REGEIS Lodestar

REGEIS began with a vision that efforts in information technology should provide a direct, tangible, and accountable benefit/service to the end-user. In developing software applications for higher education, REGEIS’s guiding principle has been to empower end-users to perform their jobs more effectively, more efficiently, and with more enjoyment. Simply put, end-user empowerment and functionality should be the ultimate goal of any reporting application.

With a click of the mouse, REGEIS believes faculty and support staff should be able to directly, instantly, and easily obtain the necessary information to perform their duties. Users need:

“Watkins and his team have developed a series of front-end programs that allow authorized users access to the University's database. The programs, which are easy to use and incredibly fast, allow an almost instant delivery of data… The method of delivering this information is virtually transparent, which gives users time to concentrate on the analysis of the data, as opposed to the delivery system.

CAUSE/EFFECT Fall 1997

It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect faculty and support staff to become proficient in understanding relational databases; table structures, taxonomy, and schema; and inner-, right- and left-joins.

REGEIS Perspective

Background: REGEIS’ founder and current president began his career in local government, from East Lansing, MI to Alexandria, VA, and then Portsmouth, VA, last serving as an Assistant City Manager. He left local government to work for the International City Management Association Retirement Corporation (ICMA-RC), a 501(c)(3) organization offering pension and investment services to local government, initially as Director of Research, and then promoted to Corporate Vice President.

In 1989, he entered higher education as a Special Consultant to the President, with a charge to “develop an executive information system for higher education.” Over the past two decades, he has served in numerous other capacities with several higher education institutions, including University Registrar, founding director of the Office of Information Technology, and Academic Affairs Consultant for student retention/advising and Institutional Reporting.

“We believe that software projects (both in higher education and more generally) work best when there is clear mutual understanding between the users and the developers regarding how the software is to be used and what is important for it to accomplish.”

Software and Collaboration in Higher Education: A Study of Open Source Software

The REGEIS perspective for higher education is three-fold (Functional, Executive, Technology):

Functional: First, and foremost, understanding the day-to-day needs of deans, academic chairs, faculty, offices of institutional research, admissions, student records, financial aid, and support offices to serve/guide students through successful matriculation.

Executive: Understanding the leadership challenges facing higher education executives in responding to federal/state mandates, the student tracking, reporting, and advising needs of faculty/staff, and providing quality/affordable educational opportunities for all students.

Technology: Understanding the relational design of an enterprise, monolithic transaction system and recognizing that this design does not meet the reporting needs of users. A Dual-Database strategy is more functional, and significantly less expensive.

“A third concern expressed by a number of university leaders is that a small number of commercial vendors hold a great deal of market power in areas of core operating or strategic importance..”

"One could imagine a rather bleak scenario in which universities and colleges feel compelled to purchase monolithic systems with even less flexibility than they have now to optimize on individual modules."

Software and Collaboration in Higher Education: A Study of Open Source Software

REGEIS LOGO

The REGEIS logo, a pyramid consisting of 4 layers, depicts our lodestar/vision that functionality should be the ultimate goal of any reporting application. Each layer represents a necessary element in reaching the apex, end-user empowerment/functionality.

Layer One: The foundation layer is technology. It is essential that the optimal technology be deployed across the campus, i.e., servers, network, enterprise system, internet and desktop applications.

Layer Two: Data integrity is the next layer. “Garbage in, garbage out” is a long-time, though now seldom-used, axiom in information technology. Faculty/staff advisers cannot properly advise students with inaccurate data; Presidents, policymakers, researchers, the public, and others cannot make informed decisions with inaccurate, unreliable, and inconsistent institutional data.

User-Centric

Layer Three: Reporting/tracking applications are the third layer. Applications are the end-users view of data in the enterprise system. Applications must be User-Centric , not Technology-Centric 1) based on industry standards, not proprietary; 2) easy to understand and use directly; and 3) provide information interactively and instantly to user’s desktop, without need to wait 1-3 days for a static, canned report.

Layer Four: The apex of the REGEIS pyramid is functionality, which at its highest level is student success. Functionality begins with empowerment, the institution’s commitment to understand and provide for the student reporting, tracking, and advising needs of faculty/staff.

“… it became clear that we lack mechanisms to sense when a student is off track toward graduation and to intervene in a timely way. We do not have in place enough early warning mechanisms to identify students in academic trouble, or to identify students who have missed out on crucial 'checkpoint' courses, or students who have simply drifted away from a credit load and attendance pattern that will keep them progressing toward a degree.”

"Furthermore, we sense that the lack of such mechanisms reflects a lack of institutional commitment to seeing students through to the successful completion of their studies."

-- University of Minnesota, “Improving Our Graduation Rates,” The Report of the Graduation and Retention Subcommittee of the Council of Undergraduate Deans (August 2001)

A Step Toward Functionality

One strategy to achieve functionality could be to re-allocate, under the control of the Provost and Chief Academic Officer, a small fraction, say, a nickel of every dollar spent on information technology, to meet the needs of faculty and staff.

“…Provosts and CFOs, in collaboration with their CIOs, would have to engage with it as a matter of routine when considering major projects. We expect that such engagement will improve the quality of collaboration between academic and technical leadership on campus. This would be a mixed blessing for CIOs, who will benefit from closer alignment with the academic leadership, but who would also likely have less autonomy with regard to strategic decisions about administrative systems.” -- Software and Collaboration in Higher Education: A Study of Open Source Software

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