Information Systems and Services and Information Technology Management and Leadership

The opening keynote address from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Enterprise Conference in Chicago, Illinois. This speech was given by Kenneth C. Green, Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, the largest continuing study of the role of information technology in American colleges and universities. This speech, entitled The Changing Role of Enterprise Systems: From EDI to Internet Icons, is approximately an hour and three minutes long.

Over the past 15 years campus administrative information systems have morphed into enterprise systems. This presentation will focus on the promises (implied and inferred) in this transformation from EDI in the 1990s ("systems will share data"), to the Internet-spawned expectations for online resources and services, to the recent Spellings Commission report mandate that campuses "bring data" from their enterprise systems to address critical assessment and outcome issues.

Beacon Technologies has a history of working with Universities to provide IT services including website design and development, programmatic solutions, content management systems, ecommerce solutions, and other services.  Beacon began their work in the education sector with providing the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's Genomics department in combination with Duke University with a website that captured the departments need for a highly technical, yet clean and functional look and feel.   The designers at Beacon Technologies are able to transform a vision into web graphics that convey the sophistication that today's graphic design demands.  

Since their humble beginnings with the UNCG Genomix department, Beacon Technologies has gone on to work with Wake Forest's MBA school site providing search engine optimization to designing and developing the entire website for Texas Southern University.  

Many schools are now moving to provide ecommerce solutions to sell their school's products directly on their websites.  Beacon has been able to capitalize on this by providing turn-key ecommerce solutions.  A good example of this is NC State's Engineering department's ecommerce store in which they now sell school products and resources nationwide.