Administrative Systems

Administrative systems should be affordable, flexible, and customizable. They should help end users plan for and achieve their goals and help them complete tasks along the way.

In this free July 22 EDUCAUSE Live! web seminar, Kuali Student: A Next-Generation Administrative System, presenter Richard Spencer, executive director of IT, University of British Columbia, will show how the vision, principles, and design for Kuali Student are aligned with these objectives and discuss why community source development was selected for this project.

The call for proposals is now open for the Enterprise Information and Technology Conference 2008, a small-scale event ideal for making contacts with peers, engaging in discussion, and discovering new strategies and solutions for dealing with challenges facing those involved in administrative and enterprise information systems and their related technologies. The conference will be held May 28–29 in Chicago, Illinois. The program will follow these tracks:

• Demonstrating the Increasing Value of IT
• Infrastructure Evolution
• Services Evolution
• Systems Evolution

Submit a presentation proposal. The deadline for submissions is January 14, 2008.

For many years technology projects at MICA followed a simple formula:  implement tools and services and then get people interesting in using them to improve business.  This approach worked pretty well for us -- as a small, private visual arts college.  People on our campus really respond to things they can see and experience -- particularly when it comes to technology.  So building or upgrading a system first and then showing that what it could provide was an effective approach. 

You can read in some of my prior posts about our MICA Connected initiative.  You can also see in there that part of that initiative is an upgrade to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 (Q4 2006).  I have been remiss in blogging over the past couple of months because we have been too busy actually working!  I have to get better at working and blogging at the same time -- like walking and chewing gum, sorta.

I am also tracking our progress here:

http://connected.mica.edu/blog/tsimpson

so you can read more details if you are so inclined.  We are very, very excited about our progress to date.  We have an amazing staff, really great end users, a wonderfully supportive community, and a senior adminstration willing to bet quite a bit on the prospect of our success.

More later -- back to work!

HB

In this 41-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Robert O'Leary and Nick Pavlakos in a session entitled Offshoring: Bringing Business Value to Stanford University. They discuss a partnership with an offshore vendor to bring predictability and lower costs to Stanford University's administrative systems development and support functions.

In this 42-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Colin Currie in a session entitled Looking Toward the Future of Core Administrative Systems. Currie looks at vended core administrative systems and open source options to anticipate what's coming in the future,and make a case for cross-institution collaboration to establish our own administrative systems future.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                         Contact: Ted Simpson

March 7, 2007                                                                                                                       410-225-2531

                                                                                                                     pr@mica.edu

I just read a the latest HEUG newsletter and there were some dates put out in December that a number of institutions (mine included) have been eagerly awaiting:

John Wookey, Oracle Senior VP for Applications, and Susan Beidler, Director, Strategy for Campus Solutions, announced at the December HEUG Board meeting that the Campus Solutions / HR 9.0 product release date is December 15, 2006.  The upgrade scripts will be available in Q1 2007 supporting both the 8.0 to 9.0 and 8.0 to 8.9 migration paths.
You can read the whole article here, but you will need a HEUG login -- so join HEUG if you haven't already!  We already have our CS 9.0 cds and plan to have a demo instance up next month.  We are really looking forward to those upgrade scripts.

Also of note is a comment about the next version of PeopleSoft:


Oracle is still looking for input and specific requirements from Higher Ed for PeopleSoft HRMS version 9.X (which is the PeopleSoft version coming after 9.0).

As I start to bounce some ideas around about how administrative systems (student systems, financial systems, etc.) are integrated into web redesign schemata for a conference paper due . . . soon (!), I am starting to see a trend.  I currently sit on a committee that is reviewing web redesign proposals and this question of administrative integration has come up in each proposal.

I am struck by how many web vendors define "integration" very differently than I do.  It would seem that web designers (and this was confirmed during a very good conference I attended last summer) are very concerned with making a site sticky and functional (both very good things) but maybe not as concerned with some of the less sticky but no less important tasks that users perform (e.g. generating a purchase order -- not fun).  My argument is that integration is not a series of touch points that port users to different places, but, rather, a true blending of the web experience and the (admittedly dull) tasks that administrative users perform.

As I start to bounce some ideas around about how administrative systems (student systems, financial systems, etc.) are integrated into web redesign schemata for a conference paper due . . . soon (!), I am starting to see a trend.  I currently sit on a committee that is reviewing web redesign proposals and this question of administrative integration has come up in each proposal.

I am struck by how many web vendors define "integration" very differently than I do.  It would seem that web designers (and this was confirmed during a very good conference I attended last summer) are very concerned with making a site sticky and functional (both very good things) but maybe not as concerned with some of the less sticky but no less important tasks that users perform (e.g. generating a purchase order -- not fun).  My argument is that integration is not a series of touch points that port users to different places, but, rather, a true blending of the web experience and the (admittedly dull) tasks that administrative users perform.