Work is underway on multi-year student systems initiative

Earlier this year, the University of Florida announced a multi-year effort to unify and modernize its student systems. Over the next five years, the Campus-wide Modernization Program to Advance Student Services — or COMPASS — will be implemented in a series of releases that began with the migration of self-service functions to ONE.UF in February.

Work on two key components of COMPASS began in earnest during the spring semester: the Student Information System (COMPASS-SIS) and Constituent Relationship Management (COMPASS-CRM). A new e-newsletter, COMPASS Update, has been introduced to keep campus apprised of information and news of important COMPASS developments to those affected by its implementation.

COMPASS-SIS will replace ISIS, the current student information system hosted on the mainframe. UF will implement Oracle’s Campus Solutions software as a foundation for COMPASS-SIS. The consulting firm of Sierra-Cedar Inc. is partnering with UF on the design, development and configuration of this new system.

Because of the breadth of COMPASS-SIS, the project team is organized into various functional and technical areas: Campus Community Admissions, Student Financials, Financial Aid, Student Records, Academic Advisement, Graduate/Professional Schools, Communication and Change Management, Training, Testing, Technical Development, Technical Conversion, Technical Integration, Infrastructure, Security, Portal and Reporting/Warehouse.

Another key component, COMPASS-CRM, is envisioned as a system that will provide a “360-degree view of UF constituents, ‘from prospect to endowment,’” according to CRM project manager Luis Andino.  Like other components, UF will implement COMPASS-CRM through a series of staged releases beginning in the fall of 2016 and continuing into 2019.

COMPASS-CRM will replace ARMS, another mainframe legacy system, as well as a variety of manual processes currently in use to track and communicate with undergraduate prospects. The project’s first order of business is to address recruitment and prospect management for undergraduates. UF will implement the Enrollment Rx software built on Salesforce’s cloud computing platform, already deployed successfully by the College of Pharmacy.

Teams working on COMPASS-SIS and COMPASS-CRM are currently in an analysis and design phase that includes gathering information, mapping existing business processes and documenting requirements for the new systems.  In March, the COMPASS-SIS team began mapping the “student journey” for all UF students, including undergraduate, graduate and professional paths that charts steps a student takes — and the interactions UF makes with that student. Through a series of interactive design and prototyping sessions, or “IDPs,” the COMPASS-SIS team is pulling together information on these journeys, current business processes, needs of campus stakeholders and the delivered functionality of the new software to formulate a design for UF’s future student information system.

Because campus input is critical to COMPASS’s success, staff from core offices — including Enrollment Management and Finance and Accounting — as well as colleges, academic departments and administrative units are participating in IDP sessions and lending their expertise. In July, the COMPASS-SIS work groups will summarize their IDP findings in a series of wrap-up meetings.

During late July and August, a series of town hall meetings will introduce the design prototypes to a broader audience. The town halls, which will be held in the Human Resource Services Building and streamed online, will provide faculty and staff with the opportunity to learn more about how the system changes may affect their work and to share their feedback. Watch for specific dates and times in the July InfoGator and on the COMPASS website.

Those who wish to follow COMPASS developments more closely may wish to subscribe to the new COMPASS Update. A semi-monthly newsletter, the Update provides a quick snapshot of the latest COMPASS news. Visit the COMPASS website to subscribe and to find an archive of Update articles.