Behind the Banner with Jeff Miner
Jeff Miner '78
About a week ago, we reported on SIS being down as part of a larger system upgrade of the Banner Production system that the school uses for many of its business-type functions (like billing, financial aid, and parking) as well as the side us students see of it (class scheduling, grades etc.) We were curious about the upgrade and set off to find out more. Jeff Miner ‘78, RPI’s Assistant Vice President for Information Services was kind enough to give us a little background on the situation, and then answer a few of our questions.
Jeff: The short answer is that your assumption stated in the blog is accurate: there was a major version upgrade performed on the entire Banner enterprise system, for which SIS is the student self-service interface.
This recent upgrade did not significantly alter the SIS interface from a user perspective. I believe that a major Banner revision will be released late in 2010 that is planned to completely revamp the SIS interface and navigation to Web 2.0 technology.
Commercial software vendors regularly issue maintenance releases that provide new features, enhancements, and defect corrections (bug fixes) for their products. Banner is an ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution that is actually an integrated suite of different functional modules, e.g., accounting, student, enrollment management, financial aid, human resources, etc. Because ERPs integrate information across many aspects of a organization, and because they interface to many other systems, they involve very large complex databases and tight coupling between the systems modules. A major challenge is the need for these changes to be backward compatible with earlier versions of the product and systems that interface with Banner.
RPI’s Banner system has almost 900,000 distinct entities (people, companies, etc.) in its database and handles over a half million course transactions and well over 5 million financial transactions per year. To paraphrase a local car dealer: “It huge!”
RPInsider: What were some of the updates that occurred (presumably on the back-end)?
Jeff: The upgrade from Banner 7 to Banner 8 was focused on back-end enhancements not generally visible to a self-service user like a student. Banner 8 introduced new functionality to accommodate customizations by individual institutions, as well as significant changes to the underlying architecture of the ERP to better accommodate internationalization of the product, e.g., adoption of the UTF-8 character set and other internationalization changes. In addition, there are numerous defect corrections and regulatory updates that are part of these upgrades.
RPInsider: Did you guys elect to do the upgrade, or was there something else that caused you to do so?
Jeff: In general, vendors will only support a particular product version for 2-3 years, so we have some control over when we do the upgrade, but not over if we do the upgrade. Undergraduate financial aid tables and methods are subject to regulatory updates from the federal government several times per year, which forces us to do upgrades in order to remain compliant with the law.
RPInsider: We know that the students look forward to that nice upgrade in 2010 which will have updated the interface! Do you know of any reason they haven’t released it sooner?
Jeff: Because it is not completely developed yet by the vendor. The primary requirement for an ERP is efficient and accurate transaction processing, and the user interface is designed to support that focus. The reality is that any ERP user interface is rarely going to be as technologically current as commercial web sites, which are primarily focused on usability and increasing their market share. And to be accurate, even if the Banner vendor releases the new interface at the end of 2010, we at RPI only have 1 or 2 “quiet” times each year where we can complete major upgrades, so I wouldn’t expect it until 2011.
RPInsider: Jeff, Thank you very much for your time!
photo: Inside Rensselaer
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