Butler University is recognized for eliminating costly customizations

Summary

Butler University, in conjunction with their partner CY2, is recognized for eliminating costly customizations in favor of using delivered functionality to advance and improve the end user experience, including the deployment of the Fluid user interface, resulting in a system rollout and start of the academic year that was smooth, and positions the university to be nimble, flexible, and rollout new capabilities over time.

Customer comments

“This summer we went live on Campus Solutions 9.2, HCM 92, PeopleTools 8.55 and Fluid in a program called "PeopleSoft Revitalization."

Like many higher education institutions, Butler University did not take advantage of lots of functionality offered through the Continuous Delivery Model on earlier releases. So in planning for the 9.2 Upgrade there was a conscious effort to look at customizations to see what could be eliminated in favor of delivered functionality and to see how we could truly advance and improve the end user experience.

Unlike many schools we didn't consider going live with Classic Mode; our goal was to use Fluid where possible, to improve the overall UI. Of course, people can still use Classic, and many functions (administrative office especially) are still in Classic, but we hope to continue to implement our own continuous delivery model so users get accustomed to changes and improvements. We want our administrative offices to get back into the business of dreaming about what they could have, to offer constant suggestions and improvements using Fluid-therefore DELIVERED. All of this is already improving our use of PeopleSoft. The go live/start of the academic year was met with very little drama, almost a ho hum response- FABULOUS! No complaints, no wailing about the enormous UI changes: it's intuitive, it makes sense, it's FLUID!

And this helps to ready us to be more nimble, flexible for what comes next. As we move into the Cloud more and more and prepare for a Student Information System (SIS) transition, we hope that changes to the look and feel, and to configuration vs. customization will be old hat and will be that much easier for the community to embrace.”

Attached are a couple of screenshots to give a basic idea of our setup at Butler. We have just four homepages:

Student
Financial Aid
Student Accounts
Homepage

The one we just labeled as “Homepage” is what is used by almost all of our faculty and staff. The tiles are of course controlled by security, so most people see 3-6 tiles at most. We could actually add the Financial Aid and Student Accounts content to this page, but the offices preferred to keep them separate.

The second screenshot is what an advisor sees when they click on the Advisor menu: a pivot grid with quick access to very timely, pertinent data on their individual advisees.

All of this has been well-received.