Case Study:                 Feasibility Study and Data Conversion Plan
The Task
Prior to the launch of a new national online college course catalog web site, the Department of Labor needed to know if community college members would collaborate in providing their course offering data in this effort.

The Client
The U.S. Department of Labor, America's Learning eXchange (ALX) is a national online college course catalog resource for students and people interested in continuing education.

The Situation
The Dept of Labor needed to construct a survey to go out to 1,200 community college presidents in order to determine the needs and interests of collaborating on this national web-based database project. They needed an assessment of the diversity of technology used to keep this information in the community colleges so they would be able to create a plan on how to approach the problem.

The Action
We interviewed stakeholders and created the survey based designed to arrive at the explicit information needed by the Dept of Labor to proceed with their plans. The survey was then released to all community college presidents and their chief technology officers and the results were tabulated and corroborated.

The Results
The results showed that this project was feasible and there was a real need for this product used in education. The results showed there was a desire to provide national exposure to the community colleges course offerings. The technology diversity was shown to be vastly divergent. This indicated more efforts were needed in the data conversion capability than had been previously expected. A plan was subsequently prepared to address this newly identified need.