New Mexico Colleges Seek to Streamline Tasks
Before 2018, there hadn’t been much coordination between the 27 state and community colleges in New Mexico.
Around that time, members of the New Mexico legislature began to question the costs of running the sprawling infrastructure of the state-funded education system.
“We were going through a time in the state when resources were tight and colleges were struggling,” says Kathy Ulibarri, who spent many years in leadership and finance roles at Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) before taking on the role of CEO at the Collaborative for Higher Education Shared Services (CHESS).
In response, five college presidents decided to address the issue among themselves. The presidents wanted to keep their local governance boards and independence while pooling resources and standardizing operations. The result was the formation of CHESS.
“Blending distinct college cultures through this effort takes a lot of preplanning and careful communication,” says Ulibarri.
Wiley, of Eduventures, agrees.
“For initiatives like CHESS, it’s fantastic that senior leaders of each college are involved,” he says. “You need institutional leadership at a high level.”
EXPLORE: How higher ed is advancing and streamlining DX.
Before the institutions begin course sharing, they are focused on streamlining administration. The staff considers CHESS a transformation initiative, but technology plays a major role.
“We were looking for a modern technology base, one that would pave the way for the next five to 10 years,” says Victor Leon, CIO at CNM. “We eventually chose Workday. It has a robust, cloud-native platform and has made a strong investment in student information systems.”
Because of the rural nature of some of CHESS’s member institutions as well as the shift toward cloud-based, mission-critical platforms, network and internet access, stability, bandwidth, and availability have emerged as critical infrastructure components of the organization’s overall IT strategy.
This includes designing a new Microsoft Azure AD-based identity and access management framework, with the goal of supplying students, faculty and staff with a secure and seamless experience navigating between the various colleges while also fully leveraging Workday’s multitenancy architecture and role-based security model.
Another initiative — still in the planning stage — is the New Mexico Statewide Education Network, or SEN, which will leverage several of the CHESS member locations as backbone nodes. If SEN is viable, it may be able to provide CHESS members with reliable, cost-effective, high-speed connectivity.
CHESS currently has five members but is open to welcoming more. As college presidents decide on organizational issues, school CIOs like Leon work together to implement technology to address the challenges of centralization.
“One challenge is data governance and management,” says Leon. “Before, we were all working autonomously. Now, we need all member organizations to have a clear understanding of various terms, so we formed a data governance committee. If we architect this right, we can use it with other institutions.”