Muskegon Community College

Results

• Effective retention of IT staff 
• IT helps leadership achieve key goals 
• Muskegon Community College has access to elite IT staff

Summary

Dale Nesbary, President, Muskegon Community College 

Technology drives most of what we do on campus. And we like to say that we're technology-informed institutions, but to a certain extent we're technology-driven institutions.   

Technology has supported any number of initiatives that we have on campus. And for me, as president, I wanted to see our student success initiative move forward. Managed Services has helped Muskegon meet our organizational goals. Our IT staff, and the broader Ellucian staff, bring people to the table that we simply couldn't bring to the table.  

Our technology management services from Ellucian began in 2005. That was a few years before I came on board, but we selected Ellucian because we were a home-grown system. We had staff on campus, but they lacked in certain skill sets. Ellucian filled in the gaps.  

Do we have challenges with respect to keeping skilled IT staff on board? The short story is yes, we do. But we've been able to keep them on board, from what I understand, more effectively than other institutions, because they are paid well, we provide them with professional development services through the institution. Even though they're not technically our employees, many of them were with us prior to coming to Ellucian. So, we think they are our employees.  

I'll use an example. Our chief information officer, Mike Alstrom, has been with us for 20 years. He brings student success materials to our table that some of our student success staff don't. I think it's very important to have a chief information officer on cabinet. I've gotten some push back from that by the way. Why do we have the tech guy sitting here? And my response is, frankly, because he provides me with better information than you do.