Beyond Embrace Our Replace

Overall Project Goals:
​Create a culture of technology innovation that empowers all members of the Bellarmine community to actively contribute to student success.

Completely replace the university’s administrative and student information systems with Ellucian's Colleague integrated platform.  Bellarmine's ERP Steering Committee sees Colleague as a modern system that takes advantage of current technologies and believes that Ellucian has demonstrated the ability to remain current as technology evolves, both of which are important to the university.

Colleague will be the "system of record" for Bellarmine data once fully in production.  Any deviations from this policy must be completely understood, documented, and ultimately approved by senior leadership. Additionally this project will provide the opportunity for Bellarmine to develop a definitive data retention program which will govern both retaining and destroying data.

Develop business processes and practices that have been vetted against industry best practices, guidance from Ellucian, and Bellarmine's needs. Business processes should be modernized, standardized, and automated whenever practical and possible. The goal is to make the Colleague system as efficient as possible, allowing the university community to spend time focusing on the things that add to Bellarmine's value proposition. Simply recreating current processes in Colleague without evaluating them is contrary to the vision of this project; simply paving the cow path is not acceptable.

Empower administrative users to be more effective and enable the entire community to easily find and access relevant information.  A key part of this goal is to reduce reliance on paper both from an information retention and workflow process perspective.

Provide deep visibility into Bellarmine's ever-expanding universe of data, allowing unprecedented insight into how the university operates today and how it could conduct business tomorrow.

Install a culture of interdepartmental collaboration and provide a lasting framework to foster this culture.

Foster and maintain a partnership with Ellucian and view them as central to Bellarmine's success.

Eliminate as many third-party systems and customizations as possible to allow a high degree of data integration. The policy will be to look to Ellucian first when considering new functionality for campus administrative needs.

Create one portal that all members of the Bellarmine community can easily find and utilize for the purpose of conducting most, if not all, of their administrative computing business. Beyond simply being utilitarian, this portal should provide users with a great experience and represent the quality of Bellarmine's technology through reliability and proper branding.

Develop a mobile application that will allow community members to have access to a host of university resources on their mobile devices. The mobile experience will not be quite as rich as the portal experience, but it should be extremely functional and promote usage.

Implement a defined, actively managed, and endorsed security governance program over all the data in the Colleague system. The default policy in data access will be deny first and grant access only with proper authorization.

Improve data integrity, data consistency, and departmental collaboration around data. Each department will interact with data through standard definitions and defined channels. In addition each department will understand how other departments utilize data so that they appreciate how their actions impact other areas.

Streamline capabilities to communicate with the Bellarmine community by providing multiple communication channels and integrated communication management. The ability to archive communications, target specific groups for communications, and allow recipients to control their communication options are all important parts of this goal.

Improve faculty experience with the ERP by providing tools and information that allow them to focus on their work with students and not on system operations.

Overall user satisfaction is important to the continuing success of this system. Universities reporting the highest levels of user satisfaction and productivity view their ERP system as user-owned and driven; therefore, Colleague must in theory and practice be a user-owned and driven system.

Improve end-user training by developing a repeatable training practice that will allow effective training of new employees as well as keeping existing staff current. This training should combine the capabilities of the software with the needs of the operational area so that everyone understands the specifics of how to do their jobs.

Eliminate extraneous custom reports by educating users on what information is natively available within the base Colleague system without the need to utilize reporting services.

Provide reliable and consistent reporting outcomes thereby improving institutional and instructional effectiveness.

Eliminate the use of Excel spreadsheets, as well as other external applications, to accomplish business tasks when the functions can be accomplished within the Colleague environment.

Adhere to all regulatory requirements by following best practices where possible and applying updates in a timely fashion to keep the Colleague system compliant.