IData News Archive 2009
December 9, 2009 - Brian talks with Scholastic Magazine about technology projectsThe November issue of Scholastic Magazine included a Q&A with Brian Parish from IData in the “Tech Tools” section. Brian discussed technology projects and avoiding waste: “It’s important to understand the problems you’re trying to solve. If you focus on solving the problems, rather than the desire for change alone, you can reduce wasted effort.” For more of this interview, read the article here
November 23, 2009 - IData welcomes Ramya RajagopalanRamya Rajagopalan joined the IData team as a Technical Consultant on November 23rd. Ramya recently graduated with her M.S. in Computer Science from University of Missouri. Prior to getting her Masters, she worked as an Oracle PL/SQL Developer for a consulting firm in India. Her work included a major BI project for AT&T. Ramya has also worked for Syracuse University in New York doing web development.
November 3, 2009 - IData Launches the Data Cookbook!IData is proud to announce the launching of the Data Cookbook. We will be giving demonstrations of this new product from Tuesday, November 3rd, through Thursday, November 5th, at EDUCAUSE 2009 in Denver, Colorado. Please stop by Booth #488 & 490 for a demo.
If you can’t make it to EDUCAUSE, you can find a demo of this exciting new product at datacookbook.com
Consulting Magazine wrote up a Q&A with IData President, Brian Parish. This discussion focussed on offering services during an economic downturn. “We held company-wide brainstorming sessions to come up with new products and services that would best help our clients..”. For more of the article, read here.
October 23, 2009 - IData welcomes…IData has recently added five new staff members Deborah Head, Louis Guillaume, Roy Mounier, Rachel Beuter and Jon Morgan.
Deborah Head is IData’s newest addition. She began on 10/21/09 as an Institutional Research Consultant. Debbie brings over 25 years of IR experience from her former position as Director of Institutional Research & Information Management at Kennesaw State University. She has also served as a consultant for SunGard Higher Education and Columbus State University.
Louis Guillaume joined IData as a Senior Technical Consultant on 10/5/09. He comes to us from his position as a Senior Developer at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Louis has been working with Datatel’s Colleague and Benefactor systems for over ten years.
Jon Morgan began on 9/1/09 as a Senior Web Developer within our Innovative Products Division. Jon will be joining us part-time while he pursues his PhD in journalism and technology at Michigan State University. Recently, he has been working on a software to help journalists collaborate on stories and research and will be continuing his development of this software as part of his PHD program. His experience over the last five years developing content and applications for major web platforms at the New York Times Online and the Detroit News is a great asset to our Innovative Products Division.
Roy Mounier joined the IData team as a Project Director on 9/21/09. Roy worked for SCT/SunGard for over 10 years as a student system developer and team manager. He left SunGard to pursue his MBA at Northeastern in Boston. During the last 3 years while pursuing his MBA, has worked for a financial data analysis firm where he was in charge of the Oracle development team.
Rachel Beuter started on 9/8/2009 as IData’s Office Manager. She has been working as a project specialist for several years at a trade association in Alexandria. Prior to living in Virginia, she worked at a university in Des Moines, Iowa.
See our Staff page for full info.
October 12, 2009 - EDUCAUSE 2009 (Denver, CO)IData will be exhibiting at EDUCAUSE 2009 in Denver, Colorado from November 3-6, 2009. Please visit us at booth #488/490. For EDUCAUSE 2009, we are introducing the Data Cookbook. The Data Cookbook is an online collaboration tool and knowledge base for institutional reporting.
Visit: http://www.datacookbook.com
On September 13, 2009, IData, Inc. celebrated its 5th Anniversary. Five years ago, it was just Brian working out of his home as a subcontractor on a project with the University of Mary Washington. At the start of the company’s sixth year, IData has grown to a staff of 17 employees and added a group of outstanding contract consultants and web developers. The company has completed work for 36 colleges and universities over the last five years while its list of clients continues to expand. The IData team is immensely proud of all the work that has been accomplished and is thankful for all of the help that has made IData a success.
October 7, 2009 – Lynchburg, VAIData Incorporated will be attending the Mid Atlantic Banner Users Group (MABUG) at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA on October 8 and October 9, 2009. On Friday morning, we will be presenting the following: The Data Cookbook: A Conversation About Institutional Reporting
June 4, 2009 – IData announces the Data CookbookIData showcased its new software as a service offering, the Data Cookbook, at the AIR Forum in Atlanta last week. This new service is being developed to help institutions record the definitions of their reporting terms as well as reports. It provides for collaboration and workflow in the definition and report request process. The need for a service like this was validated at the AIR Forum as institutional researchers saw the software and provided feedback. More information on the Data Cookbook as well as some videos demonstrating its capabilities can be found on datacookbook.com.
June 3, 2009 – IData launches new reporting servicesIData debuted its new Institutional Research and Reporting Services division at the AIR Forum in Atlanta last week. This division will be led by Scott Flory and will focus on helping Institutional Research offices complete their mission. With experts in leading administrative systems, IData provides services to help harness the data within the administrative systems as well as the auxiliary systems on campus. More information on these new services can be found here.
June 2, 2009 – IData presents at AIR ForumIData presented at the 49th annual AIR Forum in Atlanta, Georgia. The presentation focused on improving communication and collaboration between Institutional Research and Information Technology. A copy of this presentation and the full description can be found here.
May 27, 2009 - Atlanta, GeorgiaBrian Parish, Ken Dezio, and Scott Flory from IData will be attending the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) Conference being held on May 30 through June 3, 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia. If you are attending this year’s AIR Conference, please stop by our booth. We will be discussing our reporting services and new software. We also encourage you to attend our presentation on “fostering collaboration and communication between institutional research and information technology” at 11:00 am on Tuesday, June 2, 2009.
April, 23rd, 2009 - Washington DCOn Thursday, April 23rd, 2009, Georgetown University completed processing over 7,000 students and 25,000 class registrations with their new custom preregistration system. This also represents the first registrations completed in Georgetown’s new implementation of SunGard Banner. The preregistration system was a custom development project completed by IData Incorporated.
The customizations developed by IData integrate directly with Banner and provides a completely web-based experience for students, faculty, and staff using the Preregistration system, including a web-based advising workflow for reviewing class requests during the preregistration process.
The new Preregistration system is a “free market” system for choosing classes. With this system in place, the stress of a “first come, first serve” system is completely removed. It allows Georgetown University to offer a very fair system of scheduling and allows the University the opportunity to balance demand across class sections.
The flexibility provided by the highly configurable system lets the system easily handle different rules for the different colleges, and provides targeted ranking schemes that can be configured from the college level all the way down to a specific section.
The Georgetown University Preregistration project represented a major effort on the part of many outstanding Georgetown University and IData employees collaborating to make this system a reality. Many thanks go out to everyone involved with this project, and congratulations to Georgetown University on their registration success.
For a tutorial video of the student’s view of the preregistration system, you can view the following link:
http://registrar.georgetown.edu/registration/video/
IData is very pleased to welcome our new Director of Reporting and Partner Services, Scott Flory. Scott brings 15 years of experience in higher education technology. He has worked in all aspects of software development including as a developer, a consultant, a trainer, a software architect, a technical support manager, and most recently in product management. Scott’s talent and versatility in the field of higher education technology make him a great fit for IData and our clients. Scott’s main focus at IData will be to continue to grow our institutional research and reporting services division. He will also be working to expand and strengthen our partnerships with other higher education software and service vendors.
Glendale, AZ - March 6, 2009We are happy to announce that the Colleague to Moodle Integration project for the Thunderbird School of Global Management has been successfully completed. IData worked with Thunderbird to create an automated process to integrate Colleague information into their Moodle course management system. Many thanks go out to all those involved in the project.
IData Ink Volume 1 & New IData Video - March 6, 2009IData is pleased to announce the publication of the very first volume of our newsletter, IData Ink, and the release of the first in our video presentation series. This first video covers information on our project with the University of Mary Washington to put Banner on Cell Phone. Both can be found on our Extras page. Enjoy!
March 3, 2009 - Baltimore, MDLoyola College went live with an integration of their student information system, Datatel, and their Online Community. Loyola’s Online Community is a social networking space supported by iModules.
IData and Loyola worked together to develop and implement an automated process to update the Online Community with student and alumni information from the Datatel Colleague and Datatel Benefactor systems.
Initially, over 55,000 new student and alumni records were integrated with the custom processes and uploaded into the Online Community. Information updates and new Online Community members are handled change community to Online Community since that is the name of their external system daily within both systems as a result of the automated process.
The implementation of this custom process ensures that the Online Community is always current with the information Loyola has in their student and alumni information system. Automating this process saves staff a great deal of time and effort and keeping information current in the Online Community can help Loyola accelerate strategic goals such as improving alumni involvement rates, fundraising success, and increasing opportunity for alumni/student networking.
A Letter From the President of IData - February 17, 2009Dear Friends and Colleagues,
In early January, several of us at IData attended the Mid-Atlantic Educause Conference. There were a number of interesting sessions, but the prevailing message was clear: It is going to be a tough year for university budgets. As budgets are cut across the board, universities often turn to technology for ways to save money. For IT staff, this means an even greater burden as they are asked to do more with less. For many state schools and community colleges, this is amplified by the fact that enrollment often increases in proportion to unemployment. At the same time, states are forced to cut education subsidies and funding from their budgets. Again, schools find themselves being asked to do more with less.
At IData, we understand the strain this puts on our clients. Many of us have been through this in the nineties, but it was not accompanied by as much of a hit on school endowments and giving. An industry that is supposed to be shielded from sharp economic rise and fall is feeling it as much as anybody on Main Street. Rather than hearing about the pain moving “from Wall Street to Main Street,” the new phrase might be “from Boardroom to Classroom.”
While we can’t magically turn the economy around, what we can do is keep our core promises to each of you. We promise to continue to offer the best value in higher education technology. We promise to work hard for each of you to make sure we are earning your hard-fought budget dollars. We promise to listen, and to offer you the best solution for your needs. We also promise to continue to innovate and offer ideas, services, and products that help higher education run more efficiently and effectively. Our mission stands up in any economy:
“Increasing the productivity of colleges, universities, and institutional research professionals through better use of administrative and data systems.”
We thank you all for choosing IData as a partner, and we look forward to working together to not only survive the next year, but thrive.
Brian S. Parish
President, IData Incorporated
We are happy to announce that King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals is now live on the RMS Student Housing System. IData was pleased to play a supporting role in this implementation by developing the interfaces between the Banner student information System and the RMS integration tools. We would also like to thank Marc Carrion for all his hard work in bringing this project to completion.
For information on RMS, their products, and services, check out their website at http://www.rms-inc.com anytime!