"CUNYfirst" Begins Brooklyn College Training Rollout, User Survey
The initial phase of the rollout of the long-planned and much-anticipated new CUNYfirst program—a multimillion dollar University-wide system that will facilitate how students, faculty, and administrators do business electronically for decades to come—is under way at Brooklyn College and across the University.
CUNYfirst, which stands for Fully Integrated Resources and Services Tool, is a collaboration between CUNY and the Oracle Corporation intended to simplify nearly all business transactions, from registering for classes to paying bills. The incremental rollout is expected to be completed by 2012.
"CUNYfirst will provide a much-needed, modern tool that will allow the College and CUNY to do business in a way that will save us all time, money, and, hopefully, a lot of preventable frustration," said Brooklyn College Vice-President for Finance and Administration Steve Little, who serves as the CUNYfirst Campus Team Leader for the College.
Brooklyn College has been designated as the borough training center for Brooklyn’s four CUNY colleges and for the "training-the-trainers" phase of preparing General Ledger personnel for the transition to CUNYfirst. The CUNYfirst rollout began in March with a two-day orientation session for the College General Ledger trainers across CUNY. From April 28 through May 5, Brooklyn College trainers Lisa DeStefano and Andrew Steketee will join approximately forty colleagues in intensive instruction on the General Ledger phase of CUNYfirst. They, in turn, will begin conducting training sessions on May 19 for all borough-based CUNY personnel involved in General Ledger functions.
To determine the level of awareness across the University of the introduction of CUNYfirst, a select group drawn mainly from crucial administrative and support services such as finance, human resources, student services, and information technology, as well as faculty chairpersons and academic deans, has already been asked to return the online CUNYfirst Project Community Survey. This survey was created, and will be administered, by the prestigious Baruch Survey Research Unit, and assures respondents of the anonymity of their responses.
V. P. Little stressed that a high-percentage return of completed surveys from Brooklyn College participants will be a key factor in making the CUNYfirst rollout a smooth one. "The feedback from the College community concerning their awareness of CUNYfirst will be vital in making the overall deployment of the program successful," he said, adding that CUNYfirst administrators hope responses will far exceed a similar survey conducted last spring that produced a 36 percent response University-wide.
While this initial phase is a welcome beginning to what CUNYfirst administrators anticipate will take until 2012 to fully implement, they emphasized that clear and frequent communication with the system’s end users will be required for the massive effort to be successful. CUNYfirst’s implementation has been made more urgent in recent years by the aging of such systems as SIMS and CUPS, and the accelerating retirement of University staffers knowledgeable in running and maintaining the older systems.
