To better meet the needs of their school communities while maximizing resources, three state two-year colleges will share a system administrator to maintain the colleges’ Ellucian Colleague enterprise resource planning software.
Leadership from Carl Albert State, Murray State and Redlands have been working to identify ways the institutions can partner to provide services even more efficiently to students while supporting the work of faculty and staff. All three schools use the software platform Colleague to provide many vital functions, including enrollment, billing, purchasing and human resources, so they came to an agreement to share the cost and management of a dedicated staff member to oversee this operation.
“This partnership will mark the beginning of a new chapter of collaboration between institutions all across the state,” said Carl Albert State President Jay Falkner. “I’m thankful to everyone who worked to make this possibility a reality.”
Representatives of the institutions selected Allen Scroggins of Poteau to fill the new position. He will divide his time serving all three institutions as an employee of Carl Albert State College.
“Redlands Executive Vice President/Chief of Staff Jena Marr worked diligently with her counterparts from Carl Albert and Murray State to bring this project to the implementation stage,” said Redlands President Jack Bryant. “We are excited about the opportunity this provides for our institutions, and we hope this is the first of many statewide collaborations.”
Partnerships, such as colleges sharing an Ellucian network administrator, are a valuable option during a time when higher education institutions are exploring more ways to collaborate as both a means of maximizing budgets and creatively enhancing services and programs.
“We are better together and this kind of agreement is the future of higher education. We are honored to be in a partnership that makes such good sense for our students, faculty and staff,” said Murray State President Tim Faltyn. “I believe we should be and will be entering into more of these kinds of partnerships going forward.”