A student information system transition is one of the most complex, disruptive, and ultimately transformative projects a higher ed institution can undertake. Recently, Thesis Elements Chief Product Officer, Dr. Jennifer Beyer, and Ande Smith, President of Deer Brook Consulting, sat down with three Elements clients who have been through it – and come out the other side.
We asked them what they’d tell someone standing where they once stood. Here’s what they had to say.
You will Underestimate the People Problem
Before you can think about data, timelines, or integrations, you have to think about your people. Ande Smith, President of Deer Brook Consulting put it plainly, “There are no technology projects. There are only people projects.”
Every institution on the panel acknowledged some version of this. The staff member who has done something the same way for 20 years. The department head who didn’t realize how much of their identity was tied to existing manual workflows. The team that burned out after years trying to implement a new SIS before pivoting to a different partner.
Flathead Valley lived through a multi-year implementation attempt before pivoting to Thesis Elements and noted that the institutional fatigue that followed was real. “There was a lot of turnover during that time, a lot of frustration internally,” he said. “These projects can be trying to the whole institution and affect every department.”
The advice? Do the hard work of assessing your people, not just your data and your budget, before you begin.
Data Preparation is the Linchpin for Success
Every panelist, unprompted, circled back to their institutional data. Ande Smith called it “the linchpin of any kind of change in a system.” Kent Rogers said if he could do it over, he would have pushed harder for institutional discipline around data cleanup earlier in the process. Jerri Brown noted that her institution’s biggest challenge was understanding how decades of accumulated data (some of it stored inconsistently across the life of the system) would translate into the new environment.
The reason data preparation matters so much goes beyond the mechanics of migration. As Ande explained, unresolved data problems don’t disappear after you go-live, they just become credibility problems. “If things don’t go well initially or you have adoption problems, data problems become a ‘the system doesn’t work right’ conversation. It’s not that the data was wrong.”
Start with a data cleansing exercise and plan for problems on day one regardless. “Despite your best preparation, there are going to be data problems,” Ande said. “If people are aware of it and prepared for it, you can clean them up quickly and move even more easily into adoption.”
Go-Live is the Start of the Race, Not the Finish Line
Multiple panelists used almost exactly this phrase, and it bears repeating. The assumption that go-live is the endpoint of an implementation is one of the most common and costly miscalibrations an institution can make.
Kent Rogers said, “Once you go live, that’s the start of the project. It’s not really the end. That’s where you start to really get your integrations honed in, or the new integrations and the new business processes and the new workflows that have all been usually put on pause as you’re trying to implement your core SIS. Now that you’re live, the floodgates are open.”
Jeff Gutkin, who took St. Elizabeth University live in just seven months, made a deliberate decision to not bring in consultants before go-live, and to bring them in immediately after. “Our entire team is only focused on the building and not on the managing of two systems,” he said. “I would do it again like that. There’s a lot of faith involved.”
The implication: budget and resource accordingly for the six to twelve months after go-live, not just the months leading up to it.
Words of Wisdom for Those Going Through a SIS Migration
We asked each institution for their single most important piece of advice for an institution for a SIS transition. Their answers were honest, specific, and worth quoting directly.
Jerri Brown, Prescott College
“We’ve mentioned it, all of us, at different points: data preparation. Especially if you’ve had a system for many years, any work you can do ahead of time is going to benefit you.”
Jeffery Gutkin, Saint Elizabeth University
“If we had known our processes – what they were going to look like a lot further on – maybe we would have done things a little bit differently. So really try to find that end goal well past go-live.”
Kent Rogers, Flathead Valley Community College
“There is a philosophical component that I think the institution needs to have a conversation about when they engage in this work … I think going with that best of breed is really what worked best for FVCC. It does mean more integration work. It doesn’t mean it’s not without its challenges, but I do feel like it makes us nimble.”
Final Thoughts
Every institution on our panel arrived at their SIS transition differently. Some forced by an end-of-life announcement, some driven by fragmentation and desire for the cloud, and some recovering from prior implementation attempts. But they all landed in the same place: a go-live they’re proud of.
No matter where you are in this journey, the best thing you can do is talk to people who have been there. The questions you don’t know how to ask are usually the most important ones.
If you’re interested in learning more about SIS transitions or simply want to have a conversation of what a SIS transformation could look like for your institution, reach out to the Thesis Elements team. We’re happy to connect.