft Inc., will manage financial, human-resources, and student data for the entire state government and for all 11 public higher-education institutions in North Dakota. The administrative system for higher education that the new software will replace is more than 20 years old. "We've needed this for well over a decade," says Ellen E. Chaffee, president of Mayville State and Valley City State Universities, which will be the first two institutions to run the new software. The state has imposed new accountability measures, she says, that require public universities to report more precise figures for costs and more accurate counts of full-time-equivalent students. The state also wants colleges to provide better numbers on nontraditional students who take distance-education courses, often from more than one university in the state, to earn a degree. "Right now, we're doing a huge amount of work by hand to provide them with those numbers," Ms. Chaffee says, because the older administrative software shared by the university system's institutions was never designed to generate those figures automatically. So far, the legislature has given the statewide project $7.5-million in seed money. The State Board of Higher Education has approved a new student fee of $42 per semester for one year to pay for some of the initial costs of the new system, says Grant Crawford, the chief information officer for the North Dakota University System. And when the legislature convenes again in 2003, lawmakers may consider revenue bonds as an additional source of financing for the system, which will serve about 32,000 full-time students and 19,000 higher-education and state-government employees. Federally mandated financial-aid changes that must be made by June 30, 2004, would have required a $1.5-million reprogramming effort to make the current higher-education system compliant, Mr. Crawford says. Even the new PeopleSoft system may require some customization of its software code, he says. The system could be called upon, for example, to generate a tuition bill, financial-aid package, and transcript for a student who may be enrolled in distance-education courses offered by several public universities in the state. PeopleSoft was the first choice of a selection team for the new system. But a brief controversy ensued when the state's governor, John Hoeven, a Republican, intervened on behalf of a competing provider, Microsoft Great Plains Software, based in Fargo, N.D. Great Plains Software was acquired by the Microsoft Corporation in April 2001. After a six-month study and a 400-page report, which Mr. Crawford describes as "a somewhat painful exercise," the selection team demonstrated that the Great Plains business software would not meet the system requirements by the deadline for which a new administrative system has to be operating. The PeopleSoft bid satisfied "better than 98 percent" of the system requirements, Mr. Crawford says, and Governor Hoeven eventually upheld awarding the contract to PeopleSoft. The governor's intervention, which at the time "caused quite a few people angst," was motivated by his interest in giving a North Dakota business the opportunity to participate, Mr. Crawford says. "We've got a good working relationship between state government and higher education." In preparation for the new system, Mr. Crawford says, North Dakota's state universities and government agencies already are pretty close to having an identical "chart of accounts," a feat that typically requires reaching a difficult consensus on accounting standards among or within institutions. A chart of accounts is a comprehensive list of financial accounts and the codes that those accounts use to represent such information as budget period, department, fund, program, and type of transaction. Eventually, Mr. Crawford says, state administrators also expect to integrate information from the higher-education student system with information about public secondary and elementary students. Lee Alley, the chief information officer for the South Dakota State Board of Regents System, says he will be watching North Dakota's efforts with keen interest. "This is going to be an important experiment," he says. "Certainly there are going to be challenges," because universities' data and transactions typically differ from those of state agencies. Using an existing Datatel administrative system, South Dakota's six public universities are beginning a $1-million database project to help students who enroll in courses at more than one institution in the state. The database project will require the institutions to adopt more uniform practices for keeping financial and student records. (See an article from The Chronicle, May 9.) Multi-institution administrative-software systems are increasingly common. But North Dakota's joint state-government and higher-education project is unusual, says Ms. Chaffee, the Mayville State and Valley City State president. "This is a high-stakes activity," she says, "and all of us are kind of taking a deep breath and doing whatever it takes to make this successful." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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