My Housing Account

I feel there's some background information that I should share before talking about the presentation I made this last week at a conference in San Diego; but I'll try to make this as brief as I can.

I work for the BYU Campus Accommodations Office. We do all the contracting and billing for all of housing and dining services (about $40 million worth per year). Four years ago, we purchased a software system called RMS (Residential Management System) to help us manage our housing and dining contracts. RMS is one of the premier university housing management software packages available on the market today, and is used by over 150 colleges and universities, including Notre Dame, Geogria Tech, Northwestern, Duke, Purdue, and many others across the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.

After we installed RMS, we quickly discovered we couldn't customize it the way we wanted, and the user interface left much to be desired. At the time, I was working as a student employee providing customer service and creating Crystal reports. I did, however, have a fair amount of programming skills I had learned in the past. Drawing from these skills and learning new ones, I began writing web applications to supplement the services RMS provided. Since then, my applications (named My Housing Account) have replaced the need for RMS's online student portal; I've been able to provide students and administrators with so much more than RMS can provide, and all at a much higher quality and lower cost, with much greater customer satisfaction.

My Housing Account gets on average over 1600 users login every single day, and receives over 3.5 million pages views per year. There are a lot of really cool things in My Housing Account that I am really proud about. One of the more "showy" features, though, is a graphical, visual Room Selection process. Rather than have someone in our office (it used to be me) have to manually assign each of our 4800 residents to a room with a roommate, students can now select their own room themselves. It has a pretty slick user interface and has a lot of bells and whistles. It's kind of a similar process to selecting your own seat on a plane when you book your flight, but a little more elaborate.

Every year, the company RMS sponsors a users conference for all its users. Two years ago, in Las Vegas, I showed our Room Selection process to a number of RMS employees at that conference. Their developers were particularly excited about it, and we were asked to present at the users conference the following year in Orlando. Last year, however, our presentation was blocked at the last minute. They didn't explicitly say why, but I figure it was because RMS didn't want us to show other schools what we could do without using their product. We did, however, get a chance to talk quite in depth with Phil Mosely, the new VP of Operations at RMS. Phil was intrigued and agreed to come to Provo a few weeks later to visit more with us.

During Phil's visit, the director I report through proposed a partnership between BYU and RMS, in which we would provide RMS with the source code for our Room Selection process, and in return, RMS would change their product to offer support for what we were doing. Phil was very, very excited about that idea. During the next several weeks, BYU's intellectual property attorneys and RMS's attorneys hashed out an amendment to our service agreement, and we were officially made partners. Over the course of the next several months, my student staff and I created an open source version of our Room Selection process which we provided to RMS's developers. Again I was asked to present at the next users conference, this time in San Diego, which happened last week.

In San Diego, I presented our Room Selection process (which is just one small part of what we have in My Housing Account!). The other schools were so blown away by it! In their eyes, this was the best thing since even before sliced bread! :) They asked a lot of really good questions, and were overwhelmingly excited about the entire concept. After my presentation ended, everyone ran up to talk to me and ask questions. They were all so impressed! They wanted a demo they could take back and show their bosses at their schools, so I provided them with a video demonstration we made for our students. My favorite part of all was seeing their jaws drop after telling them the entire Room Selection was developed in only about 8 months time by two students (myself and one other), in between answering phone calls and responding to emails. (I since was hired to work full time to manage the office's software development.)

While at San Diego, I met with Phil again, who basically said that our Room Selection has redefined the direction the company is heading in the future. RMS's development teams have been told to make the integration of our Room Selection process their top priority.

Anyway, it was a fun trip. It was great to meet with individuals from other universities across the world, and it made me feel good to know that I developed something that will literally change the students' contracting experience in the entire university housing industry.