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Creating an Effective Steering Committee

It is sometimes the case that while the business leadership of an institution is keenly aware of the strategic importance of the financial information system, the academic leadership may not view the financial system in such a light and may be hesitant to divert funds from academic programs towards efforts to upgrade an administrative system. Even when there appears to be general agreement that a new financial system is needed, a high-level planning effort will be needed to evaluate the extent to which and how financial practices, processes, and systems should be changed.

Thus the first and most critical step in planning a new financial system is to bring together institutional decision-makers, opinion leaders, and key stakeholders from diverse areas across the institution, and from the major constituents who will be served by the system, to serve as a steering committee to articulate a strategic framework for the effort and to provide leadership for the project.

To be most effective, such a steering committee should be sponsored and appointed by either the president or chancellor or by the senior executive officer responsible for financial operations and administrative systems. If this responsibility is divided between two senior officers, then either or both might sponsor the steering committee.

As financial systems no longer support, exclusively, the financial operations of the central administration (e.g., accounting office, purchasing, disbursements), the chief financial officer (CFO) rarely has either the organizational authority or political capital to lead an institution-wide financial initiative alone. For similar reasons, the chief information technology officer can rarely operate in isolation in making technical decisions that will influence campus financial practices and processes. In highly distributed and loosely coupled environments, changes in the financial systems will be viewed as having a major impact on academic activities as well. Thus the leadership of the steering committee might come from both the CFO and chief technology officer in partnership. Depending on institutional culture, the budget officer and/or senior academic officer might also play leadership roles.

The Steering Committee's Mission Define and communicate the case for developing a new financial system for the institution. Establish a vision that ties together the institution's academic needs and aspirations with a proposed financial and business systems architecture. Develop a set of planning principles that will help define the scope and character of the project as well as provide the means to evaluate its outcomes. Establish, through an assessment of various tradeoffs, the high-level scope, boundaries, and priorities of the project.

Given the interrelationships between student systems and financial systems and the trend to distribute information access to academic departments, high-level representatives from the student services office (and academic affairs if the senior academic officer is not co-leading the steering committee) will also need to be active at the strategic level. Representatives from the institution's internal audit office and auxiliary enterprises should also be included on the steering committee. In a large university, business officers from major academic units might be steering committee members, as might representatives from the health sciences sector in institutions with medical schools and/or clinical facilities.

Most colleges and universities have a great deal of diversity of systems, so it is also wise to ensure representation of different computing environments or platforms and to seek representation from both large and small units across the institution. The needs of units with extensive systems staff will be different from those with few or no such staff. The latter units may require financial systems that minimize training time, are intuitive, and provide many prepackaged templates and require very little manipulation, while larger campus organizations may prefer to have direct access to financial databases and may desire to customize user interfaces and functionality of the systems.

The steering committee's charge should be stated in writing with as much specificity as possible, including a clear statement of responsibilities and a suggested overall time frame. The committee will be the visionary and architect of the overall project, particularly active in the early stages. However, it will also play essential problem-solving, political, and communications roles and should remain "in business" throughout the project's life.

The roles of the steering committee include:

• establishing the financial architecture of the institution through a process of creating a vision and setting goals;
• developing the framework for discussing potential tradeoffs in the institution's decision to build or buy software or to engage in strategic external partnering for software development;
• issuing a report to inform the institution of the strategic directions that have been articulated;
• appointing a project manager and project management team and "steering" the overall institutional effort through implementation;
• approving project plans, budgets, deliverables, and time lines proposed by the project management team; and
• communicating across the institution and within vertical units to convey "ownership" of the project and project decisions.

It may be desirable or necessary to have the steering committee appoint ad hoc subcommittees as strategic planning proceeds for the project. These subcommittees may focus on areas such as scanning the external systems environment (both at other institutions and in the marketplace), reviewing literature on higher education financial systems, interviewing campus customers, communicating findings and directions to the institutional community, and other areas of interest where involvement of the entire steering committee is not practical.

It will also be necessary to appoint a project manager and project management team to carry out the remaining phases of the project. Like the steering committee, the project management team may also find it necessary or desirable to appoint one or more ad hoc teams to carry out specific functions.

In general, it will be important to distinguish between the two standing groups -- the steering committee and the project management team -- and the myriad ad hoc teams that may be needed to accomplish focused and specialized tasks. The standing groups will generally last throughout the duration of the project, while ad hoc groups will be formed to address specific tasks during the course of the project and will exist only as long as needed to accomplish those tasks (see Figure 1).

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