Documents Contributed by ECAR, Partnerships, and Case Studies

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the benefits of multi-institutional development of a ubiquitously needed IT service. By leveraging emerging technology, procurement opportunities, and internal resources, the University of California Office of the President and University of California, San Diego were able to develop a complex disaster recovery solution involving the joint hosting and comprehensive mirroring of each location’s mainframe and non-mainframe computing environments.

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the methods and practices used to manage ongoing collaborative activity and how the Kuali group partners plan for the sustainability of their collaboration. The case study highlights the collaborative nature of the Kuali Project to meet its goal of building a suite of administrative software, rather than the project’s history, structure, or operations.

The University of Alberta is a major Canadian research university with a history of developing customized information systems in COBOL since the early 1970s. In 1999 and 2000, this university completed the implementation of PeopleSoft HR, Finance, and Student Administration software suites. To reduce costs and ensure the retention of skilled IT workers, the University developed in June 2000, a trilateral alliance with itself, Payment Systems Corporation (PSC), and IBM Global Services, and Turnkey Management Systems. The alliance is responsible for data center operations, connectivity from the data center to the campus, application support of the PeopleSoft applications, database and UNIX administration, including security, application change management, and telephone based registration. This ECAR study chronicles this process, the labor issues associated with IT outsourcing, the current status, financial performance, and future plans associated with this initiative.