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Administrative Information Systems Newsletter |
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theEnterprise |
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© January 2006 / Issue 1 |
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Welcome to theEnterpriseWelcome to the first edition of theEnterprise, the new quarterly newsletter focused on UNTS administrative information systems. The goal of this newsletter is to inform the UNTS community of the technological news related to enterprise systems that support administrative functions for the university. Topics will include news items about functionality thats impact faculty, staff, and students; such as, recent implementations and changes, data security, upgrades, and training opportunities. Readers can also look forward to reading about interesting IT facts and behind the scenes interest stories about the sometimes baffling world of information technology. | |
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by John Hooper, Executive Director of Administrative Information Systems, CITC, UNT Howdy from the Captain's Chair! I understand that it's called the Captain's Chair because the newsletter is called theEnterprise. I guess that makes me a paunchy, balding actor plugging cheap airfares (and now reinventing himself on Boston Legal) for those of you old enough to remember the original Star Trek. For the record, despite the title of this column, this has been a university system initiative with leadership coming from the many outstanding functional and technical folks on the EIS implementation team. It has been a collaborative effort between UNT's Computing and Information Technology Center, UNT-HSC'S Information Technology Services, and the functional product families at both institutions. The original Enterprise's mission was a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before. We are also just over three years into a five-year mission to rework administrative information systems for the University of North Texas System. Although we have come a long way and have been very successful in implementing three major PeopleSoft applications (Financials, Learning Solutions, and Portal) including dozens of modules in 18 months within budget, it hasn’t always been easy. Like the crew of the Enterprise, the members of our team – the product families, the staff of CITC and ITS, and the folks who are the customers of EIS, our students, faculty, staff , and alumni - have been buffeted by the occasional meteor shower and Romulan attack. There have been times we were tossed from side to side on the bridge and wished Scotty would beam us up. For those fans of the later Star Trek series, there were times we wanted to escape to the Holodeck. There were also weak moments when we wanted to know “who decided to go on this mission anyway”. But like the intrepid crew of the Enterprise, through the extraordinary focus, commitment, and effort of the project team as well as the patience, adaptability and perseverance of the users of EIS, we prevailed over many challenges and have boldly gone further, faster than most of our peer institutions. Unlike the Starship Enterprise, however, our mission was not an option. As the last century wound down, we had an aging, mainframe based administrative system with some software components dating back to the early 1970’s. This platform had served us well for nearly three decades but it had reached the end of its useful life. It was inflexible for the needs of a growing, multi-campus, multi-institution university system. It had limited self-service capabilities, little Web access, and wasn’t architected to be available 24x7. The tools that it was based on it were aging and falling into disuse making support and attracting technical staff difficult. Expectations of our customers were changing as well. UNT is the largest provider of web based instruction among four-year higher education institutions in the state of Texas. Distance learning requires “distance”, 24x7 services for students that aren’t on campus during traditional academic time periods. There is a greater expectation for Web-based self-service by students, faculty, staff and alumni due to the explosion of the Internet. We are moving toward more flexible class scheduling not tied to traditional, fixed terms. As the UNT system expands, there must be the flexibility to accommodate additional institutions. Society is moving toward non-traditional, virtual working arrangements for faculty and staff that require remote access to services and flexibility within the applications. UNT now has employees that do not live in Texas or come to campus to work. Our administrators, faculty and staff will have greater demands for data and information as the higher education market becomes more competitive and external funding wanes. Ultimately, there should be ubiquitous access to UNT resources with a single authentication. We are three years into our five-year mission to provide a foundation that will allow us to address these expectations. The first years were spent bringing up a vanilla version of the purchased PeopleSoft applications, rebadged as EIS for the UNT System. In addition to the vanilla implementation, we focused on compliance requirements (institutional, state, and federal) and mandated reporting issues. In addition, we have achieved many of the technical goals – 24x7, web based access, relational database structure, and a modern technical architecture. We also had some major success in the application areas as well – HR self-service inquiries, eProcurement, online grade reporting and a donor prospect management system – to name only a few. Now, with the foundation we have prepared with EIS, we are beginning to tackle some of the efforts that will deliver the vision of EIS. We are in the process of expanding our EIS data warehouse and will begin to deliver on-demand, content rich, configurable reporting and analytical tools to university administrators and decision makers starting with budget reporting in 2006. We will expand the my.unt.edu presence making the portal the entry point for more rich administrative and academic content including on demand reporting, more robust Email integration, and expanded administrative self-service. We have several technology support projects that will enhance application performance, stability, and security through improved load management and a new firewall. We will also implement improved backup and failover initiatives to increase availability and disaster recovery readiness. In the functional areas we will continue to enhance core Finance, HR, Student, and Development processes to improve efficiency and usability. Here is a sampler of only a few of the efforts that will be underway. In the finance area, major initiatives have begun or are planned for budget development and self-service asset management, travel, and interdepartmental transfers. In student administration, we will be enhancing recruitment prospecting and facility scheduling and providing departmental self-service access to course and class fee information. In HR we will be implementing payroll encumbrances to improve budget management and reporting, self-service demographic updates including training enrollment, and benefits encumbrances for grants. In advancement, we will be implementing the giving club module for President Council members and completing implementation of the pledge reminder system. Like the Enterprise, we are a few years into our voyage, but have not yet reached our final destination. With theEnterprise, we plan to keep you aware of what lies ahead.
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Enhanced Security in EIS requires ID Card Replacement for UNTIn April 2004, with the implementation of EIS, UNTS began using EMPL IDs for all students and employees. EMPL ID's are unique numbers randomly generated within EIS and assigned to a student or employee record. The use of these numbers allows UNT to better protect personal information since it replaces the use of social security numbers in the information system and on UNT ID cards. As of November 2005, more than 2,000 faculty and staff members, and 10,000 students at UNT are still using UNT identification cards that contain their social security number instead of their EIS-generated number (or EMPL ID). ID cards containing social security numbers will be deactivated in early Spring of 2006 (does not apply to HSC), as the university continues its efforts to protect private information. All community members with ID cards that were issued prior to April 2004 must replace their ID cards in order to maintain access to UNT facilities; including the libraries, residence halls, health center, computer labs and recreational center. ID cards can be replaced at no charge by bringing the current ID card or a driver's license to ID Systems on the first floor of the Eagle Student Services Center. Employees at the UNT Dallas Campus or other locations can contact ID Systems to arrange for alternative methods for replacing their ID cards. ID Systems is located in Room 105 of the Eagle Student Services Center and is open from 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For more information, contact Michael McElroy, ID systems assistant, by phone at (940) 565-3225 or e-mail at McElroy@fis.admin.unt.edu. Improved Salary Encumbrance ProceduresThe decision to purchase software to support administrative processes was a dramatic culture change for UNT. Historically, our administrative systems had been “home grown.” Many of us entered the world of information technology using either SIMS or HRMIS. Sometimes customization is still required by the CITC development teams which support administrative users. A new procedure introduced in September 2005 was developed by the CITC Payroll/HR Systems Team. The procedure provides for salaries to be encumbered for a position/job setup. In addition, the procedure disencumbers salaries as they are expended. Salary encumbrance is also known as salary commitment accounting which makes the committed salary “untouchable” except by salary payout. The encumbrance/disencumbrance data in EIS is delivered to departments via budget pages. This information helps departments keep a more accurate account of their salary budget commitments and balances. The PeopleSoft application did deliver salary/wage encumbrance functionality; however, the business logic of this functionality was too generic to fit our university's departmental needs. In November 2005 an additional procedure went live that captures the differences between salary encumbrance and payroll expense on a month-to-month basis. The differences, if any, are known as salary savings which are accessible by running a query in EIS. Salary savings through vacancy are automatically released from encumbrance accounts so that department users can keep track of their actual salary commitment as the fiscal year progresses. Administrative Report DistributionCypress is an application currently being used to distribute various types of reports to departments. Another application, AppWorx, facilitates the scheduling of the report distribution. Examples of reports that are being distributed currently are phone bills and payroll reports. Success has also been realized with the Financial Aid group and 1098T's. In the Fall of 2005, a pilot project was tried to use Cypress to deliver budget reports to departments. A decision was made that Cypress was not the best solution for budget report delivery and an alternative solution was identified. Early in 2006, access to the budget report (and other on-demand reports) will be made available directly from the myUNT portal without having to log onto any additional Web sites. Reports will be accessible and viewable directly on the Web. Most reports will be able to be viewed and stored in a variety of formats including .pdf, .csv and Microsoft Excel. A major change in the technology world occurred in January 2005 when Oracle, our database vendor, and PeopleSoft, our application vendor, merged into one company. While EIS is not comprised only of the PeopleSoft application suite, PeopleSoft is significantly important to the success of our enterprise system. Key technical staff carefully monitored merger activity. This merger will not have any effect on EIS in the near term. We will continue to be engaged with Oracle to influence the direction of their future product suites and to develop a strategy for the products we own moving forward.
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by Cathy Gonzalez, EIS Training, Communications, and Administration Manager, CITC, UNT In the past several years, a changing technical climate for UNTS has been highlighted by the retirement of a legacy mainframe system and the implementation/integration of multiple platforms and applications into what is known by the UNTS community as EIS. Even with the right tools and a superb technology platform, a successful IT project is still quite a feat. Technology is a big capital investment. The risk of the investment is often not realized until near the end of the project when actual functionality is translated into successful business processes. A primary benchmark that the right technology is in place is when you do not feel the technology is a daily struggle and you have time to focus on critical success factors. The following news items highlight some goals that have been executed successfully or are well on the way to becoming realities: Web-based Administrative Services Support UNTS Long-term Strategy One of the often overlooked reasons for implementing Web-based administrative services for students is in support of the changes in our academic culture resulting from a student population that expects a distributed learning environment. UNT is the largest provider of online credit courses among four-year higher education institutions in Texas which demonstrates the University's commitment to meet student expectations. The availability of high-quality online college courses will soon rival face-to-face offerings, according to a 2005 survey of online learning by the Sloan Consortium, a group of schools embracing online education lead by Babson College and the Franklin Olin College of Engineering. The survey also found that a majority (56 percent) of chief academic officers said online education is critical to their long-term strategy. How does a heavy concentration of online courses impact administrative services offered to UNTS students? The majority of students taking online courses need online access to register, participate in academic advising tasks, and review grades. A typical online class at UNT can include students who live in Denton, those who commute from the metroplex, and several students in the military who are stationed overseas. The same reasons which inspire students to take online courses are the same reasons they need a virtual campus – time, geographic location, and cost savings found in not having to commute long distances. Administrative productivity and the ability to provide customer service by using EIS have enhanced the ability of administrative departments to provide services to students. Faculty and staff are able to access and control administrative functions from anywhere. Web access is available but with a tight security framework that ensures data confidentiality and compliance with federal and state security policies. Improved Queries for EIS Functional Users Walter Bowen, UNT Associate Director of Admissions, reported that the CITC Student/Contributor Services Team worked to optimize UNT and HSC Admissions offices’ queries, SQR Reports and Crystal Reports projects. “We had several on the admission’s side that were developed early in the EIS implementation that were taking an extraordinary amount of time to run, sometimes timing out and occasionally abending because they extended into an EIS maintenance window,” said Walter. Query and reporting projects that used to take up to six hours or longer to complete now run in under one minute. The benefits to both the end users and functionality of EIS are vastly improved turn around time to obtain critical reports and a reduction in resource processing time for the EIS production environment. Queries have sometimes been a contributing factor to slowness in production processing time for EIS. If queries are not carefully planned, they can become very intensive “resource hogs” on the database. Functional users in administrative offices are working with CITC's Administrative Information Services (AIS) development teams to understand reporting requirements and how to extract data by searching as few database tables as possible. The PeopleSoft application places query functionality into the hands of non-technical functional users. In the legacy mainframe world, only the technical teams had this functionality. The dilemma faced by the EIS implementation group was how to assist functional users in making good choices with this new functionality at their fingertips. Being able to use the PeopleSoft query tool was beneficial for end users. They did not have to wait for the technical teams to have time to create the query; on the other hand, it has required a learning curve about the convoluted world of database queries. A win-win situation has been for end users to attempt to develop queries in a non-production environment, then have the development teams test and streamline the queries. Based on the experience of the Admissions offices both at UNT and HSC, this collaborative solution is working. EIS Maintenance ScheduleEIS undergoes scheduled maintenance between the hours of 7:00 p.m. Saturday and 7:00 a.m. Sunday, and from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you experience difficulty during these times, attempt to perform your activity again during normal operational hours. Occasionally, one or more of the EIS subsystems may require unscheduled service. Use the System Status Monitor to determine whether an unscheduled outage might be the cause of your issue. Clearing Your Browser's CacheThe web pages you view in the browser are stored in a folder referred to as the browser's cache. The information stored in the cache may later interfere with navigation to other web pages. If the cache is not occasionally cleared, use of EIS may be slowed or interrupted. The cache should be cleared as problems arise (contact your department's technical support staff if you do not know how to clear your cache). If you call the Help Desk, there is a high probability the technician will first ask if you have tried clearing your browser's cache.
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Have you ever wondered what was really meant when the Computing and Information Technology Center announced the mainframe “was going away”? See if you can guess correctly what happened after the plug was pulled on November 30, 2004.
To support administrative services at UNT it takes: 29 - PeopleSoft environments 21 - PeopleSoft modules 60 - Oracle databases 103 - Unix servers 38 - Windows servers | |
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Upcoming instructor-led EIS training events may be found at: • EIS Timekeeper Training Schedule EIS WebCT training is available for faculty or staff new to EIS. If you are interested in distance learning options, request enrollment by clicking here.
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• UNTS myUNT portal
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Contributions to the newsletter come from the technical and administrative areas that support UNTS enterprise information systems. The newsletter is edited by Cathy Gonzalez in the Administrative Information Systems (AIS) department in the UNT Computing and Information Technology Center (CITC). Please email comments and suggestions to Cathy by selecting this link. |
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