More Than a Tech Migration: SIG Supports Northeastern Illinois University’s Move to SaaS

As Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU)prepared to migrate its Banner environment to SaaS, the university needed additional expertise and capacity to support its internal teams throughout the transition.

The project required coordination across numerous functional and technical areas, including:

• Data migration
• Third-party integrations
• Institutional reporting
• Training
• Data governance
• Post-go-live preparation

With multiple stakeholders involved, NEIU also sought strong project oversight to keep activities aligned with Ellucian’s implementation plan while accounting for the university’s academic calendar and critical business cycles.

THE SOLUTION

NEIU engaged SIG to provide supplemental Banner SaaS migration support alongside Ellucian.

SIG brought together project management, functional, and technical expertise to help NEIU navigate its pathway to SaaS, connecting the broader implementation plan with the people, processes, data, and systems that needed to be ready for the transition.

Rather than approaching the project as a technology migration alone, the engagement addressed the interconnected areas that can determine an institution’s readiness for long-term success in a SaaS environment.

Providing Project Leadership and Coordination

SIG worked with NEIU and Ellucian stakeholders to support the project plan, timeline, and overall coordination of the migration.

The team helped establish clear roles and responsibilities, identify key stakeholders, and facilitate communication across functional areas. Regular team lead meetings provided a forum for addressing dependencies and understanding how decisions made in one area could affect other parts of the institution.

Project planning also considered NEIU’s academic calendar and major business-processing periods, helping implementation activities remain aligned with institutional priorities.

Preparing Functional Teams for SaaS

SIG supplemented Ellucian training by helping NEIU assess skill needs, prepare employees for training sessions, complete assignments and prerequisites, and reinforce learning throughout testing and implementation.

The team also helped translate broader Ellucian communications and guidance into NEIU’s institutional context, providing functional users with an additional layer of support as they prepared to work in the SaaS environment.

Building Data Governance into the Journey

NEIU incorporated data governance into its SaaS migration rather than treating it as a separate future initiative.

SIG worked with stakeholders across areas including Human Resources, Finance, the Registrar, and Financial Aid to assess existing data governance practices and better understand the university’s processes, methodologies, staffing, and technology.

The engagement was designed to help NEIU establish a framework for managing data ownership, quality, access, and security, including recommendations for developing a data governance committee, policies, processes, and standards.

Supporting a Complex Data Migration

SIG provided hands-on support for migrating institutional data to the Banner SaaS environment.

The scope included academic and student history, admissions information, transfer credits, test scores, financial aid history, accounts receivable balances, fixed assets, and other critical institutional data.

SIG supported data mapping, migration testing, troubleshooting, and live simulation preparation while helping NEIU staff build the knowledge necessary to participate in and support the migration process.

Modernizing Third-Party Integrations

SIG worked with functional and technical teams to inventory integrations, document data flows, identify challenges, and determine how each integration should operate within Banner SaaS.

Rather than replicate the existing environment, SIG helped evaluate whether enhanced Banner functionality could replace certain integrations, creating opportunities to eliminate redundancy, improve efficiency, and reduce ongoing support requirements.

For integrations that remained necessary, SIG provided development and support to help align them with the SaaS environment.

Rethinking Reporting for SaaS

The move to SaaS also created an opportunity for NEIU to evaluate its institutional and departmental reporting landscape.

SIG worked with IT and functional users to identify critical reports, document ownership and usage, and determine which reports should be migrated, combined, eliminated, or redeveloped within SaaS Insights.

This approach helped NEIU look beyond simply reproducing its existing reporting environment and instead consider what reporting would be most valuable in its future-state Banner environment.

THE IMPACT

The partnership between NEIU and SIG produced a number of important outcomes, including:

• Successful transition to Banner SaaS
• Improved readiness across functional and technical teams
• Streamlined or eliminated third-party integrations
• Stronger institutional reporting capabilities
• Establishment of a sustainable data governance framework
• Increased internal knowledge and confidence
• Reduced burden on NEIU’s IT and functional teams
• Post-go-live stability and support

SUPPORT, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY

For NEIU, the pathway to Banner SaaS extended well beyond the technology itself. It required the university to consider how its people, processes, data, integrations, and reporting environment would operate within a SaaS model.

By working alongside NEIU and Ellucian, SIG provided support across multiple stages of that journey — from project planning and organizational preparation to data migration, integrations, reporting, training, and post-go-live support.

That breadth of expertise is central to SIG’s approach to SaaS transformation. Every institution begins from a different place and faces a different combination of technical, functional, and organizational challenges. SIG can meet institutions wherever they are on their pathway to SaaS, helping identify what comes next and providing the expertise and capacity to move forward.