Welcome to part two of my little mini series about partnering vs self operating your campus card system. If you have not read part 1, then I would recommend starting there to see the pros and cons of doing it all yourself, or what I call self-op(eration).

Where the first post was about doing everything internally, this post discusses the pros and cons of working with other departments to provide services. For the purpose of this article, I am will be speaking towards working with departments that offer their own managed suite of services that use their own or campus credential. Often times, this is a department like Campus Security and Protective Services or Residence. On most campuses, both these areas have spent years developing a solution that meets, or at least met, their needs as well as their clients.

While self-op provides you with the ability to define your own path and roll out, partnering with other departments allows you to empower other departments, while growing the campus card system and services often with a smaller investment by the OneCard office. The major advantage of partnering for services is being able to take advantage of the knowledge and history of the department using the service without taking on requirement of additional staffing in either. This helps the associated groups feel like they are able to provide a better service while hopefully embracing a new technology. Any time you make the decision to work with the different department it is imperative that the history is taken into account but the goal should be to advance the service not just replace it with a new integration or expansion.

When partnering, a lot of people struggle with taking the opportunity to expand or change the process. I mean, I get it, they have spent years developing their system and processes, and you just come in and tell them to change - it can be hard. But many times, the processes that are built were developed in isolation. Departments, and the people running them, are often afraid of these changes impacting their job. This can lead to delays in adopting streamlined processes, and improved service levels for cardholders. This in turn causes the overall campus card program to grind to a halt as you may be unable to do things like change card technology, moving from mag stripe to smart contactless or providing wearable technology can be impacted because it’s “new” and not part of the existing system.

Decreasing the requirement to make money, and moving towards more of a cost recovery or central funded model can be lauded as the reason for diversifying your department. Through partnering we allow the cost to be spread throughout the institution requiring each department to recover a little bit of the funds. The longer term issue with this is that this same model often ends up saving departments money while costing the institution more in both staffing and redundancies throughout departments. 

So the short answer is that there is no one answer. You have to look at on your campus needs, funding model and existing relationships to determine a plan which is best suited to you and your overall objective. Having someone work with you to build a best of breed solution incorporating the benefits of both sides of the question enables you to grow your program confidently while increasing services to students and cutting down administrative overhead.