Talking Stick - November/December 2013 - 21

provide students with opportunities
to meet some of the housing and
residence life staff. "With a residential
population of less than 500 and an
intimate staff size, the logistics of
an in-person housing selection and
room switch process seems to be the
most feasible for the institution," says
Christine Petrilla, assistant director of
residence life at Rosemont College in
Pennsylvania. "From my short tenure
at Rosemont College, I have seen the
community that is built through the
process, especially when the entire
residential population gets together on
one night for selection."
However, if the benefits for
students and staff of having an online
housing process outweigh the costs,
then it's a choice worth considering.
In some cases, remodeling the
current process may be the ideal
solution, and it may be possible to
use a hybrid solution by offering
some steps online, such as enabling
students to view floor plans or gain
access to special housing applications,
which would allow information to
be obtained well ahead of the actual
selection dates. This can help in
the planning phase, when limited
occupancy options need to be
considered and changes may need to
be managed on-the-fly. The IT staff
can develop a simple interface for
identifying housing requests online;
in addition, there are a variety of Webbased tools and desktop resources that
can be used to collect information.
Google Docs is a great way to create a
free online housing application that
is reviewable in real time and can
be sorted in a variety of ways. While
SurveyMonkey and QuestionPro are
technically survey tools, they too offer
options for free questionnaires used

as applications that can be tracked per
individual response. With a little bit of
know-how and time, Microsoft Access
can also be used to build a small to
mid-sized database; if housed securely
on the institution's Web server, some
of the forms can be published online
as applications.
The third option is to build a
Housing Management System (HMS).
This may be an ideal solution to
address the logistics of managing

of lines of code, test and compare
it to current housing selection
processes, and then finally introduce
it to the student body, test again,
tweak, account for errors, and tweak
again. The cost of staffing can also
be high because once the system is
built, it needs constant monitoring
and requires significant updates at
least every two to three years. Unless
the institution has an IT team large
enough to dedicate two to three

wheN a process Is auTomaTeD, sTuDeNTs caN see
how IT works aND uNDersTaND ThaT There are
pre-programmeD rules whIch make The process
NeuTral aND objecTIve.

housing in a mid- or large-size school.
The larger a campus becomes, the
more time it takes to have people
actually select rooms, and space may
need to be reserved for 500+ students
to make their selection. Then that
information needs to be transferred
to a computer. Another reason to
build the school's own system is
transparency. When a process is
automated, students can see how it
works and understand that there are
pre-programmed rules which make
the process neutral and objective.
Again, the bottom line is that the
benefits for students and staff must
outweigh the costs. The two major
costs associated with a home-built
HMS are time and staffing. It takes
about two years to develop, code,
integrate, and implement a fully
operational online housing system.
Time is needed not only to create the
system, but also to write thousands

people to this project exclusively for
several months, the costs may end up
outweighing the benefits. "The main
factor we had for creating our own
program was that we had a library
and technology services department
that had the capability and means to
be able to create a system that would
be specifically tailored to our students
and housing system," says Ozzie
Breiner, director of residential services
at Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania.
Buying a housing management
system may be the best choice for
some institutions, but the benefits
for students and staff need to be
quantified in some way that the cost/
benefit ratio is crystal clear to the
finance office, which wants to know
what the program costs and where the
money will come from - and, more
specifically, why it should be spent on
this particular project. Most software
November + December 2013

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Talking Stick - November/December 2013

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