In early summer the Campus Community Product Advisory Group conducted a survey to collect information related to the issues facing the Higher Education community. We wish to thank all those who took the time to respond and provide some valuable information which has since shaped the conversations our Advisory Group has been having in response. The purpose behind this survey was twofold. One to gauge our current constituents’ understanding and preparation level for implementing the Campus Solution-Human Capital Management Integration. The survey responses indicated that several institutions had not yet determined the approach they may take to accomplish the integration. From the anecdotal information regarding the integration and documentation provided for it, a common theme for the PAG to build upon was the desire for more information related to the impact to business processes.
In response to the desire for more information, the Campus Community group has worked closely with Oracle, the Technical Advisory Group, and the specially created Focus Group for the CS-HCM Integration to provide additional information related to this. A webinar was conducted with the early adopters of the CS-HCM Integration and is available in the archives of the Education Series (http://www.heug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=177) on the HEUG website. As more schools move through the integration, the Campus Community PAG will continue to provide additional information.
The second purpose was to gain a better sense of the priorities for improvements in the functionality that falls under the Campus Community umbrella. Of these pieces of functionality, Communication Generation (CommGen) was the clear front-runner for where institutions would like to see improvements. This outpaced all other functionality items as the top priority by a 2 to 1 margin. When addressing the specifics about where to devote time and effort, the desire to simplify setup and use is where the majority of responders saw the biggest impact to be made. There were several specific comments and suggestions made which have been shared with the Oracle Team who are further evaluating the feedback and functionality.
Rounding out the other top five functionality items to improve were Delegated Access, Population Select, Periodic Verification, and 3Cs. Delegated access is the ability to allow a delegate access into a student’s account, i.e. Parental Access. Population select improvements revolved around extending out the delivered population select/update areas and expanding functionality to additional tables. Additional information has been requested from the community for use cases to provide to Oracle as they would research the expansion of the Pop Select/Update functions. At the Alliance, we will request some ideas for the additional areas to expand this feature.
Rounding out the top 5 was Periodic Verification and the 3Cs. Periodic Verification was noted by many as a desired feature to comply with a manner of validation/verifying data currently recorded. The common theme to this improvement was the ability to have it easily configurable and adaptable to the needs and processes at the various institutions. The 3Cs improvements noted in the comments regarding this particular item were more so related to the CommGen improvements. Though some specific features were discussed such as expanded self service features related to the checklists and communications out to students and the ability to utilize HTML to provide hyperlinks within the messages.
Again, we thank you all for the input from the survey. This has been quite helpful in shaping the conversations with Oracle throughout the year. We would like to highlight that many of the conference sessions within the Campus Community track at the upcoming Alliance will also address aspects of these higher priority items from the survey.