October 27, 2011

From the Field: When It’s Halloween and You Are Haunted by an SIS Integration

Oct. 27, 2011 at 02:07 PM | By Emily Meehan | Comment Count

For many clients newly transitioned or in the process of transitioning to a new education CRM platform, October is a terrifying month for reasons having nothing to do with Halloween. Enrollment and recruitment divisions are operating in high-gear, admissions counselors and representatives are in the throes of the recruitment fair circuits, and all manner of higher educational institutions are peacocking at sundry open houses and interest-generating events trying to court potential students. The transfer of data between the prospective student market and the educational institution is frequent, voluminous and consequently overwhelming without the right tools and processes to manage the flow of information.

Luckily, you formulated an airtight strategy and have painstakingly selected a relationship management engine that relieves the discomfort and self-sabotage of drinking inquiry and application data from the fire hose. Unfortunately, the implementation process is inevitably disrupted by the seasonal events in your business cycle and vice versa, so when the fall madness begins, many CRM projects are not deployed, which means reverting back to another few months of old habits and systems. OR, the CRM configuration is complete, but one or more ancillary systems needs to be synchronized with what is in the CRM, and integrating is the only sensible route to go. If not approached correctly, the system integration can make the work involved for a CRM configuration pale in comparison (there’s a vampire reference in there somewhere).

Those of you who were graced with the serendipity of configuring the CRM in time to allow for the data mapping, programming, testing and rollout of the integration in time for this recruitment cycle are – possibly, and only possibly -- in a good place. The jury is still out on whether end-users are actually putting the tools that work in the way that you planned, which is a reflection of how well the technical requirements have been aligned with their needs and expectations and only, of course, to the degree that the change has been clearly communicated and managed. More on this in a later piece.

For those of you that have seen your go-live date come and go, you are now enduring the tedium of manual exporting and importing of data from one system to another to synchronize records. And since you are still trying to get the integration up and running, you are also scrambling to conduct the seemingly countless iterations of tests to ensure the data being passed is accurate – and all of this comes at a most unwelcome time. Not to put too fine a point on the Halloween references, but you may be living a nightmare. Did it need to be this way? Probably not and here’s why:

Don’t Integrate Too Soon:

Some organizations are so concerned with a drop deadline for ensuring an automated transfer of data between their disparate systems, that they begin the process prematurely – that is before the configuration is complete or before the technical requirements have been truly identified. If the CRM configuration is not finished, then you can be sure any integration-related programming that occurs before your configuration is done will need to be edited – possibly a few times. This is unnecessary backpedaling for everyone involved, and will almost definitely push back your go live date. Make sure your system is completely configured and vetted with the appropriate stakeholders before kicking off any work on a system integration. Far better that you do the integration work once than have to live in programming purgatory (there’s another one), and cause the project to go over budget.

Your CRM Vendor Is NOT the Liaison Between You and Your IT Department:

The system champion of the CRM implementation is also the project owner of the system integration. The technical resource at your institution is not responsible for driving the system integration, nor is the vendor responsible for ensuring that you and your technical resource are on the same page. If executive level support is required in order to secure a technical resource, secure it as soon as possible, and then please establish a nice rapport with this person as this project was probably not on his or her radar. Try to find out in advance what type of file your system requires, ask where files should be placed pick up or drop off, and build in turnaround time if, for example, a directory with read write access needs to be created.

Test Now or Forever Hold Your Peace:

Nobody likes to stare at rows upon rows of pipe delimited fields looking for inconsistencies or errors. But the education CRM project champion knows the data best, and therefore ownership of testing process must reside with the project champion. We have seen many institutions skimp on testing up front and miss glaring errors, and even missing a minor error during testing creates can present major problems later on. Again, this results in backpedalling, cost overruns, and a huge lack of confidence in the data among end-users which begets user-adoption issues. Testing is a detail-oriented process, but your vendor can provide guidance around a testing plan and best practices for ensuring all scenarios have been thoroughly reviewed before go live. Be thorough up front, as it can come back to, uh, haunt you later.