Please note that this case is fictional. Similarities to Babson College or its employees and students, if such similarities exist, are purely coincidental. Copyright notification and a note to students appears following the case.

Benson college is a business school with a student body of about 2000 undergraduates, 300 full-time MBA students and 1500 part-time MBA students. The part-time MBAs take courses in the evenings, and full-time MBAs take most of their elective courses in the evenings as well. 90% of the undergraduates live on campus.

Currently, the College sends out registration material to students listing the available course and the times that they are offered. Students register for courses by filling out and returning registration forms. The forms are processed by the registrar's office and posted to the registration system in the evening. Students may check the status of their registration by touch-tone phone. Although the registrar updates the availability of courses daily, students still need to check to make sure that they were not closed out of courses that they had registered for.

The College registrar has sponsored a project to reengineer the student registration process so that student registration will be paper-free and will require no human assistance. The impetus for this project includes a need to reduce the cost of running the registrar's office and to respond to competitive pressure in the evening MBA market by making registration easier and more pleasant for part-time students.

A start-up team consisting of the registrar, an assistant registrar, the Graduate Dean, the Undergraduate Dean, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), and a member of Benson's Quality Office have met a few times and have established the following parameters for the project prior to setting up a project team.

• Students will be able to register by telephone or World Wide Web. If they have paid in advance, this registration will be effective immediately. Otherwise, the registration will be provisional pending receipt of payment (by check), and will remain in effect for one week.
• The project will be completed and systems will be implemented and tested by December 10, 1998, in time for the Spring 1999 registration.
• A project team will be formed shortly consisting of the current start-up team, a software developer, and possibly volunteer members of the faculty and undergraduate and graduate student body.
• The current registration system, which is built on proprietary software using a proprietary database, will be replaced rather than modified. Although functional, it is considered too inflexible to change and too costly to maintain.
• Benson does not have the staff or resources to develop this system from scratch. It will have to be purchased.
• The system will have to interface with the existing accounting system which maintains student account information. It will also have to interface with the room and faculty scheduling system. Other interfaces may be identified by the project team.
• The system will have to check for prerequisites and time conflicts. Other system requirements and information needs will be identified by the project team.
• A budget of $50,000 has been allocated for the preliminary analysis and design. Additional funding will need to be justified by the project team and approved by the registrar and the President's Cabinet. If sufficiently large (greater than $250,000) it may have to be approved by the trustees, who meet quarterly.
• Certain internal resources are constrained as follows:
  • CIO: at most one day/mo.
  • Registrar: at most two days/mo.
  • Deans: at most one day/mo./dean
  • Assistant registrar: 50% of one assistant registrar's time
  • Developer: 50% of one developer/system analyst's time
  • Quality officer: at most one day/mo.

The background of the people on the team is as follows: The CIO is a visionary and leader who has been at Benson for five years and understands the business well. He does not have a technical background, but is an avid user of desktop office products as well as Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is available on the campus to all members of the team. The registrar has been at Benson for five years and is a strong supporter of the use of advanced technology for automation. He is also considered a power-user and has developed some stand-alone Microsoft Access applications for his area. The assistant registrar has been at Benson for eight years, but has little technology training or knowledge. Both deans are technically literate, have used Lotus Notes, but have quickly noted that they have more pressing problems and interests. The developer has been at Benson for five years and knows the business well. She is a proficient Visual Basic programmer and an Microsoft SQL-Server guru. She has used several CASE tools, although not here at Benson. She is also trained in systems analysis and design and has worked on a broad range of projects here at Benson. She has had no training in object-oriented design, although she has read widely and kept up with advances in the field. The Quality Officer has been with the Quality Office for one year and is fully trained in Total Quality Management.

Benson's organizational structure is as follows:

• President (and Board of Directors)
  • Academic VP and Dean of Faculty
    • Undergraduate Dean (controls programs)
    • Graduate Dean (controls programs)
    • Faculty
  • CIO
    • Development
    • User services (includes help desk, documentation, desktop delivery and support)
    • Library
    • Network and Data Communication (includes servers, modem pool, and Internet connectivity)
    • Telephone Company
  • CFO
    • Budgeting
    • Accounting
    • Physical plant
    • Purchasing
  • Student Life
    • Housing
    • Public safety
    • Sports

The registrar reports to both the Graduate and Undergraduate Deans.

The College has standardized on the Banyan Vines Network Operating System (although some Novell Netware subnets exist), Windows NT servers, Windows 95 desktop systems, BeyondMail mail and workflow management tools, Microsoft SQL-Server for enterprise database management, and Visual Basic for GUI development.

Note to my students: I have modified the case somewhat since we developed it in class. Please mail me at gordon@babson.edu with any additional enhancements and suggestions.

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This case was written by and for the students of MIS7540 at Babson College and Professor Steven Gordon. It was last updated on 1/26/98. Any use of this case without the express written permission of Babson College is prohibited.

© Babson College, 1997, 1998