Carnegie Mellon University
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S3 Assessment Project

Carnegie Mellon's Enrollment Services and Computing Services divisions have embarked on a joint effort to assess and explore opportunities to strengthen the university's core student systems in alignment with the University’s Strategic Plan 2025. Determining factors in launching such an effort include the rapid pace of change in technology and the university's current capacity to address contemporary business needs and evolving technology. 

The S3 (CMU's Student Services Suite) Assessment Project seeks to assess its current student information ecosystem, understand the current landscape of the industry, and identify the recommended future state of its enterprise-serving student information system (SIS) and linked systems.

CMU has engaged Deloitte’s Higher Education Practice as a partner in this effort.

Over the course of 12 weeks – from June through September 2021 - the project will:

  • Engage a broad range of campus stakeholders through a series of interactive workshops
  • Articulate a holistic case for for the future of CMU’s student information ecosystem
  • Estimate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for CMU's future student information ecosystem

Steering Committee & Core Project Team

Questions or Feedback?

About Deloitte

A recognized leader in the higher education space, Deloitte has solved complex problems with over 175 public and private institutions nationwide to solve complex problems and challenges. Deloitte’s higher education team has experienced professionals and industry leaders that turn ideas into impact. Their work includes operational and financial transformation, enterprise technology solutions, student experience redesign, and organizational and change management.

Learn more

What to Expect

The project will include the following objectives:

Current State Assessment
  1. Student systems scope and utilization (owned active and inactive systems use), business functions, goals, priorities and gaps
  2. Identification of linked systems in the ecosystem
  3. Student systems architecture, integrations, and strategic direction
  4. Methodology for capturing and calculating total cost of ownership (TCO)
  5. Student engagement: how are students actually making use of the system, how are we communicating with students from within the system
  6. Feedback and input from students
  7. Capability and robustness of student data analytics, and business intelligence
  8. Vendor maintenance support of applications
  9. Readiness for student engagement and student administration process changes
  10. Responsiveness to new and/or urgent campus needs

Benchmarking
  1. Identification of direction of peer institutions, including spend / TCO / team size for home-grown and ERP SIS support teams
  2. Change management processes of peer institutions, including incremental improvements, evolving requirements
  3. Industry trends relative to university segments
  4. Future of cloud modernization/platform vs best of breed
  5. Regulations and relevant compliance matters that would impact systems (external factors impacting systems)
  6. Staff resources employed or contracted to support the environment
  7. Organization hierarchy to support current environment
  8. Processes in place to address significant new business requirements, to incorporate or fold in new technologies or boutique systems, and address data feeds and sharing

Recommendations for Future State
  1. Identify profiles of software options for student systems (point solutions, best-of-breed, upgrade, cloud adoption, etc.) and student data analytic platforms / data warehouses
  2. Develop criteria to objectively analyze options
  3. Outline feasibility, implementation costs, timelines, and processes for migrating to a new solution
  4. Methodology for capturing and tracking total cost of ownership, including incremental changes, expansion of offerings, and new business requirements
  5. Access to student data, both from the student / faculty / staff points of view, based on business drivers and desired outcomes
  6. Vendor support for the applications in the phased approach

Plan to Achieve Future State
  1. Recommended roadmap and/or phasing to accomplish strategic goals while minimizing disruption
  2. Projected team(s) structure to implement each of the various phases
  3. Order of importance for solutions
  4. Options for phasing with pros/cons
  5. Identification of risks/assumptions
  6. Estimated costs of implementation, ongoing support and regular improvements and additions for various options

Business Case
  1. Cost and risk of inaction
  2. Draft of funding proposal (University IT Portfolio Management ‘UITPM’ template provided by CMU)

Final Presentation
  1. Upon addressing any comments and receiving the approval of the final report and roadmap by the CMU project team, the consulting firm must be prepared to lead and/or participate in a discussion with CMU’s executive leadership to answer any follow-up questions with respect to the recommendations and associated business case set forth in the report.

The project will include the following deliverables:

Report of Findings/Recommendations
  1. Executive Summary
  2. Current state findings, observations, and current cost of ownership
  3. Short-term opportunities, including funding, effort, and team structure for implementation
  4. Benchmarking, best practices, and peer institution information, including methodologies on capturing total cost of ownership and change management/evolving requirements
  5. Recommendations; include, but not limited to, all areas as outlined above
  6. Appendix with additional relevant details

Roadmap & Business Case to Achieve Ideal State
  1. Phasing options with dependencies so that order can be adjusted
  2. Milestone dates
  3. Risks / assumptions considering alignment with parallel enterprise efforts
  4. Estimated costs including internal labor resources and expected capabilities (implementation and ongoing growth)
  5. Infrastructure gap assessment to support the project along with estimated cost to procure needed hosting and technical applications.

Timeline

The S3 Assessment Project will take place over 12 weeks from June to September 2021. It will begin with a Current State Assessment and Peer Benchmarking Research and will conclude with Future State and Business Case Presentations.