Meeting & Agendas

Approved. {CW; DO; BB}

Due to the recent high number of requests for new departments and altered department names, the CORE Committee recommends that all requests require the completion of the official form (see link below) by the requester and assurance that the committee gets a chance to review the requests, as these requests are touching many areas, both academic and administrative. A request was also made to modify the current official form for adding/changing departments and department names, such that the form include the Area of Study and the Program, if it is an academic department. The CORE Committee also wants to use the DEPTS.TYPE field to distinguish between Academic and Administrative departments. We will experiment with that in Colleague Test starting the week of December 11 - 15, after Colleague Test has been cloned from Colleague Live. The CORE Committee also discussed the need for a more simplistic way to utilize org charts. eStaffing, CMS, eTime, and Org Chart all use some method for deriving Organizational Charts. Some of the data resides in Colleague, but in the Academic areas, it is an issue. Adjuncts are currently showing as working in the Human Resources department, for instance. The problem was acknowledged, and the Committee will shelve the topic until a later date.

Anyone who wants to weigh in on benefits vs. costs in terms of a college-wide conversion of the Unidata DBMS to MS SQL Server DBMS should contact IT Applications Development. A cost-benefit analysis is being prepared.

Colleague Test is scheduled to be cloned from Colleague Live on December 8, 2017. After the cloning, any new Colleague Software Updates will be added to Colleague Test and the R18 Colleague Software Updates document updated accordingly. Colleague Software Update assignments will be made during the week of December 11 - 15, 2017.

A subcommittee of the CORE Committee, dedicated to Data Cleanup will be resurrected. At this meeting, the committee looked at A70.APPLICANTS and APPLICANTS. A70.APPLICANTS went from 120 data errors a year and a half ago to over 20,000 this week. Most of this is related to CRM Recruit sending over Yes/No values instead of Y/N values. The CORE Committee will work with Enrollment Management to solve the problem.

The amount of time that HR, Payroll, and IT have had to devote to the new TRS Reporting System has been devastatingly high. The TRS system is riddled with inconsistencies ambiguities, and the documentation is inadequate. Ellucian has done a poor job of creating a workable solution, but other vendors are also experiencing problems. Texas colleges are struggling with this new process. TRS seems to recognize the problem they have created, but so far the only acknowledgement that colleges are getting is that they won't be fined for delays in getting their monthly reports verified. Currently Ellucian has not developed many of the forms for Colleague that TRS requires. And of the 7 that are available in Colleague, only 2 of them are working. Ellucian has also provided sub-standard documentation, but, in their defense, TRS has made it difficult for any vendor to meet their requirements.