Steps are underway for the launching of eMERGE, Metro State’s collaborative information system that represents a monumental change in how the College will share and use information.

eMERGE will be a new way for faculty and staff to track students, communicate with others about individual students, and use readily-available information to assess everything from how a student is faring academically to the retention trends of specific demographic groups. Non-student areas such as Finance and Human Resources will use other tools to perform budget or staffing analysis.

“The initiative is so big that different users might only see a piece of eMERGE, depending on their role,” said project manager Rick Beck, director of applications services in Information Technology.

Beck, his core IT managers, database administrators, server administrators and applications analysts have all been working behind the scenes on the infrastructure for eMERGE since August 2007, when the initiative was approved by the President’s Cabinet. “It’s not going to change the way the College handles daily critical operations,” Beck added. “We’ll continue to go to Banner for up-to-the-minute data.”

To describe eMERGE as big is almost an injustice, because almost everyone in every division of the College will use or benefit from it, if not during the initial implementation, then later as phases are completed. What will come together through this sharing and merging of information is the future in recruitment, retention and student services. And that future is the ability to record, store, share and assess every facet of students’ experiences from the time they first contact the College about applying, through to graduation, and¯down the project’s road¯their involvement as alumni. The only exceptions to the information sharing will be things already protected by FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and HIPPA (Health Insurance and Portability Privacy Act) and visits to GLBT Student Services and the Counseling Center, Beck said.

eMERGE is not just a tool for those who work directly with students, though. It also will be used by Human Resources, Finance and Administration and others, such as Alumni Relations and Development, in the coming years. As Beck said, “There’s something in it for everybody.”

Keeping track of student interaction
A key component of eMERGE will be its ability, once fully implemented, to track College interactions with specific students. For instance, when an advisor in the Academic Advising Center meets with a student, that advisor will be expected to enter into eMERGE the gist of what the student was told. Later, when a faculty member in the student’s major department meets with that student, he or she can go to eMERGE and see exactly what advice was given earlier to the student. That faculty member also enters his or her contact with the student, which will be accessible for subsequent faculty and staff interactions with the student. To reach its full potential, eMERGE will require the participation of everyone who has contact with a student.

“It’s going to mitigate the ‘mom and pop syndrome,’ where students go shopping for advice or approval from department to department and person to person until they find someone to say okay,” said Larry Worster, director of student services technology and assessment, who has been working with Beck and will serve on the initiative’s implementation team.

Worster seems most excited about eMERGE’s ability to assess and analyze information. “We’ll be able to get a greater handle on whether things are working or not,” he said. “The numbers at the end will nurture a ‘culture of evidence’ so that we can assess our performance to see if we’re being effective over time.”

Custom-designed
Worster and Beck agree that one of the best aspects of eMERGE is that it is being customized by SunGard—the company that produces Banner software—to meet Metro State’s particular needs. As such, it will be fully integrated with Banner.

A consultant from SunGard met with designated staff from 14 different offices in mid-March to learn how they use data, what kind of software they use, what works and what doesn’t. “It was like a focus group,” said Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services Judi Diaz Bonacquisti. Her area will be dramatically affected by eMERGE, but “it goes way beyond enrollment and information technology,” she said. “There are big implications for academic and student life as well.” Ultimately, she believes it will enable the College to better serve students, and be a much better mechanism for tracking students.

Phases
eMERGE will be implemented in phases. The first phase, the operational data store (ODS) database that will store day-old information from Banner, is in the works. IT staff have completed the infrastructure. Functional training on how to use the ODS and Cognos, the reporting tool, will take place from mid-April to mid-June.

“Cognos is like MS Access on steroids,” Beck said. “We’ll be able to put very powerful reporting tools in the hands of end users. It allows for consistency in reporting and the data is flattened out and presented in a way that’s understandable.”

All told, the eMERGE initiative will keep Beck and the soon-to-be-appointed implementation teams quite busy over the next 15 months or more as the other phases¯the enterprise data warehouse, the recruitment module and the retention module¯ come into play. The recruitment module is slated for implementation in fall 2008; the retention module in fall 2009.

Watch @Metro for the next article in our eMERGE series: “Phase Two: Preserving our institutional history – the enterprise data warehouse.”