Recommendation for an Organizational Mechanism to Provide an Ongoing Assessment of Wellesley’s Reporting Strategies

Both technical and non technical members of the Wellesley College community need to know where to go in the long term to get information about institutional reporting strategies. In the short term, this document will be posted on the Campus Wide Information System (CWIS) and members of the college community can contact members of the project team to ask questions about the report. However, should there arise the need to consider supporting a new strategy, or a new tool, community members need a mechanism to initiate a new process.

Due to the institutional nature of this work, it is clear that no one department should make decisions about reporting in isolation. The team therefore looked for a person or group that could be called upon to initiate a new process. We felt that the Technology Priorities Group (TPG) was best suited to be the starting point for any such process both because they represent an institutional perspective and because they have the authority to make things happen.

We recommend that TPG respond to ongoing needs in two ways.

First, we believe that a group should be pulled together every two years to review the existing strategies, update documentation and make updated recommendations where needed. We would expect TPG to designate a leader for this group and have that leader put together his/her team. This team should be composed of members of Database Systems and possibly Systems and Networks, Advanced Applications and/or User Services and at least two members of the Technology Support Group (TSG). We would expect this first group to be created in the spring of 2003.

Second, we believe that TPG must be prepared to pull together a similar group should any request be made for a new tool or strategy which could a) require changes to our current reporting strategy or b) have significant impact on the way the College provides technical support for reporting.

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