CD’s selection as the site for the fourth annual IBM Innovation in Students Services Forum in August was further recognition of the University’s leadership in giving students the most convenient and efficient services that creative planning married to sophisticated technology can provide.

The conference, attended by representatives of some 75 universities nationwide, took place Aug. 1-3 in the Trabant University Center.

President David P. Roselle’s keynote address highlighted the transformation in student services the University has effected over the past decade, a transformation discussed in greater detail in the lead chapter of Renewing Administration: Preparing Colleges and Universities for the 21st Century, a just-published book sponsored jointly by IBM and EDUCAUSE (see accompanying article).

As an original IBM Best Practice Partner, UD has been a model for universities wishing to improve their student services.

“About four years ago,” Executive Vice President David E. Hollowell explained, “I got a call from IBM. Its Global Education Industry group had been getting a lot of requests from universities about how to provide better student services. So IBM conducted a survey that asked people what schools they had heard were doing well in this regard. The University of Delaware kept coming up.”

IBM wanted to learn how UD had gone about improving service to students. Eventually, IBM identified 15 institutions, including UD, at the forefront of delivering efficient, effective student services, and the IBM Best Practice Partners program was born.

“IBM wanted to get us all together to study not only what we’d done, but the thinking that drove the process,” Hollowell explained. The first forum took place in the summer of 1996, and Hollowell gave the keynote address.

The next summer, the Best Practice Partners, which now included a few additional universities, got together again. In 1998, the forum, hosted by Brigham Young University, was expanded into a day-and-a-half-long conference open to any university representative wanting to learn from presentations by the Best Practice Partners, who afterward met in a closed session.

“I suggested that the next year we bring the conference back East and host it at UD,” Hollowell said. “Just as at BYU, we had a couple of days of general sessions, then the Partners met for a day and a half on the Wilmington Campus. These conferences are good for everybody: They give us an opportunity to share ideas with our fellow Partners, and they provide other universities with models and best practices. In addition, IBM gets the chance to see what is needed to provide a state-of-the-art student service environment. They sell their services by telling other universities, ‘We can help you look like the University of Delaware.’”

Last summer, IBM’s Global Education Division and the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) published Planning for Student Services: Best Practices for the 21st Century, to which Hollowell contributed a chapter about UD’s strategy for and implementation of more efficient, accessible and technology-driven student services. Hollowell, who is past-president of SCUP, was instrumental in bringing IBM and SCUP together.

In February 2000, SCUP, IBM, PBS and UD will partner to deliver a television production on best practices in student services to be broadcast through the PBS Adult Learning Service.

In addition to Hollowell, Joseph DiMartile, registrar, and Carl Jacobson, director of Management Information Systems in Information Technologies, are UD’s current representatives in the Best Practice Partners program.

Vol. 19, No. 10	Nov. 4, 1999