Feng said Oracle sees this issue as one of the biggest challenges in the market today, that for their customers, there are increasing expectations from students and faculty, not only for demands on their academic ecosystems, but also demand for integration between the two systems to be real time and kept up to date with new functionalities being introduced. Along with that, it becomes harder for the IT staffs to keep up with those emerging technologies, coupled with their fear that applying upgrades to their existing systems will cause the integrations to break. Seeing this integration as an area that needed to be worked on, Oracle came together with other vendors and with IMS Global in order to try and reinvigorate the standards for this integration to occur seamlessly.

Feng added that Oracle's interest in this area, and the standards work being spearheaded by the LIS working group within IMS Global is primarily in response to customer requirements. And the goal, she said, is to speed product integrations.

Leonhardt said that if he could summarize the question into a single most daunting challenge, the word he came up with was complexity. Many of the applications used by Georgetown make his life complicated, he said, and the integration work currently underway hopefully will gradually eliminate some of that complexity. "There is still a void of standards in some spaces and there still is the need to do point to point or specialized interfaces in many ways. I think it's going to take a while for modern technologies to become prevalent in higher education and in the key administrative spaces."

In terms of dealing with the problem, Leonhardt said he thinks most institutions and vendors are investing in the types of integrations that make the most sense and offer the most payoffs. The path is there to reduce complexity, he said, but that there is still much work to be done.

Fontaine reminded the audience that we are continually moving into an instant world where people expect things to happen magically at the snap of their fingers. More specifically, they enroll in a class and expect it to show up in their course management system instantaneously. As a result, there is a need to provide a more real-time environment. At the same time, the data that needs to be shared among those systems is getting broader. IMS Global initially focused on the user, the enrollment and the course provisioning on the system. There wasn't a lot of specialized capability. "Now we're seeing a lot of demand for greater information back into the SIS. What grades are actually going to be defined for a course? What types of grades are going to be defined? The need for additional status. That bridge has to get wider."

Another challenge Fontaine raised is the fidelity of the data. Blackboard has been doing a lot of batch integration work for many years and one of the things they've found is that there are two constituent groups on campus, the academic side and the back office folks. Many registrars used to have the attitude that as long as a student's enrollment record was correct by the end of the semester, then that was all that was needed. If drop/adds and other interim data weren't processed in a timely manner, then that was okay. In this instant world where disparate systems are integrated, however, the data has to be good. And it has to be correct in real time.

With regard to fidelity, Fontaine pointed out that standards have to matter. "In this new security world that's out there, you're going to get patches from everyone of your software vendors. The standards have to validate so that you can have a solid and reliable bridge. That data needs to move back and forth in such a way so that when you upgrade, you're not worried about the reliability of those integrations."

Fontaine sees a diversity of practice in the way that teaching is delivered through these different systems, and he thinks that's a good thing. "There's a lot of experimentation going on with a varied range of systems. How you tie these systems together that give the academic side the diversity they want, but pull that information back in and make it a good usable experience for people is really important."

Moon said the two themes he associated with the question were complexity and cost of ownership. The first challenge he said is in the variability of institutions, ranging from two-year community colleges to research institutions, each with their own variety of requirements. And at some single institutions, he said it is not uncommon to find three or four different learning systems in use. "As an administrative system vendor, it makes it all the more challenging to go in there and figure out how you're going to interface your student information system with these various systems on campus."

Higher education can drive down the cost of ownership by having a standardized interface, Moon said, and having LIS 2.0 takes everyone in that direction.

Abel summarized the discussion by mentioning themes he heard raised in the panel's answers: the handling of upgrades, complexity of IT, the ability to exchange outcomes (from learning to administrative systems), fidelity of data, flexibility of support for various teaching and learning scenarios, and total cost of ownership.

A member of the audience cited fear as one of the biggest challenges facing the integration of data across the two systems. Fear that systems will not be compatible and that the data contained therein may be flawed. There also is fear between the academic and administrative sides of the institution that each other cannot be trusted. When there is an environment where the academic side can trust the IT department, then everything works well.

Leonhardt added that when you think about how IT has evolved within colleges, two decades ago many did not even have a CIO in place. Only within the last 10 to 15 years have CIOs come into their own on college campuses. Leonhardt also thinks that the line between the administrative and academic sides of institutions has largely disappeared. Where CIOs can push the two sides together and bring about natural collaboration, you see good things happening.

Institutions also fear the fidelity of the data, said Fontaine. Many schools have built defense mechanisms into their LIS systems for fear the real time exchange of data may not be accurate. "We need, as an industry, to provide some best practices for schools that will offer ways in which they can best manage this data and how they should implement the exchange of information."

Moon believes that as the industry moves toward service oriented architectures (SOA) and exposing business services to academia, there will be an attempt to bridge the gap between the two sides. "You'll see academia having access to this functionality through various things like Web 2.0 and mashup and all the rest of it. They will feel more in control of what they need to do."

Feng added that a lot of times the fear of the unknown results in a sort of paralysis and academicians would rather "deal with the devil they know" than take risks to work through the issues they face. She also believes that now that there are applications in the landscape that are going to become compelling to students and faculty, offering better teaching tools, the result is going to force the shift to a better set of infrastructure that is service based. That speaks to the need for a new standard contract that deals with that new architecture.

Someone from the audience asked when the market would begin to see SOA. Moon replied he thinks higher education will begin to see major movement within the next 18-month timeframe. Most applications, he said, are already exposing multiple services. Many of SunGard Higher Education's products, for example, such as the Banner SIS and Luminis platform have many services they are exposing. Once you have services, how do you orchestrate those services and combine them into composite applications? He predicts major movement in this direction by the end of 2009 and 2010.

Abel said that IMS Global has just started a workgroup on service oriented architecture that is being chaired by Oracle and IBM. At the moment, it looks like the group is going to focus more on providing definitions as to what is SOA, what does it really mean, and what are the projected timeframes for implementation?