To: All Faculty & All Academic Professionals & All Civil Service Staff
           <everybody@illinois.edu> 
    From: "uipres@uillinois.edu" <uipres@uillinois.edu>

Reply-To: uipres@uillinois.edu
 Subject: MASSMAIL - A Letter from the President

January 29, 2004


Dear Colleagues:

Nothing worth having comes easy. I am reminded of this every time the 
subject of Banner comes up.

Banner, or UI-Integrate, our universitywide information systems upgrade, 
is an ambitious and complex undertaking that will pay dividends well into 
the future. The new system allows the university to operate more 
efficiently--an important factor in this era of tight budgets--and scraps 
a patchwork of obsolete subsystems that are expensive to maintain and at 
risk of failure.

But it hasn't been easy, as we all can attest.

I, too, have experienced a "Banner moment" on occasion--puzzlement and 
frustration when stymied by a function. To those for whom this has been a 
regular occurrence as we climbed the learning curve of Banner's 
implementation, please accept my gratitude for your patience and hard 
work. The success of UI-Integrate would not be possible without the time 
and effort of faculty and especially staff who learned to use a new 
system on a challenging timetable.

The UI-Integrate project team has kept us on schedule for completion in 
June 2005, and they have stayed on budget. Our most critical business and 
human resource functions, including payroll, have come online, and 
student information systems are next. Yes, there have been glitches, and 
hindsight indicates a more benign schedule for implementation might have 
been preferable. Overall, though, a resourceful project team and a legion 
of university employees who work with the system daily have gotten us 
over hump after hump.

My sincerest thanks to all who have labored so hard to make UI-Integrate 
a reality. There remains work ahead to complete the task, and I remain 
confident the benefits will be well worth the effort. To learn more about 
UI-Integrate, go to the project Web site: www.ui-integrate@uillinois.edu.

And, again, thank you.

Best wishes,

James J. Stukel
President
uipres@uillinois.eduThis mailing approved by:
The Office of the President

-- 
This message sent via MASSMAIL.  < http://www.cites.illinois.edu/services/massmail/ >