Using your own resources inside, Is it right or what?

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

During the initial four (4) years stay I had in the University of Southeastern Philippines as a student, the enrollment system of the university, may it be for old or new students as well as the transferees have not been changed or improved at all. The procedures found in the enrollment system proved to be traditional yet not very efficient. I thought it was the standard procedure for the University of Southeastern Philippines or more specifically for the CHED (Commission on Higher Education). Every semester we had to enroll and every time we enroll, we experience different kinds of troubles and struggles related to the enrollment system of the university. We may have complaints and grievances yet we were satisfied with the way the enrollment goes. There were no significant reasons (at least on our side as the students who experienced the hardships of enrollment) for an action that would require the university to generally change the enrollment system. Yeah sure the enrollment processes is very slow and tough. There were lots of students getting annoyed and short-tempered, some were discouraged to enroll at the scheduled enrollment dates and decided to content themselves with late yet easy enrollment. Not only for those who enrolled or attempted to enroll but also those staff and faculty that were in-charge of the enrollment procedures experienced irritations and difficulty. Overall, the now previous and old enrollment system proved to be too traditional and old to cope up with the growing population of students or enrollees as well as the demands they carried to the service offered by the university. Though the old enrollment system also proved itself successful during those times, the university has concluded that it has now needed a new enrollment system.

So what happened to the new enrollment system? It was hastily developed and implemented, that is what happened. The whole development cycle or process for the new enrollment system was short and also untimely. Without sufficient time to gather useful data and collect the necessary information from the concerned population, the development for the new enrollment system was based on the meetings and discussions done by the involved parties. With minimal reflection to actual and substantial data, the designs for the development were put through and the development of the system was underway.

So who developed what? Astoundingly, the university decided to use resources found inside the organization to assign the responsibility for the design and development of the new enrollment system. Why astounded? The university have always (but on second thought, maybe not always) sought the services of companies or parties outside the organization to handle these matters (which from my experience, what most of the government offices or bureaus have always done, that is to seek the service of private or outside organizations). The old or past enrollment system was designed and developed by some private organization and that would always require payments to them only to maintain it. It may have proved to be too costly and the enrollment system (especially the software) was proving itself to be way too obsolete and old. The ones that developed the new enrollment system are both our college’s professors (as college I mean the Institute of Computing where I belong). At the start of the second semester, they were not yet tapped by the university to conduct the development so they were both given classes with their according subject courses to handle. I belonged to one of the classes handled by on of those teachers that were tapped by the university. But as the semester started, they were suddenly informed of the development of the new system. With that happened, their corresponding classes were left with no teacher leading to cause of alarm and little confusion. The college was forced to use its other teaching staff to substitute for both of the teachers as the only solution to this problem. Even though with that, the problem may seem to be solved. It was not in the case for us the students, because what we had started to do under the supervision of our old professor was fruitless since the new professor have forced us to change our proposals even though he adapted to the group we have formed under our professor before. Applying new teaching principles, we were left with no choice but to follow. Although it was not generally related to the development of the system involved, this was one of the cases of what may happen if an organization suddenly decided to use in-house strategy for system development, which in this case is an academic institution.

What lead the university to adapt and use in-house resources to develop the new enrollment system was primarily because of expenses. Not limited only to financial expense but also in time for development and implementation. Having the issue raised and discussed during those times, the university was open to choose using its own resources for the development. It was primarily and compellingly due to the disadvantages of outsourcing and the benefits of insourcing that made the university to tap the resources inside. But whether it was a right decision or not, there are many factors that we may consider deriving before determining it. In this case which was short of time and very abrupt, not only the operations of the university were affected but also the design and development of the system was also influenced. It may be prejudicial to state that the university chose the wrong option but it can be seen that it may only not in the right time to tap the in-house resources to commit to another responsibility despite having a prior engagement that may affect other entities. But in general occasions, in-house strategy for development of a system is highly recommendable and beneficial especially to those that possessed the capacity and adequate resources to proceed with it.