EDUCAUSE | peoplesoft

Inspired by Greatness

smiltenb — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:41:30 -0500

: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling

One of the things I love about working in higher education is the community of sharing. This week, MICA had the good fortune to host visitors from Brandeis University who shared their experiences around on-line admission applications and course evaluations. Brandeis and MICA are very different in how we manage our enterprise systems. At MICA we're very lightly staffed and therefore must follow a very vanilla, low customization model. Brandeis a larger investment in ERP technology staffing and utilizes these resources to extend functionality of their systems in ways that, well, make some of us at MICA drool.

We also attended the University System of Maryland Oracle PeopleSoft conference where Gettysburg College did a terrific presentation about connecting technology projects with institutional strategy through a student leadership initiative. During his introduction, Steve Lewis commented on one of my favorite themes of 2008 -- aligning technology goals with organizational planning. I've participated in many conversations where technologists wonder about how we can get leadership buy-in for technology projects. The Gettysburg approach was to focus on the goals set by the leadership in the college's long term plan and use this is as the basis for technology iniatives.

Brandeis, Gettysburg and MICA couldn't be more different in terms of our staffing, acadmic programs and approach to technology. But at the end of the day, we're all trying to accomplish the same things: support the education of our students. While it's not likely that MICA will be able to implement the exact solutions that work so successfully at these institutions, our dialog and learning will lead us to providing better services for our students in our own great MICA way.

Fame and Fortune in Las Vegas

smiltenb — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:51:54 -0500

MICA's Ocean's Twelve are attending the Oracle/PeopleSoft Higher Ed User Group Conference in Las Vegas this week. This is another record breaking year for HEUG -- topping more than 5,000 attendees at this international conference. And this is a record breaking year for MICA as we have 12 people attending the conference and are presenting a six sessions. We have been so fortunate to have resources like the HEUG and local peers who have helped us through our challenges to realize the values of big technology. And it is always interesting to get a away from home and gain a perspective on what we've accomplished so far and what lies ahead.

Aside from the awesome presentations and great hallway conversations that happen at an event like HEUG, we had a special treat today. Stan Jakubik, Assistant Vice Chancellor at the University System of Maryland, begins his term as the HEUG President later this week. Our group from MICA was honored to pose for this photo op. We are thrilled to have someone from the neighborhood as a champion for higher ed and for technology. Way to go Stan!

MICA Launches More Killer Administrative Applications

tsimpson — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:49:49 -0600

The past month has been a hectic one across the MICA enterprise. Check out the following realeases we made over the past two weeks alone.

Academic Analytics
On February 5, 2008, we successfuly launched the first phase of our Academic Analytics project at MICA. All senior staff were given access to our analytics environment. This first release is an implementation of Higher Ed Analytics by iStrategy Solutions. We have already started 2 projects within this project that will challenge us to extend the delivered functionality.

Housing Lottery Application
On February 18, 2008, current MICA students will apply for our housing lottery online (for the first time). This is the first piece of functionality delivered by Welcome Mat -- the residence management system currently being implemented at MICA.

Online Paychecks
Starting wih the first pay period in February, MICA employees can see their pay check data online (for the first time ever). This is delivered functionality from our Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 (with integrated HRMS) system served up securely to employees through our Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.0.

Competitive Scholarship
As a visual arts college, we regularly face technical challenges when it comes to acquiring, storing, cataloging, and viewing images and other media. MICA Superdevelopers Ben and Carolyn faced those challenges and built an environment in which students can upload their work (images and video), that work can then be cataloged with metadata from our student information system (Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0), and served back in a secure, branded environment.

MICA Goes Live on Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 and Enterprise Portal 9.0

tsimpson — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:36:42 -0500

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Ted Simpson
October 29, 2007
410-225-2531
tsimpson@mica.edu

MICA RELEASES ORACLE PEOPLESOFT 9.0

Upgrades Include Campus Solutions, HRMS, and Enterprise Portal 9.0

Multi-Year Initiative Reflects MICA’s Commitment to Leadership and Innovation in Technology and Positions the College as a Leader in Higher Education Technology

BALTIMORE – Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is pleased to announce that we have successfully upgraded to Oracle PeopleSoft HRMS and Campus Solutions 9.0 and simultaneously integrated them into a new release of Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.0. The upgrades were completed and released on Monday, October 29, 2007. All of the upgrade tasks were completed by MICA administrative and technology staff. These upgrades are part of MICA Connected, a multi-year initiative reflecting MICA’s commitment to leadership and innovation in technology.

Current live modules include Academic Advisement, Campus Community, Contributor Relations, Financial Aid, Recruiting and Admissions, Student Financials, Student Records, HRMS, and Payroll.

MICA Connected is designed to bring to the entire campus community together through improved electronic communication, and web resources. Its main components include upgrades to MICA’s administrative systems, building new models for supporting communication, web-based information and self-service resources across departments, and a newly redesigned MICA website and accompanying digital communications.

# # #

We Are Live in Spite of it All!

smiltenb — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:56:49 -0500

We technicaly began our Oracle/PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and Portal upgrades in May 2007 and, having made my way through countless upgrades/implementations over the past eight years, this project has been suprising uneventful. Just to shake things up a bit we threw in a few wrenches of our own -- deciding to implement the new versions on vmWare, deploying a new SSL switch/load balancer and using (the new for us) Oracle Application Server.

One of the attributes the really pride ourselves on here at MICA is the ability to be agile. When we have a change in plans or challenges that appear at the last minute, our team is not only great at adapting, they often use it as an opportunity to expand knowledge and learn from the experience.

After such an uneventful upgrade we finally got to put our agility to the test when Oracle told us they could not resolve the problems with Oracle Application Server to make it compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer -- one week prior to our go live. Fortunately MICAgility lept into action and, with assistance from vmWare, we rebuilt all of our 9.0 server environments using BEA Weblogic instead of the Oracle middleware.

While having a small staff and being agile can sometimes be a challenge, it really positioned us to deal with this last minute boulder in the road. And, in hindsight, I can't say that I'm too surprised -- Oracle let their early adopter school (Northeastern) go live without support for non-IE browsers and they have been working to fixing the problems with Firefox and Safari since July 2007. And it's been great to see technology (vmWare) and people (flexible and adaptable) coming together in a way that allows small colleges like us to manage bumps along the upgrade road.

MICA Oracle PeopleSoft 9.0 Upgrade Project Page Updated

tsimpson — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 03:07:51 -0500

I took a break from the action today to finally update our project page with some worthwhile information about our Oracle PeopleSoft 9.0 upgrade projects.

You can view that page here:

http://www.mica.edu/tss/connected/administrative/

We are also tracking our issues on our wiki/blog project site. This may be of use to other schools who will be upgrading to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0, Portal 9.0, or Financials 9.0.

You can view that page here:

http://connected.mica.edu

PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 Upgrade Project Page Updated

TedSimpson — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:03:58 -0500

I took a break from the action today to finally update our project page with some worthwhile information about our Oracle PeopleSoft 9.0 upgrade projects.

You can view that page here:

http://www.mica.edu/tss/connected/administrative/

We are also tracking our issues on our wiki/blog project site. This may be of use to other schools who will be upgrading to PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0, Portal 9.0, or Financials 9.0.

You can view that page here:

http://connected.mica.edu

What comes first: business or technology?

smiltenb — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:55:02 -0500

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.

But now we are victims of our own success. We became so adept at our old "build it and they will come" methodology that we ocassionally trip over ourselves as we try to embrace the MICA Connected approach. One of the great refrains of MICA Connected came from someone in our HR office who, after working here for several years, attend her first Oracle/PeopleSoft Higher Ed User Group conference. When she got back exclaimed, "It just makes so much sense: first you have to get your business straight, then you get the technology to help you do it better".

While the model of putting business before technology is spreading like wildfire throughout MIculture we still easily slip back into our old model. A great debate is going on within our department as we try to formalize a process for delivering improved systems for faculty. Some believe that we need to have something to show faculty and staff so that they can get on board. Others think that we need to do our homework first -- to talk with faculty about the business requirements and then model technology to meet them.

Old habits are hard to break -- and maybe there are some times when they still serve us well. What about other institutions -- do you have good models for putting technology first? Or successful models for putting business first?

PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 Upgrade

tsimpson — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 08:08:01 -0500

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!

MICA Connected Launch

smiltenb — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:47:46 -0500