By:Tshegofatso Teseletso
The Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) has embarked on a multifaceted real-time online automated system to resolve the current partially-manual operated systems through the implementation of the user-friendly ‘BASIS’ to fast-track the automated online system.BASIS stands for BIUST Academic Student Information System. It is a major project of strategic importance to the University and its imminent completion will see to the realization of one of BIUST’s key strategic initiatives.
The institution has partnered with Software Application and information Solutions (SAis), Anthology and ICL Botswana, who are providing project management services for BASIS projects.
The BASIS project was launched in October 2020 by the BIUST Vice-Chancellor,Professor Otlogetswe Totolo and is on schedule to be completed in June 2022. Spearheading this remarkable initiative is Mr. Donah Lekwati the Director, Registry Services who was recently appointed to serve as the BASIS Change Manager.
His role encompasses overseeing the University’s readiness for the change brought about by the BASIS system. “I work with a team of Change Agents bound together by the desire to ensure a smooth transition to the new system and acceptance of the new way of doing things by users”, Mr. Lekwati highlighted.
According to Mr.Lekwati,the BASIS initiative seeks to automate all the academic services of student recruitment, online application, selection and admissions, registration, academic advisement, academic progression and suspension of studies just to mention a few. He further emphasised the project also cover one critical student service of student accommodation. Research is also another key component of the BASIS system that postgraduate students and academic staff will enjoy going forward from the portal.
This system is being developed to ‘talk to other University systems such as the ID Card system,Library Sierra system,Oracle Human Resource system, Oracle Finance system as well as the Blackboard learning management system.The diligent project change manager delineated that these are systems that play a role directly or indirectly in the academic life of the student.
“The importance of the systems talking to each other is to ensure that ultimately the student self-service facility has all the information at a single point that the student needs”,he said.
The BASIS system is beneficial to the student community, who will experience and interact with the aforementioned academic services in a completely different way. Academic services for students will be completely online.He noted that student class timetables will be easily accessible in their self-service portal.The initiative will also ensure that the accommodation application can be done at the student’s convenience.
The Change Manager indicated that students will represent a major change as the main client in this initiative.” It is for this reason that efforts are underway to ensure that students will be acclimatized to this new way of accessing academic services”,he said.Furthermore, the Change Manager said Academic Staff will also enjoy the benefits of this system through the automation of services they used to do manually.
They will be able to easily build student groups as they deem fit for ease of academic advising or for their convenience; easy posting and receiving of students results through the system. For research purposes, the system will make it very easy for supervisors to manage the progress of their postgraduate students be it on monitoring research projects and academic performance.
As he concludes, Mr. Lekwati stated that this will be a major achievement for the University as it is expected to improve the institution’s reputation and enhance its competitiveness among its local, regional and global peers.BIUST will soon be among global Universities which prides themselves in real-time automated systems.The University community is urged to be on the lookout for the Change Agents who will soon ramp up their activities to increase awareness of the BASIS System and help the University to manage the imminent change to be embraced across all quarters.
The Change Manager supervises, motivates and trains Change Agents drawn from across Faculties;Directorates / Departments/Schools as well as the Centre. He is the contact point between Project Managers from ICL Botswana and the Project team.The Change team will soon be stepping into the respective department to conduct project visitations and the uptake of the BASIS project by staff and students community in readiness for the GO-Live project.
This is a multi-million Pula project that will benefit the BIUST community by automating the manual processes in academic services, improving service delivery and ensuring the accuracy of data.Currently, the project is in a phase where the users are being trained to prepare them for User Acceptance Testing.
Following this, the User Acceptance Testing phase will begin followed by the end-user training and Go Live in June 2022.For more information about the BASIS project you can send email to sis.helpdesk@biust.ac.bw or telephone 4931485,4931473 and 4931331.