Friday, January 26, 2001

The UNC Shared Services Alliance Advisory Board met in the General Administration Building, Chapel Hill on Friday, January 26, 2001 at 9:00 a.m. The Chair called the meeting to order.

The minutes of the October meeting need to be amended to correct Joann Dehoney's name. The board voted to accept the November 30 minutes.

The board revisited the subject of sending substitutes to meetings. After some discussion on this subject, there was a motion and second that board members will notify the Chair or a designated person when sending a proxy/representative to act on their behalf at board meetings and if a vote is taken, the position taken by the proxy will be recorded as the board member's official vote. With that understanding the board members need to make sure that their proxy knows the board member's position on all agenda items. Motion passed It is the responsibility of each board member to inform their representative/proxy of what their role is.

The Career Services Proposal was presented for discussion. It was noted that UNCC was not on the spreadsheet and should be added in the current user category and ECSU should be moved to the current user category. There was also a request to see if we could synchronize service for everyone up front. There are currently two representatives handling these accounts and we would like to see if we could get one person designated to be our focal point of contact. A motion made and seconded to approve the Brass Ring concept once the final proposal is submitted Motion passed.

A proposal from Embark was shared with the board. There was discussion about acquiring two pieces for the Alliance schools to help meet baseline due to the hold up with the PSP. This is a web-based way of implementing events scheduler and interview scheduler. There were some additional questions we needed to have addressed. Does the Development Service Fee include the Annual Subscription Fee for the first year? Does the discount apply to both Development and Subscription Fees? Is there a discount if we buy more than one product per school? The board members are to notify Robyn by February 7 if their Admissions offices are supportive of this.

Discussion followed about transaction fees. The Statute has passed and Universities must have a planned approved for their transaction fees. The Office of State Controller sent a letter to Chancellors related to the passage of this statute and it has been shared with the Chief Financial Officers. There is a committee at GA working on this. The Interim VP for Information Resources will distribute to the board information on a presentation to the Chief Financial Officers along with the policy on transaction fees.

UPDATES

RFP - The board was updated on the status of the RFP for the Prospective Student Portal. Due to funding constraints we are currently exploring some other alternatives. Committed to WCU for the deliverable. Their investment in this project is not at risk. We will need to do more ourselves sooner and look at much more modest contract for assistance. The technology architecture should be revisited again. Admissions affirmed the PSP and we need to keep it moving. At this point the RFP is on hold, but not the PSP. The process we undertake may expedite the PSP for ASU and UNCW. Use resources from Systems Support group, TLT and Alliance and one person each from WCU, ASU and UNCW. One of the functional requirements of the PSP is to build the interface to Pathways.

RFI - The board was updated on the status of the RFI. After the RFI was initially written, it was distributed to the board for input. It was revised based on board input and comments from Procurement and Legal. Waiting for the OK from Legal to post. A paper copy was handed out and once it is finalized an electronic version will be distributed to the board. Hopefully we will responses that can be reported on at the March 1 meeting.

WSSU stated we need to get the RFI out and get as much information as possible and recommend that we consider bring a consulting firm to help organize and do the legwork. After much discussion, it was suggested we may want to participate in a telephone conference call with some vendors, but we need to be up front and stress this is a fact finding venture. WSSU and NCSA volunteered to work on drafting the statement of the problem and develop questions. WSSU will get the information out to the board and the board members are to get their comments on the draft back to WSSU to help shape the statement and questions. WSSU will schedule the conference calls. Pick a time and day for the calls and as many people as possible can participate. We could use two different consultants -- one for planning and one for implementation. We need clarification on if a particular consultant assist with writing the RFP can they bid.

Sun Equipment - WSSU and NCA&T SUN equipment should be delivered by January 29. Others have been delivered.

Payment Gateway - delivery date is next week. Will pass date along as soon as Touchnet sends it. We will need to resolve how UNC will handle the fee issue before Payment Gateway is production ready.

Sun Training - There are still seats left for Sun training and presently $5,000 left against the Purchase Order.

A copy of the status report shared with the Chancellors on January 23rd was distributed to the board. If there are corrections, please let the Interim Executive Director know so the changes can be made.

The Procurement Workflow documents for Hardware and Software were presented to the board. Major comments received back were from Procurement regarding a couple of changes pertaining to giving a more detail and stating that as you reach certain limitations, in some instances you will have to actually go out to a vendor process. This is reflected in step 2 and in certain cases you will be working with ITS or P&C. The rest of it remains the same. A motion was made and seconded to accept these workflow documents as official. Motion passed. These files will be sent to the Interim Executive Director for posting on the website.

Please put draft number and date on all documents distributed to the board.

The procurement section requested a discussion on virus protection software. A survey of campuses was requested to get a good count on the number of nodes by virus protection software so a proposal could be put together that the campuses could participate in. It was noted that there are advantages of having this type of protection at the server level. It was suggested that future items such as this be sent to the alliance distribution list so the members could redistribute the information to the appropriate people on their campus. The Interim Executive Director will discuss this with the Procurement Director.

There was discussion after lunch related to the latest study on range revisions by OSP and the resulting action that will go to the Personnel Commission in February and the implications of budget reversions at the campus level.

Interim Executive Director Report:

• Met with the Assistant to the Vice President for Information Resources to discuss the process for updating the Alliance website. Will be adding the approved minutes and the procurement workflow documents to the updated site.
• Provide the board with the EDI request we had received related to interfacing high school transcripts from EDI to SIS. A member of the System Support team will begin working on the interface program.
  Planning a pilot install at NCA&T with a representative from SCT and some members of the System Support group. The members of the System Support group will develop documentation based on this pilot install to be used at other campuses. This will be scheduled after the release of EDI version 3.0 that is due out in January.
  There are a number of campuses that have done a good bit of work with the EDI Smart software. ASU is working on an electronic method of getting the application out of NC Mentor and into SIS. This will be shared with the other campuses.
  Testing of the software is planned for the March/April timeframe with six high schools, four campuses and some community colleges.
• The two campus surveys discussed at our November meeting have been revised based on feedback. They will be sent to the board electronically. Applications Manager contact information is needed from each campus. These surveys will be emailed to the Applications Managers and the CIOs later next week. Let me know if you have any questions about them.
• Provide the board with a summary of the Alumni/Development survey. Will meet with the Systems Support group and look for alternative methods to address some of these issues as a stopgap while we proceed with the RFI process.
• Videoconference times have been scheduled to hold organizational meetings for the following functional workgroups.
  Technical 2/ 5 10:00-12:00.
  Financial 2/8 10:00-12:00
  Student 2/13 10-12
  Alumni 2/15 10-12
  
  The workgroup for Human Resources still needs to be scheduled.
  These groups will be given background information on the Alliance. The By-Laws will be shared with them so they understand their roles and responsibilities as specified by the By-Laws. They will be brought up-to-date as to the RFI and specific groups will be updated on things that have taken place recently, i.e. the Financial Workgroup needs to know about the purchase and pending implementation of Payment Gateway and the transaction fee. Will ask each campus to identify the primary contact. Some campuses have done this, but not all. The primary contact is the person that will attend in-person meetings and be the official voting representative for the campus, etc. There is no set number for staff attending the videoconferences. Depending on the topics being discussed, the primary contact should ensure the correct people are notified and represented.
• Position descriptions being created to establish a Web Developer and Data Base Administrator for the Alliance.
• The TLT Board decided to send the Executive Director of the TLT to the Alliance Board meetings. Tom Jackson will be the designated TLT representative until the Executive Director is hired.

The spreadsheet for baseline services was distributed to the board. The Interim VP for Information Resources added the three columns to the far right as a check off indicating when/where the services were being addressed. It was agreed that these need to be shared with the functional groups to validate our assumptions are right and determine what to do with those items that are blank. Use the method PWC did with the allocation of points. This will give the groups something to be engaged in.

There was a suggestion made for all board members to ever so often come in the night before to meet about items that are not part of the Alliance agenda.

Meeting was adjourned at 2:30pm.