Riverside College is a small liberal arts college in North America, with 5,000 students and about 30,000 alumni. It has been using Microsoft Excel to manage alumni information and email for communication (e.g., a monthly newsletter). The College has recently released a strategic plan that aims for growth in enrolment (8,000 students) and greater alumni engagement.

Several issues have been identified that were related to alumni engagement:

(1) Employees at Alumni Relationship Office have been complaining about the lack of rich information on alumni. For instance, the information on file typically only includes one's name, address, email address, year of graduation, and employer. Many information is outdated. Furthermore, it is difficult to track each alumni's donation and tailor the fundraising activities.

(2) The alumni who wants to stay connected don't know how to update their contact information if they changed their job, and/or email address, or moved to another city/country. They will not receive alumni newsletters, magazines etc. Some alumni wanted to make a donation but was frustrated with the process.

(3) Access to the information is limited. Professors who would like to look up alumni and invite them as guest speakers do not have the access to the information. Employees at PR office also want to use alumni information to promote the school and boost the enrollment. However, they are not able to effectively identify the alumni who might be suitable for this purpose.

(4) Other issues

The College is considering an overhaul of the technology used for alumni engagement/management and is looking for a solution from a vendor. The new solution will help employees at Alumni Relationship Office build better profiles of alumni (i.e., more information fields), automate the processes of communication (e.g., signing up for events), and enable new engagement opportunities. It will also give access to employees in other departments who needs alumni information, and provide support to alumni for updating personal information and give donation etc. The new system should have some social network integration as well.

It seems a web-based and/or cloud-based solution will be necessary given that most alumni are in other jurisdictions, though security could be a concern. $50,000 have been earmarked for this solution, with the potential of going up to $100,000.

The Vice President, Dr. L. King, is taking the lead. He would like to implement a new Alumni Information System to solve the current issues. The project starts now (Jan 30th, 2023). He quickly established a project team and assign the Collage's CIO, Perry Sisk, as project manager.

Perry Sisk plan to send a request of proposal to a few vendors and have them submit their proposals to him by email. His plan is to send the request out before the Winter semester ends in April and have the proposals submitted by June 30th, 2023, which will give him enough time to make a decision by the end of July. The new solution will be implemented in Fall (September-December), with Jan 1st, 2024 as the official rollout date.

Riverside College has a very small IT group that will not be able to provide support for the new system after it is in place. Vendor support will be needed.

Conduct a background study for this project, search for similar projects as examples:

• Determine what riverside College needs based on the information above
• Study what additional function/feature of the alumni information system may be useful to Riverside College

Identify all stakeholders and conduct a stakeholder analysis