I am the VP for Academic Affairs and the Dean for a small residential college.
I'm looking for a comparison of college degree audit (and other campus utility) software platforms to use for degree auditing, database management and database integration. Which is better for this: Ellucina or Jenzabar CXsmall?
I'm no expert on the platforms, Ellucina or Jenzabar CXsmall. I'm also not really familiar with degree auditing, what type of database management or which databases you wish to integrate. My expertise is more surrounding the software evaluation process itself than any particular product.
What I do is helping companies evaluate software and our basic premise is to collect requirements, rank requirements, understand the cost/revenue analysis of requirements and then seek software solutions that directly address the most acute requirements as well as software that covers most of the total requirement set.
Generic comparisons between software often factors in things like, Is it .Net technology? Can it scale to hundreds of users? - when the underlying technology may be of zero importance and a small residential college will never have use for 100's of users.
In any case, current staff will have an understanding of the workloads needed and can attend scripted demos and presentations on the different software - and the final question, to your Degree Auditor Manager (or whatever title that person holds) is 'Can you audit more degrees using this software tool?' (If the volume of audits is actually a key factor, I don't know if it is or not.)
So what you're actually comparing is not the software itself, but the fit of each software within your organization.
Along the way you're going to want to develop measurable goals for the project and understand the change management required to utilize the new tools you are acquiring. You'll also want to talk to other schools using the live software because we all know what we see in the demo and what actual humans using the software accomplish are two different things.