Report to the Lane Community College Board
LASR Project
December, 2001

The project is on schedule and within budget. 

CAMPUS COMMUNICATION
The December LASR Update session is scheduled for 3-5 p.m. on Friday, December 7 in the Boardroom. The college is considering purchasing CAMPUS PIPELINE, and representatives from the company will be on campus and will demonstrate their product in two one-hour presentations beginning at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. CAMPUS PIPELINE is a web portal product that integrates directly with the SCT Banner data, and with WebCT, a web-based course management tool used by many Lane instructors. These demonstrations will be of particular interest to Lane's faculty; the product supports e-mail communication with students, message boards, chat rooms, course calendars, automated creation of course home pages and more, and provides one point of entry for students and staff to access both course information and information stored in the Banner system.

STEERING COMMITTEE
Bret Force has re-joined the LASR Steering Committee as the student representative.  The project is pleased to welcome him back.

FINANCE
The third SCT configuration and consulting visit for Finance occurred November 13, 14 and 15.   The Finance Team made great progress on the chart of accounts during this visit.  The team has sent the current draft of the chart organizational hierarchy to the President, Vice Presidents and Associate Vice Presidents for review.  This hierarchy is critical because it drives the way budget and expenditure information ìrolls upî for reporting and informational processes. The Finance Team is also consulting with staff who have budget responsibilities including directors, administrative support staff, outreach campuses and staff in areas of the college that provide non-traditional instruction and services to further define and check their work, and will continue to involve staff outside of the core team as work progresses. The Finance system is scheduled to "go live" on July 1, 2002.

HUMAN RESOURCES
As a result of Sue Colvin's retirement announcement, Linda Simmons and Mary Glenn have joined the LASR Implementation Management Team representing Human Resources.  The second Human Resources configuration training occurred November 27, 28 and 29.  The Human Resources core team is working on a list of tasks related to job classes, identifying positions and encoding for employee information entered into the system.

TECHNICAL TRAINING
When organizations make significant changes in technology systems, it is not unusual that the computer programming staff must learn to use completely new programming tools. On November 6, 7 and 8, SCT provided on-site Oracle training for Lane's computer programming staff.  Additional training for programmers, Advanced PL/SQL, is scheduled for December 4, 5 and 6.  By conducting the training at Lane rather than sending programmers to off-site training, the college realized substantial cost savings, minimized the difficulties of scheduling, and achieved the additional benefit of having all programmers learning together and sharing ideas.

STUDENT SYSTEM
LIMT has begun identifying members of the Student Team, which will bear the responsibility of implementing the largest component of the Banner system in time for the 2003-2004 academic year.  Membership will include staff that are knowledgeable about credit programs and community education, and will be selected to bring classified, faculty and management perspectives to the configuration work.  Because the Banner system is an integrated database, the Student Team faces the largest challenge of the project: pulling together data from a host of on-line and off-line data systems across the college that currently manage department-level or location-specific information about curriculum, schedules, faculty assignments and workloads, and store student data for credit and community education students separately.

For more information about the project, contact Linda DeWitt, Ext. 3006, or visit our web site at http://2011sitearchive.lanecc.edu/lasr/.  For information about the Finance implementation, please contact Stan Barker, Ext. 5608.