Dear Colleagues:
Yesterday was an historic moment in New Mexico higher education. Thanks to the hours, months, and especially, the professional expertise that many of you have dedicated to the Enterprise Resource Planning/Student Information Systems project, I am pleased to announce that the CHESS Board of Directors, which I chair, the SFCC Governing Board, and the boards of our member colleges voted to partner with Workday to help bring our collective vision to life. We will announce the selection of Workday to local and national media soon, but I wanted to share the good news with you first.
Workday is a trusted cloud-based service that will become a single, shared platform for our student and administrative systems. Workday’s portfolio of enterprise cloud applications for financial management, human resources, planning, spend management, and analytics have been adopted by many higher education institutions, including Dallas College, Arizona State University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Virginia. I am confident Workday provides the robust suite of applications needed to support and continually enhance our student, faculty, and staff experience.
With Workday, we will begin envisioning a future where we can:
- Create stronger educational experiences and pathways for our students.
- Adapt and continually improve business processes and operations that are the same for all five institutions.
- Fully leverage institutional data for better, more real-time planning and decision making.
This unprecedented project and our ongoing participation in CHESS represent a strategic business imperative and a visible reminder of our institutional commitment to improving the lives of the students and communities we serve.
Please join me in offering special thanks to our SFCC colleagues, as well as those at CNM, Clovis Community College, Northern New Mexico College, and San Juan College, who made this possible. An effort of this magnitude involves extensive collaboration. We would not be celebrating this important milestone without the hard work and dedication of the CHESS ERP selection team.
Our five colleges will launch the nation’s most innovative, exciting initiative in higher education. In the coming months we will implement the human resources and financial services models. In addition, we will collaborate with Workday to design and implement a new multi-institution student platform. I am counting on each of us to continue our commitment to this project fully, and to depend on one another for support as we know this will be a challenging – yet rewarding – time in our college.
I am excited to embark on this journey with you and I look forward to sharing more about our plans in the days ahead.
Sincerely,
Becky Rowley, Ph.D.
President
