Mahendran Jawaharlal, President and CEO
CARS Information Systems Corporation
Cincinnati, Ohio

You have Information Technology issues. Support costs and demand for IT staff are both on the rise. In addition, institutions struggle to retain their IT personnel, thus making it difficult to build and keep an adequately trained staff. We have solutions for you. We�re here today to discuss ways in which you can successfully empower your end users with powerful instructional and support resources, and keep your personnel trained!

What�s your solution? Well, for starters, an institution�s choice of a "customer-intimate" solutions vendor, one that focuses its attention on your issues, is of primary importance. CARS Information Systems is one such vendor. In a Personal Information Manager (PIM)-integrated campus portal, the CARS Solution empowers users by offering powerful, industry-standard software tools, comprehensive support and consulting services, and training. Our powerful solution supports change control, allowing users to take control of their systems and implement custom solutions tailored to their individual needs. Vanilla is for ice cream, not enterprise applications.

In addition to powerful software tools and support services, CARS�s customer-intimate solution helps to empower users with its client community--a virtual community of users, helping to keep institutions' support costs to a minimum. The virtual community pools resources by sharing information across and between institutions through networking resources, such as national and regional user groups, Web resources, and electronic discussion lists.

We�ll get back to the specifics of solving your support issues, but for now, let�s take a closer look at the IT support problems facing higher education.

The higher education marketplace has a wealth of choices for software solutions providers. In providing more and better solutions to higher education, software and support systems like the CARS Solution and its competitors have grown in features and complexity. These enhanced data solutions, as much as they improve your data processing capabilities, come with costs both predictable and hidden. These costs come from a variety of sources.

When you purchase a software system, you know up front the cost to purchase the system and its yearly maintenance. So, you ask, when do the hidden costs come in? Hidden costs occur in the ongoing support of the software system on your campus. One typical source of hidden costs is inadequate training and support to your end users and IT staff. When your own staff cannot handle support issues on their own, hidden costs can mount up. We�ll phrase this issue in the following question: How can an institution reduce hidden costs on support issues?

Now let�s look more closely at the IT staffing issue, which also contributes to hidden costs. In 1998, the issue of "Retaining, Retraining, and Recruiting Information Technology Staff," was identified by the then-CAUSE Current Issues Committee as a key ongoing issue "�important to the future of information resources management and�higher education." Indeed, hiring, training, and retaining IT professionals is an industry-wide challenge. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the United States is about 1.3 million people short of meeting the need for technical professionals. This problem is especially troublesome for institutions of higher education, which must compete with businesses that often offer higher salaries.

Another hidden cost results from the rising salaries required to keep and retain IT professionals. According to the Gartner Group, the historical annual growth for IT salaries is between 4 percent and 5 percent. Gartner projects an escalation of this growth rate to as much as 14 percent through 2000, due to the shortage of qualified labor. Finding and keeping IT staff is a costly challenge--creating the issue: How can an institution reduce the need for a large IT staff?

As for retention of IT staff, the Gartner Group suggests that institutions need to implement "�skills management as an ongoing program of investing in employees to make them more valuable to the institution as well as boost their careers. Such investment forms a key element of retention." IT staffing shortages and retention also cause related problems in keeping your institution's staff trained. When a knowledgeable user leaves, the overall institutional knowledge base declines, leaving the remaining users scrambling for answers. Keeping your staff well-trained and informed is another challenge--the issue here is this: How can an institution keep its IT staff trained and supported?

Let�s look at solutions to these issues.

Let�s restate the three issues we just identified:

• How can an institution reduce hidden costs on support issues?
• How can an institution reduce the need for a large IT staff?
• How can an institution keep its IT staff trained and supported?

So, what�s your solution? The solution is a virtual user community. Let�s start with a definition.

Such a user community is virtual because it has no set physical location; its members reside nationally and are brought together through electronic media and conferences. The community�s common interest: assisting each other in implementing, developing, and supporting their on-campus computing solutions. EDUCAUSE is an excellent example of a virtual community. You, after all, are all here this week to share, discuss, and possibly solve your common goals and issues.

How does this virtual community assist you? To begin with, you immediately empower your users by extending their resources beyond the limits of your physical campus! Through the sharing of information, you get a virtual extension of your IT staff and the knowledge available to your end users. Users get the support and advice from the community�s power users, who are end users with lots of technical experience.

And what kind of support are we talking about? Not simply technical issues; we also are talking about discussion concerning the processes and procedures that go into managing an administrative office. The range of help can be virtually limitless! Typical community-asked questions might include:

Such communication brings vast benefits to members of the community. An active community brings a synergy of ideas and solutions to its participants. This synergy and knowledge sharing becomes a virtual extension of your institution�s technical and administrative processes knowledge base. But even more, this communal-sharing extends to that of software code. Technical staff can test and share their code with their peers in the community. The overall benefit: your resources are extended beyond the minds of your staff and the physical limits of your institution.

Let�s see how the virtual user community can address our three stated issues.

How can an institution reduce those hidden costs on support issues? As I previously stated, a virtual user community helps you reduce consulting and support expenses. When a user has an issue or question, the community, nine times out of ten, supplies an answer. Maintenance problems are solved within the community quickly and without the need for consulting services.

How can an institution reduce the need for a large IT staff? Each institution brings to the virtual user community a conservative average of 10 experts from the technical area and each functional area. With an active membership of, say, 100 institutions in the community, your administrative staff knowledge equals that of a staff of 1000 people! Thus, you are pooling the resources of dozens of schools! When you add to this the possibilities of sharing code, your IT staff does not have to "reinvent the wheel" with each new project. With this kind of support and knowledge, a smaller-sized IT staff can successfully support your institution!

How can an institution keep its IT staff trained and supported? By its nature, a virtual user community encourages knowledge sharing and training. After proper training from your software solutions vendor, the community continuously helps to build and reinforce your staff�s training.

I hope it�s now clear to you that an active and thriving virtual user community is vital to solving a good portion of your IT support and staffing issues. To be in such a community, your institution must have the right common solution provider whose solutions are powerful, customizable, and industry-standard.

CARS Information Systems supports its virtual user community better than any other vendor in the marketplace!

Rather than continuing to describe a virtual user community in general terms, we will use the active and thriving CARS virtual user community as an example of how such a community works! The CARS virtual user community is built on a solid foundation of the technical and support solutions of the CARS Solution, and is buttressed by user groups, Web and Internet resources, shareware, and flexible training programs. Let�s start with the supporting structures of the community.

First, we�ll discuss the community�s bases of user communication. User groups make up the first form of communication between member schools. For example, the National Association of CARS Users (NACU), independent of CARS and run by elected officers from CARS client institutions, offers many opportunities for networking including tracks for training and discussion, cross-functional issues, and round tables. In addition to NACU are various regional user groups that meet at various times during the year. These groups allow for the discussion of regional issues, such as local and state reporting and a regional pooling of resources. Together these user groups provide many opportunities for community members to assist each other.

The second means of communication comes in the form of electronic communication resources. Currently the user community makes use of Client-Only Web pages, the NACU Web pages, and client-specific discussion lists for communication and support information. The Client-Only Web pages, for instance, contain support information including software updates, shareware, and white papers.

Online forums such as discussion lists play a vital role in a virtual user community, and provide the most direct and daily assistance to their members. A discussion list, run by a list server, receives email from individual members and broadcasts the email to all of the discussion list�s subscribers. Discussion list participants communicate with each other on an almost constant, daily basis. The CARS lists include a general topics list, track-specific lists (such as student, financials, and enrollment issues), and a technical issues list. CARS also has plans to improve its clients� community with the addition of technology such as an online help desk, automatic/just-in-time software updates, and an extensive knowledge base available from a Web browser. In addition, we plan to improve our user groups� communications by encouraging technologies such as video-conferencing.

CARS�s plans for a Web portal, a centralized gate for all online communication, will improve upon the current discussion lists. CARS�s direction in regard to portals revolves around the institution�s chosen Personal Information Manager (PIM), the focal point of each individual user�s online communications, calendar, and business intelligence data. We envision having users use their PIMs linked to their campus portals to interact with the virtual user community.

Another important contribution to a virtual user community is shareware. CARS, for example, has collected a large shareware library, judged to be the "best of the best" in coding, through the NACU Software Contest. Contest entries, any projects that modify or enhance the CARS Solution at a local level, are submitted to and judged by NACU. Winners receive a cash award. The contest entries are then placed on the CARS Web site and made available for downloading. Entries with universal applications have been incorporated into the CARS Solution itself. Overall, this library has proven to be an enormously successful resource to clients.

I�d now like to discuss the virtual community infrastructure--the common solution across the community. For the community to work, for members to be able to assist one another successfully, the shared information must work across the community. After all, a virtual user community contains institutions that have their own individual and specific ways of doing things. To this end, CARS�s continuing and future direction has been to provide its users with a powerful and flexible development platform. We provide industry-standard tools such as Web and UNIX-based solutions, and our solutions strive to keep our clients constantly up-to-date using a revision control system. This allows clients to keep current without losing their local changes--a vital aspect for keeping the virtual user community successful! Clients can modify their system to their heart’s content; they can share local code with each other, and yet still remain current with CARS’s latest enhancements. This is what we mean when we state, "When a scoop of vanilla just isn’t enough!" You don’t have to have a vanilla system--your campus solution should be as specialized and individualized as your institution!

And, as technology evolves, we constantly keep to our principles of providing technical power and flexibility to the community. Along with providing a personalized PIM-based campus portal, the next generation of the CARS Solution will be operating system- and database-independent. CARS will then give each member of its user community the flexibility to choose its operating system, be it an Intel-based platform such as NT and Linux, or the ever-reliable UNIX flavors, or to choose its database, be it Informix, Oracle, SQL Server, or Sybase.

Lastly, we’ll discuss the services offered by your solution provider and how these contribute to the foundation of a virtual user community. This is where a customer-intimate vendor’s solutions come into play. At every stage of your relationship with a solution provider, you should receive industry-leading services. CARS implementations, for example, lead the industry in the speed of completion. Clearly also, you should have support 24 hours, 7 days a week. As well, you should have access to services for those times where you need a little extra support, such as customizations, system administration assistance, operating system/database upgrades, hardware migrations, data conversions, Web consulting, and performance analysis, etc. This is your solution provider’s contribution to the virtual user community. Your support issues will be solved, either by the community or by your solution provider!

In regard to training, well-trained and happy users are vital to our mutual success! Well-trained users make better contributions to the virtual user community and get the most benefits from the your administrative solutions. This is why CARS has developed flexible training programs designed to keep your users trained. CARS has a yearly schedule of training courses, computer-based training courses, and client site-based training programs determined by what best suits your needs. In addition, we also offer an institution-wide training program called Education Advantage, which, for a FTE-based fee, allows a school to send its staff to any and all education courses that it desires. Our "refresher" policy allows you to repeat a course, if needed.

In summary, CARS offers its services in support of the virtual user community to keep it thriving, yet self-sufficient. We emphasize training to provide the community with a good supply of expert users. To complete the picture, we contribute our support services to schools when they need us!

In conclusion, virtual community synergies reduce costs and increase knowledge by pooling the resources of all of its member institutions. The CARS Solution supports a thriving and self-sufficient virtual user community better than any other vendor in the industry. CARS does so because we bring all the necessary ingredients into the mix. These ingredients include a powerful, flexible, industry-standard technology, client-intimate support services, well-established user groups, and many electronic communication resources. And don’t forget the cornerstone to the foundation of the virtual community--the CARS Solution’s unique Revision Control System, which allows a school to retain its individuality, get benefits from the general user community, and yet remain up-to-date with CARS’s latest enhancements.

And finally, if your institution would like to take advantage of the synergies of a virtual user community, we would love for you to join ours! The CARS virtual user community is vibrant and growing!

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Oblinger, Diana G. & Verville, Anne-Lee. "Information Technology as a Change Agent" Educom Review, January/February 1999.

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