Building a SaaS Ecosystem with Ellucian Student

Challenge

Routine system maintenance held back Western Iowa Tech's IT team from focusing on innovation.

Results

• Decommissioned 35 servers by moving to cloud infrastructure
• Implemented Ellucian Student in 18 months
• Sunset five third-party integrations and eliminated many customizations

Several years ago, Western Iowa Tech Community College, a multi-campus institution serving approximately 5,000 students in northwestern Iowa, made an intentional decision to transform its technology posture. According to Steve Brown, Director of Information Technology Support Services at WITCC, a significant part of the initiative was shifting leadership of localized projects away from the central IT unit to individual departments.

"It went from IT directing things to the departments pushing us more, which was a great change," Brown said. "Over time, it built a lot more buy in. We have a good culture around that."

The spirit of collaboration has enabled Western Iowa Tech's IT team to focus on improving the campus experience while knowing they will enjoy broad administrative support. According to Brown, this was crucial to the success of the college's latest campus technology milestone: migrating its cloud-hosted Ellucian Colleague system to Ellucian's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP solution, Ellucian Student powered by Colleague.

"To me, the biggest thing that made it successful is you have to have buy-in from everybody at the college," Brown said. "We had great buy-in and that made the whole thing easier."

A First Step onto the Cloud

Colleague had been Western Iowa Tech's central hub for student, financial, and human resources data and services since the 1990s. Five years ago, the school first began to modernize their Colleague system by offloading it from on-site servers to Ellucian's Hosted Cloud.

"At the time when we moved to the cloud, we ended up decommissioning 35 servers," Brown said. "That's 35 we didn't have to update anymore."

Three years later, WITCC began preparing for a full migration to Ellucian's SaaS platform. Brown said that SaaS technology, which delivers up-to-date software applications over the internet on a subscription basis, has grown increasingly prevalent in the higher education industry.

"We've known for a while that everything's going to SaaS, and when we went Hosted, we knew that was just going to be a step along the way," Brown said.

According to Christina Brandon, Dean of Outreach and Information Technology at WITCC, the Ellucian Platform offers enhanced interoperability with other SaaS solutions while leveraging the heightened cybersecurity of the cloud. Automated updates further alleviate the burden of on-site maintenance from her team of 16 people.

"We know technology is rapidly changing," Brandon said. "I don't think, given our size, our current IT staff can keep up with managing that many things on premises. We have to be able to count on our partners to do that."

Getting Ready for SaaS

WITCC's preliminary project work ensured that core campus technology was compliant with the Ellucian Platform and driving higher-level business processes in the most efficient way possible. According to Brandon, collaborating with Ellucian during this phase helped the IT team root out many potential redundancies.

"You really go in depth with each and every area of the college to say, 'What is this process? What are we using it for? How is this run?'" Brandon said. "It's nice when Ellucian points out that 'No, actually [Ellucian Student] can do that.'"

Brandon said that this work led WITCC to sunset about five third-party integrations. According to Brandon, that software was purchased and "bolted on" in the past, but had outlived its utility given enhanced functionalities of Ellucian and third-party solutions.

"This process made us go through each and every one of those integrations and look at what it was doing, how it was doing it, and if we could eliminate it," she said. "We were able to clean our connections and make sure those were useful."

Brown added that preparing to migrate to the Ellucian Platform also pushed WITCC to eliminate home-built customizations that, much like the third-party integrations it retired, had served a purpose in the past but became burdensome to maintain.

"Each step along the way we cleaned up more, and I think it went really well," he said. "You find a lot of things that you're doing because you've done it for the last 20 years this way, that now there's easier, simpler ways to do it, or things we customized that are now part of the Ellucian product. It was a great learning experience for everybody."

Going Live on Ellucian Student

Western Iowa Tech completed its implementation of Ellucian Student in about 18 months, according to Brown. He credits this success to WITCC's strong campus culture of shared technology ownership as well as support from the Ellucian project team.

"If you don't have buy-in from the people using it, no matter what you do, it's never going to work successfully," Brown said. "We had a great implementation team from Ellucian working with us, and we had really good buy-in throughout the college."

Brandon further emphasized the usefulness of proactively raising awareness among stakeholders throughout the implementation process. She also highlighted the importance of clear communication, a patient approach, and thorough testing.

"Folks should make sure all their third parties that they're using and connecting alongside their reporting are all in line before flipping that switch," she said. "I wouldn't get so anxious to flip the switch [to go live] until you have those connected."

According to Brandon, the IT team began to spread the word about the upcoming go live — the complete migration from hosted cloud to SaaS — about three months beforehand. That way, everyone on campus was prepared when they took the system down on a Friday afternoon, and brought it back up the following week on schedule.

"Between our communication with the ticketing system, and then our daily conversations with Ellucian, the go live went really well," Brandon said. "In fact, when we turned it back on, folks got right back to work."

Reduced Maintenance, Increased Functionality

Western Iowa Tech immediately saw a reduction in on-site maintenance after migrating to SaaS. In addition to the decommissioned servers, Brown said that automated updates which come through the platform have also saved his team a lot of time.

"As soon as the new stuff comes out, it's all getting installed — everything's staying current, which frees up a lot of their time," said Brown. "Before, we did patching once a month, and between researching and installing, [the guys would spend] 16 hours each for the three of them. And that's all gone away."

Beyond the work of the IT department, Brown says that WITCC's administrative users have also benefited from the modernization, uncovering new features and functionalities that were not available or they were not aware of before.

"It is a huge commitment from every department to review how you use the system, how we can make the system better, data changes — everything that's involved," Brown said. "I think departments like Financial Aid and HR in particular got a lot out of it. They learned a lot more about what they could be doing, how to utilize the product."

In addition to realizing new capabilities within core Ellucian Student, Brown also commented on plans to enhance usage of other Ellucian solutions across campus — such as Ellucian CRM Recruit and CRM Advise — that are integral components of the broader student-first ecosystem the school is building.

"We will have more time to refine how the system is used — improving functionality, using more features, tying the two together better," Brown said.

Ellucian Experience — the customizable dashboard interface that serves as the central access point to campus resources for students and staff — is also due for a makeover.

"We have a huge focus coming up to re-do our whole look and feel of Experience," Brown said. "A lot more new features have become available since we first started out with it."

One Interoperable SaaS Ecosystem

Brandon explained that Ellucian Student offers more than just smoother integration with other Ellucian solutions. It also enhances interoperability with top-tier third party solutions.

"The third-party products we were using before were dated and clunky; they didn't have the newest built in," Brandon said. "Now we've got the benefit of adding third-party SaaS products along with Ellucian products to really get those benefits. Our statements look better, the functionalities for the students too. We've gained a lot of bells and whistles."

According to Brandon, WITCC has already begun to redesign the student experience at the school within this emergent ecosystem. One of the first steps has been rolling out a student marketplace with TouchNet, an Ellucian partner.

"It's one stop where they're able to do everything that they need to do, and the bill talks to everything," Brandon said. "Before we were using different pieces and different functionalities. And now it's just nice, it kind of pulled everything together."

The most exciting aspect of modernizing to SaaS for Brandon is her team's increased capacity to take on more projects exactly like this — collaborating closely with departments on strategic initiatives that enhance the student and staff experience at Western Iowa Tech.

"I can't wait to use my team to be innovative, because that's what it allows me to do," Brandon said. "It allows me to take my IT person and put them with a functional user and together learn how to best utilize the system. I know there is so much functionality that we are just surface-level scratching."