Finance & Admin: Student Housing Module Rewrite
The Student Housing Module was first implemented in the Fall Term of 1998 and does not meet many of the current ISRS standards because the module was developed before these standards were established.
The pain is being felt by students who cannot sign up for rooms online; web-based information for housing is limited. The paper and pencil effort for room and meal assignments and related billing is not only inefficient, it is labor intensive and therefore costly. In addition, the module is not effective in assigning housing to participants in summer sports camps and conferences. These are major revenue sources for the housing programs and highly valuable since the income is from non-student participants.
One of the major goals of MnSCU is to make it easy for students to come to our institutions and to provide the highest level of service once they are here. The housing processes currently in use do not meet this goal.
The Housing Module was developed early because of the clear payback in time and cost effectiveness. Most of the state universities were using manual processes, but some had evaluated commercial software. The concern was that commercial software would have to be reconfigured to work with ISRS and that would mean additional work and perhaps cause security problems. So it was determined to build the module in-house. However, while development on ISRS continued, the Housing Module became “stuck” in the preliminary stage. The two main reasons were the departure of the primary developer and a lack of funds.
The alternative of purchasing a commercial product was fully explored, through the call for and evaluation of RFPs. The very high cost of viable alternatives, plus the need for integration with ISRS at several points, and limited flexibility for the needs of our many different institutions led the User Group, sponsor, and ITS to conclude that building a custom system was the better, and perhaps only viable alternative.
