Director's Message, by Jennifer Gehrt

The Financial Information System (FIS) is live! What a great accomplishment for those K-Staters who have been directly involved in making this happen. I particularly want to commend Bryan Kraus and Dave Winter, functional team leads for the Controller’s Office, Mark Grinter, technical team lead for the Office of Information Systems, and Ron Semarge, FIS trainer. They and all of their team members have spent many, many hours above and beyond the normal work week to ensure an on-time implementation. Of course all of their work would not have been possible without the support of the Technology and Systems Teams, led by Judy Riniker, Information Systems, and Julie Bell, Computing and Network Services. To review all of the team members see the entire project organization chart.

As the university transitions into this new financial era, I am reminded of a quote from British Novelist, Jean Rhys: “Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often in a succession of jerks.” The FIS will be much like this with some bumps in the road and may not work exactly as expected or hoped for at the beginning. Give it time to mature from this infancy; have patience. Make your needs known to the Controller’s Office and those needs will be prioritized and worked on over the next few months and years. Once users adapt to the new system, they will find many features that are helpful to make daily work more efficient.

Now that FIS is live, the LASER project effort will focus on bringing up the student system (iSIS). That part of the project is also entering a new phase this summer. The colleges of Business and Engineering are beginning to work with the Registrar’s staff to learn about enrollment management and related areas and then to configure and test the system to meet the colleges’ needs. Training for the other colleges will be scheduled this fall.