Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR)

Story Details

At what point do 20-year-old administrative systems become too costly to support and adapt and become a detriment to attracting and retaining top students, faculty and staff? Many educational institutions have been facing this choice over the last decade, beginning with the self-examination of IT systems that began with the approach of Y2K.

It's a difficult decision for a single institution. It becomes even more complex when you are a statewide higher education system with 19 different schools, each with its own policies, procedures and local requirements. Yet two years ago, the Tennessee Board of Regents embarked on that path, shifting from mainframe-based systems to a web-based, services-oriented architecture, and its progress has impressed constituents and vendors alike.

To maintain and enhance its reputation as one of the leading educational systems in the South, TBR recognized that it would have to invest in its IT infrastructure to efficiently manage and operate today's changing learning environment and to compete for the best students and faculty. The goals of the project were to improve administrative and academic services and their accessibility to users, to provide better decision support and management tools, and to move to a web-based, self-service model to reduce costs and improve the quality of services and responsiveness to change.

Placing itself on an aggressive three year timeline to complete the project by the end of the 2007-2008 school year, TBR is well on its way to rolling out the SunGard SCT Banner suite, primarily on new Sun Microsystems Enterprise servers running the reliable and proven Solaris Operating Environment distributed across the state. Over half the schools have already implemented Finance, HR/Payroll, and Student Administration.

Sun's ability to respond quickly, understand the needs of higher education, and work seamlessly with the application provider, SunGard SCT Banner, has been critical to the on-going success of the planning and implementation. With new, open standards-based software and hardware, TBR can eliminate millions of dollars in costs for maintaining the legacy system. Sun Consulting, with years of experience implementing SunGard SCT Banner products on Sun, and Education Services, with a wide array of training options for learning new software and hardware, also play an important role, since over half of the $39 project million budget is targeted at employee development and training.

“Today's students are getting increasingly sophisticated,” said TBR CIO Tom Danford. “As Generation X, and then Y, and now Z, shows up on our campuses, they've had different needs for information technology. We've had to move from a batch to a 24 by 7 world to meet our goal of being as or more sophisticated in IT than they experienced in high school. That's one of the reason's we've adopted Sun as our platform.”