September 2002 — Features

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The NEW DIGITAL CAMPUS

By Steve Burrell

Plymouth State College's Solution to the Build vs. Buy Portal Debate

Higher education decision makers are faced with a question that has serious organizational and monetary implications: Is it more effective to task campus IT staff with building homegrown portal applications, or is it more efficient to implement a third-party infrastructure to unite campuswide technology resources?

Plymouth State College was one of the first institutions to seek a solution to the build versus buy dilemma. In the mid-1990s, the New Hampshire-based college began actively developing a portal technology called the Student Information and Library Access System, otherwise known as MySILAS. The homegrown portal offered students, faculty and staff access to campus information and services, including online registration, grades, class rosters, syllabi and financial account status, long before such online services were available at other colleges and universities.

But, Plymouth State's build versus buy decision stems back to a time even before the development of MySILAS. During our search for a vendor solution we noticed that most of the software on the market was proprietary and didn't meet our integration needs. So we decided to take on code development ourselves, starting on an expedition that turned into a gold rush. And as the portal caught on, the entire campus community wanted more.

The need to improve Plymouth State's antiquated processes, such as requiring students to stand in line to register for classes, was the catalyst for MySILAS. When the portal was launched, it received overwhelmingly positive feedback just for the time it saved. As MySILAS inspired continual use from campus constituents, it also generated increasing requests for the information technology services (ITS) team to develop more advanced service-specific applications.

Vendor-Developed Infrastructure

On the surface, MySILAS appeared to be a successful development, but the portal required extensive maintenance. Although the ITS team received content and miscellaneous contributions from the residential life, undergraduate studies, finance and help desk departments, the small MySILAS development team struggled to keep up with coding demands, as well as an increasing need for security and content management. Because of the strain on the ITS team, application development projects became back-burner undertakings.

There were also inherent liabilities. If our small IT department was to suffer a turnover, portal applications and business processes would be put at substantial risk. The success of MySILAS made it increasingly difficult for our IT staff to maintain the portal code while developing new applications. We became so entrenched in the details of code development for MySILAS that our mission to support constituents and business processes through new technology applications seemed to vanish.