University Times

Pitt faculty, staff and students, get used to it: PeopleSoft now is the only game in town for accessing and compiling student transaction information. With a couple exceptions, Pitt’s new PeopleSoft Student Administration system is up and running, replacing the ISIS system University-wide.

The two-year project was completed Aug. 28, the day before fall term classes started, according to Robert F. Pack, vice provost for academic planning and resources management, who was reporting to the Sept. 6 Faculty Assembly. Samuel Conte, Pitt’s registrar, also contributed to the presentation.

“We are now in full production process,” Pack said. “Every transaction that involves students is in PeopleSoft. ISIS is no longer a transaction piece of software. ISIS is still up, but it is no longer accessible to anyone except a few central administrators.”

The student implementation project included retrieving and converting all ISIS data, he said. “The first task was to take the dozen years of institutional history in ISIS — student data, service indicators, financial aid data — and we brought all that over to PeopleSoft.”

That data transfer included 273,000 records of student biographic and demographic data; 300 financial aid lender records; 12,000 academic progress records; 5,400 scholarship code records, and more than 4.5 million miscellaneous student records, such as enrollment, career, advisement and residence data.

According to Pack, among the benefits of the new system to the University community are:

• The integration with the University’s portal — my.pitt.edu — making a separate security apparatus unnecessary. All access to PeopleSoft is through the portal, using username and password.

• The elimination of Social Security numbers as student identifiers. Instead, students are given a system-generated unique number. “The Social Security number is still in the system, because we need it for financial aid purposes and some federal purposes,” Pack said. “It not accessible to anybody but a small number of administrators who process that kind of material. Faculty should no longer collect those numbers for any reason.”

• The elimination of hard copy class and grade rosters. Rosters are available only on the web and are now “dynamic,” that is, they can be updated instantaneously.

• The establishment of a totally web-based system that is accessible at any time from any location. The system, unlike ISIS, is fully integrated, that is, common data entered one time automatically is shared by all system modules.

• The expansion of student information due to additional data fields, such as student e-mail addresses, emergency contacts and more than one phone number and address.

• The integration with InfiNET software, which allows real-time billing and payment processing of student fees. “This is all now on line. I’ve essentially eliminated all paper transactions,” Pack said. “Students get e-bills; they no longer get paper bills. We are now in the process, for instance, of eliminating refund checks; we used to issue tens of thousands of refunds to students every term. We now use electronic deposits.”

InfiNET also allows credit card processing by any unit at the University, he added. “We’ve always had a problem in the past: If a department wanted to have a conference and wanted to take credit cards, they had to make an arrangement, and there was always a security issue about how they would manage those numbers. Now we can extend credit card processing in a highly secure way at no cost through InfiNET to any unit that wants to use credit cards.”

• The integration with the Residential Management System for housing and meal plan fees processing.

• The capability of on-line applications.

Among the benefits to faculty, accessible via self-service, are viewing class schedules; viewing weekly schedules; accessing class rosters; recording and submitting grades electronically; using the grade book feature, and viewing the course catalog.

Using the PeopleSoft system, students can access their complete grade history, request verification on enrollment status, review final exam schedules and apply for graduation on line, Pack said.

“Whether we will do self-registration is a unit decision. The system will support self-registration. Some graduate units, particularly those with a structured curriculum, may decide to go in that direction,” he said.

“I officially closed the project Aug. 28 with one major caveat, which was something I added after the project was started: The academic advisement module [is not yet operational],” Pack said. That module will allow students and their advisers to perform a “degree progress audit” to see what requirements need to be filled. It also will tell transfer students which credits Pitt will accept, he said.

“Even more important for students, it allows them to do ‘what if’ scenarios,” Pack said. “If they change majors, what’s the impact, what have they taken, what does it count toward, what doesn’t it count toward.”

The academic advising module is expected to be in place in October in time for spring term registration, according to Conte.

Also yet to “go live” is the continuing education module that the College of General Studies oversees, Pack said. That module also will be in place by the spring term, according to Conte.

In implementing the student system, Computer Services and Systems Development (CSSD) held 15 custom training classes, which were completed by some 2,400 employees University-wide.

“Some of these classes last a week, some were only one session, depending on what people were trained for,” Pack said. “Much of the training we concentrated on administrators because they were the ones most heavily involved in such work.”

All faculty were mailed brochures Sept. 6 that outline how to get started in the PeopleSoft system, Pack said. A tutorial video also is available in the Faculty Services section on the my.pitt.edu portal.

Pack acknowledged to Faculty Assembly that the dissemination of information about the PeopleSoft system had been imperfect.

“One of the things I had hoped to do, and obviously have not been totally successful in doing, was having a lot of these communications pieces in place prior to the beginning of term; obviously they weren’t,” he said. “The primary reason for that is we had a problem on the billing [module], which is a pretty fundamental component of the software, that took everyone’s attention from the middle of August on and, as a result, other things got delayed. I hope you’ll believe we’ve recovered nicely from that.

“Despite the issue about how successful we may not have been in all ways in communications, in the thousands of transactions that the University has experienced from the beginning of this project to this term, there have been relatively few difficulties and complaints.”

He added that his office and CSSD over the next few weeks will be conducting faculty focus groups to solicit feedback on the new system and suggestions for additional modules.

Pack maintained that the overall implementation process here was faster, less disruptive and much cheaper than similar systems being implemented at other institutions, though he did not specify costs to Pitt.

“We used no new people,” Pack said. “For two years we said, ‘Keep doing your job and do this.’ So people who did it, who built it, now are running it and they can train their staff.”

Members of Faculty Assembly applauded the University’s efforts in implementing the new system. One faculty member urged Pack and his team to limit the “program-speak” terminology that might confuse the user unfamiliar with the software’s jargon.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been trying to do,” Pack said. “I’ve tasked CSSD with that communication end, to render [terms] into transparent language. We’re not wedded to the prose. That’s the kind of thing where we want your help and your advice.”

For more information on the student implementation system, access the web site: https://www.pitt.edu/studentsys/ or contact the Help Desk at 412/624-4357.

Pack asked that faculty members forward questions, problems and suggestions to him via e-mail at: robert.pack@pitt.edu.

Other Faculty Assembly developments include:

• Assembly member Paul Munro reported on the latest data drawn from his petition and questionnaire/survey on the potential uses for the University Club, a building on University Drive recently purchased by Pitt. Munro is measuring interest in establishing a faculty/staff club to replace the now-defunct Pitt Club. (The survey web site URL is: www.sis.pitt.edu/~pmunro/petition/.)

Munro summarized his latest data:

— The overwhelming majority of the 402 total responses from faculty and staff favor the establishment of a faculty/staff club. Nearly an equal number of faculty and staff have responded.

— Slightly more faculty by percentage (90 percent) favor a club than staff (85 percent) of respondents.

— Responses to a question of a “reasonable rate structure” ranged from $5-$10 dues a month for lunch/dinner food service only to $20-$30 a month for food service and health club facilities.

“A determining factor for the administration seems to be that they’d like [a club] to be self-supporting,” Munro said. “A health club is probably not a reasonable part of this, but at least the administration can use that data to supplement their own data.”

Munro plans to continue discussion of the potential faculty/staff club at Senate plant utilization and planning committee meetings.

• Senate President Irene Frieze reported that faculty presidents from Pitt’s regional campuses will attend one of the fall Faculty Assembly meetings.

• The tenure and academic freedom committee (TAFC) annually prepares an analysis on tenure and tenure-stream trends at Pitt based on information compiled by Pitt’s Office of Institutional Research and published in the Fact Book.

TAFC chair Carey Balaban distributed a preliminary report at the Sept. 6 Assembly. Due to time constraints, Assembly members agreed to discuss the results at a future Faculty Assembly meeting.

• Assembly members also agreed to discuss the implications of the recently established state House of Representatives higher education subcommittee formed to investigate alleged liberal bias among the state’s educators. (See July 21 University Times.) The Senate’s educational policies committee and TAFC are two possible forums for discussion, Assembly members agreed.

• The University Senate will sponsor a spring plenary session March 29 on the broad theme of commercialization and technology transfer in an academic context. Speakers will be announced at a later date.

Senate officers announced that there will be no fall plenary session this year.

• Also canceled, for general lack of interest, is the standing 30-minute meeting that previously preceded all scheduled Faculty Assembly and Senate Council meetings. “These meetings were for faculty to come if they had special concerns,” said Frieze. “Traditionally very, very few have come. But if there’s ever any issue you want to raise, you can call me about it.”

—Peter Hart