To:

Faculty and Staff

From:

Doug Kudravetz, CFO, Vice President and Treasurer;
Dave Swartz, Vice President and CIO

Subject:

ERP Assessment Project

American University’s innovative work over the last decade enables us to think in bold and ambitious ways. For the university’s mission and new strategic plan to succeed, we must apply this thinking not only to our academic areas, but also to the administrative infrastructure. To this end, we are beginning a thoughtful and deliberate journey to consider modernizing our existing HR/Payroll, Financial, and Student Administrative Information Systems.

As we think about our administrative infrastructure, we have the opportunity to envision a future state where technology gaps are filled; data is transparent, timely, and accurate; processes and administrative activities are easier for faculty, staff, and students; and business practices are effective, efficient, and automated. 

We need to think differently about investments in technology as we embark on this path, giving deliberate consideration to the distributed impact and opportunities to fundamentally change business practices throughout the university. With this end in mind, we have asked Deloitte Consulting’s education practice to partner with us to understand the potential opportunities created by modernizing our HR, financial, and student systems. Over the next two months, members of Deloitte’s higher education team will work with stakeholders across our institution to understand current gaps and the extent to which modernizing our systems offer the opportunity to remedy these gaps and advance our ability to meet our mission.

Stakeholder input and the perspectives of staff and faculty throughout the institution are critical to this endeavor. Some of you will be asked to participate in focus groups, interviews, or data collection. We encourage you to be candid in your input. This project is our opportunity to define the future state that meets the need of our campus. We also will form a Steering Committee to review the findings of this work and advise our Executive team on the path forward.

We look forward to sharing the results of this assessment with you in the early fall, and encourage you to reach out to any of the project leads: Nicole Bresnahan, Laura McAndrew or Kamalika Sandell.