Project FIND

Dartmouth College is developing a computerized management information system to aid department heads, faculty administrators, and Trustees in charting future educational and financial needs of the institution.

Project FIND (Forecasting Institutional Needs for Dartmouth) will include large sets of data on students, faculty, administration, staff, and alumni as well as computer programs to model the present and future operation of the College's complex systems. These models would also include budgetary data.

Donald Kreider, Vice President and Dean for Student Affairs and chairman of the coordinating committee for Project FIND, said the approach to Dartmouth's management information system is unique in that it actively involves all elements of the Dartmouth community and will be integrated with all planning aspects of the College.

Project FIND is funded in part through a $l00,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a $l00,000 gift from an anonymous donor. President Kemeny, in announcing it, noted that many institutions have failed to make use of the high-speed computer to establish a reasonable management information system. The problem, he said, is not a lack of information on students, faculty, administration, staff, alumni and facilities. "The difficulty is one of having the information in a form that is not only useful to management but available on demand. By using the time-sharing mode of the Kiewit Computation Center, a whole mass of data, once stored, can be retrieved almost instantaneously."

President Kemeny added that Project FIND will be an invaluable tool under the recently inaugurated Dartmouth Plan for Year-Round Operation. "As we are entering a stage of modest expansion under the Dartmouth Plan, we must monitor very closely the percentage of faculty on tenure and study the long-range budget implications of the size and distribution of the faculty."

He also noted that the data file on administrative officers, running under a prototype of Project FIND, recently helped the College design a salary schedule and procedure for promotions and merit increases for those officers.

Keeping track of student and faculty flow, which presently involves months of thumbing through long lists of printouts to provide the necessary background information, will in the future be handled by Project FIND. In addition, the entire budgeting operation for the college can be stored in the computer, accessible at a finger touch to monitor the daily flow of income versus expenditures.

Because of the confidential nature of much of the information stored in the data banks, especially that pertaining to salaries and alumni giving, a special security system has been devised for Project FIND. A series of special "passwords" known only to a few authorized college personnel will guard all data considered to be confidential.

President Kemeny said the benefits to the College from using Project FIND will be multiple. "We expect to have more efficient operation of the top management of the college. We will be able to provide the Board of Trustees with much more reliable forecasts of the future financial needs of the College, and we will be able to make a significant saving in the size of the supporting staff by using computers to do a great deal of the information-keeping and analysis."