Remarks by Mark Hamilton, UA President

MyUA Steering Committee Kickoff Meeting

November 26, 2003, UAA

When I first started coming around to each of the campuses to questions and answers, among those questions, was: “What is the best thing - and the companion - what is the worst thing that you’ve accomplished in your job in the last year?”

As far as I could tell with no collusion at all, three or four groups came back with the same answer to that question. The very same answer, not just the same this group to that group, but same answer to both questions - and it was Banner! “The worst thing I did this year was Banner. The best thing I did this year was Banner.”

I was talking to Steve Smith about the prospects ahead of us here and it’s daunting. MyUA is Banner-lite! We are really going to enter into an enormously difficult process involving every aspect of the institution.

This project will not go without some bumps, some fits and some starts, and disagreement in terms of sequence, combination, timing. But it is going to be grand. MyUA is a marvelous project.

I certainly see this serving people across this state - I don’t know what the magnitude is, but I can think down to 9 or 10 year olds wanting to have, at minimum, the scores from campus basketball or hockey teams or some such things.

Certainly, I can see how a portal works for twelfth graders making application, how a portal works for students. But, it also works perfectly well, if you are an alum, to maintain the faith.

One of things that I have talked to people about consolidated IT issues and plans is don’t assume that everyone can step back and think about the greater good. The reality of all these plans is that they are not win-win. They are specifically lose-lose. If you said: “But I want to do my very own thing, with my very own contract, to my very own specifications”, I absolutely promise you can get it quicker, more neatly aligned with what you want, and less expensively.

I have no question about that. That is conceded. It’s absolutely irrelevant. We are not going to do that. We are going to lose-lose.

We will lose-lose the least as we possibly can, but we are going to get one portal that will give access to everything we can get our mitts on. Figuring out which of those things we want to get our mitts on in sequence, in priority, is a very important step.

I heard the potential number of website connections out there, and I can’t make it happen in my mind. The number has way too many zeros at the end of it. As a matter of fact, it would have made a nice thing if you had asked me: “How many websites?” I would have said maybe 300 - really! Lots of zeros out there that I did not anticipate.

Which one of these sites do we want to get our mitts on, what kind of personalizing are we going to do, are the questions.

This is so clear. A portal is what students are used to, what they will want, and in the very real sense, what they will demand. For my generation, if you walk by a brand new library, you think: “This is an up-and-coming campus, this school is going places.” Kids today click on your web page and say this place has it or it doesn’t have it.

This will be a very, very exciting first impression portal that will go a long way towards our image with youngsters and be an incredibly important tool for the rest of the state if you want to know something, do something about the university.

It’s a grand task. We have had wonderful cooperation from industry because frankly they want to do this. They want to play with it - in some sense a beta test - another reason to probably won't go without blips and couple of speed bumps in the road.

We committed a lot of money towards the project. That’s how important I think it is. Industry contributed a lot of time in just getting up to the stage where it’s at now.

I know you will do great things. I suspect that 18 months from now if I gave you a survey and said: “What is the best thing you’ve done in the last 18 months and what is the worst?” it would be the portal.

Unfortunately, I can’t do it without your expertise, effort and frustration. I am delighted at your expertise and yet concerned that you will be frustrated. To me it is a predictable tension. People ought to just lay it on the table to start with. There will be predictable tensions here: "I don’t want to let go of that thing in order to accomplish this thing." I know, I understand.

But eventually, we will wear you down because I won’t let you not change. I’m serious. We are going to get this done. I want all the mutual respect we can possibly get, and in the end, I want a single, UA portal.