In order to help program managers and admissions officials identify the best way to work with IT before implementing a new technology — such as a Liaison ‘s Centralized Application Service (CAS™) — Greg Martin, Liaison’s client delivery manager, recently shared his insights about how to start the process.
In his experience, CIOs and IT directors are likely to have the following three questions when considering such initiatives.
1. To what extent am I responsible for maintaining up-time on this product and how many of my resources will that take?”
Greg Martin, Liaison (GM): IT offices have one main metric of success: up-time. In other words, ‘Do the systems work all the time?’ This usually leads them to avoid change because up-time becomes less predictable as new elements enter the ecosystem.
Fortunately, schools have no responsibility for maintaining up-time on a CAS. Liaison deploys the entire array of tools and services necessary to maintain up-time, including patches, upgrades, and improvements to the entire system over time.
2. How much of my staff’s time will be taken up by implementation of this product?
GM: Being so focused on maintaining the up-time of existing systems, central IT offices have few resources to spare. They’ll usually say no first and wait for requests to disappear. But with Liaison, IT’s only responsibility for implementation is integrating the needed data and documents to the local systems of record.
Clearly setting expectations for the amount and type of work required from IT during an integration can help get the project on their roadmap. Knowing that such transfers can be accomplished with little intervention from IT is invaluable to them. Admissions can manually upload batches of data and documents to local systems using existing tools and processes.
3. How can I guarantee the security of sensitive data, such as personally identifying information, coming through this product?
GM: Data security is of equally serious concern to Liaison as it is to higher ed central IT offices. Liaison takes every step possible to ensure that all data is secure on our end, and we provide for secure transport to on-campus systems.
Each CAS API has a flexible, role-based security model that can be adapted for both association and institution users. The CAS API is built on AWS Cloud, which enables it to adopt new technical and security standards quickly and efficiently. You can be confident that your data is secure and available whenever you need it.