Maricopa's task: upgrading its 21-year-old legacy system with HP: knowing where the legacies are buried is key to this enterprise-wide upgrade.

Replacing a home-grown proprietary IT system is usually tasked to a college IT department that had little or nothing to do with the legacy system's implementation. The advantage to that approach is obvious: Little or no institutionalized commitment to the system and a blank-page opportunity to build from scratch.

The advantage of in-house implementation is perhaps a little less apparent, but, at least for this 277,000-student system, persuasive. The Maricopa Community Colleges represents a very complex institution that could only be changed by an integrated team--including a partner like HP--that knows how everything has worked and how everything is supposed to work, says James DeVere, Director Strategic Information Technologies, and a 37-year veteran of the college.

In fact, the challenges at the Maricopa Community Colleges--10 colleges plus two skill centers and one charter high school, spread across the county of Maricopa in the state of Arizona--are all about "adopting best practices business processes and broadening information access to the people who need it," says DeVere."

There are two ways to accomplish this. They could change the school's business processes or they could change the software to accommodate the way the school was run and organized. With the project directive to not make major customizations, this only leaves the option of needing to adopt common business processes.

So a fundamental transformation of Maricopa Community Colleges management practices and student services is underway The school's soon-to-launch new Student Information System (SIS) and parallel Decision Support System--which incorporates all business and management software for college executives, middle managers, deans and faculty--are scheduled to replace a non-centralized, pre-Internet legacy system that was installed in 1983. "The legacy SIS is a good system for its day," DeVere says. "Students can register for classes and Web features were added to enable registration, fee payments, and other student self-service functions, but [the system] is based on old hardware technology, high-maintenance old technology programs and an index file structure, not a relational database."

DeVere, who has been a member of the IT team since its inception, comes with an interesting perspective as well as a unique position to serve as an effective change agent. "There is a mutual respect and working experience between the college community and me after having worked together," he says. When asked who should be on the project team, DeVere says, "We need everyone, but since most of us have at least two jobs; a core team was constructed at the District Office, while strong College Implementation Teams (CITs) were organized at each college and the District Office." DeVere also leans heavily, he notes, on advice and recommendations from such partners as HP.

In any case, their task is formidable. "The nature of community colleges demands a coherent, flexible system," says Mary Lou Massal, Senior Associate Dean at Glendale Community College. "We need a system that is flexible enough to meet the needs of our community, yet robust enough to manage transactions and performance expectations."

It was important that everyone was sensitive to the procedures yet was dedicated to implementing the best system as the goal. "There's always a certain amount of resistance with change, but the broad-based project decision-making input processes has lead to the ability to have some candid discussions and agree we don't always agree," says DeVere.

This collaborative effort among the Project Team and CIT is working. The centralized system--including the prospect for dozens of HP servers--is scheduled to roll out in the Spring Semester, 2005. "Everyone is a little nervous but we have a great project organization structure and broad commitment," explains DeVere. The keystone is that the system is flexible and student-centered with a single-record for every student, a must for a district with so many campuses. The centralized database includes a single name, DOB, phone number, student id, email address and so on, which permits students--many of whom switch between colleges or are co-enrolled in more than one college in a given semester--to make changes in one place.

Earl Monsour, Maricopa Community Colleges Director of Strategic Information Technologies says, "The Student Information System--running PeopleSoft software and intended to be delivered on a Microsoft Windows platform--will be one of the largest installations in the United States. We depend on HE Microsoft, Cisco, PeopleSoft and other strategic partners, for a lot of support."

Facts of Student Life

The Maricopa Community Colleges, comprised of ten nationally accredited colleges and two skill centers in the Greater Phoenix metropolitan area, ranks among the nation's largest community college districts. Enrollment in the district continues to grow at an average of 8 percent each year. The colleges currently serve a diverse student body with more than 277,000 students year-round. More than 197,400 students are enrolled in credit courses and some 80,000 are registered for non-credit special interest courses.

The district began with one college--Phoenix College, originally founded in 1920 with 53 students; to date, more than two million students have attended one of the district's colleges.

Today, the Maricopa Community Colleges continue to be the largest single provider of higher education in Arizona, serving students aged 15 to 93 over a geographic area of more than 9,200 square miles.