John Hooper, Executive Director of Administrative Information Systems, CITC

The Jaguars are coming!

Soon there will be a new addition to the EIS family! As with the earlier additions to the family, there will be labor involved and a significant gestation period.

Seriously, UNT has had a presence in south Dallas since 2000. Under Texas state law, the UNT Dallas Campus can become a free-standing, four-year university when student full-time equivalent enrollment reaches 1,000. The UNT Dallas facility has been in operation since the spring of 2000. It has grown steadily and opened a beautiful new facility on Houston School Road in Dallas last year.

The Oracle/PeopleSoft Financials upgrade from version 8.4 to 9.0 is underway. Testing environments are being prepared and users in the various administrative, functional areas for UNT, HSC, and the UNT System are being educated on the finer points of doing a massive upgrade to a significant aspect of EIS. The functional areas for UNT and UNT System include those related to the Controllers Office and Financial Reporting, the Budget Office, Purchasing and Payment Services, Assets, and Research Services (Grants). For HSC, the areas involved are the Accounting Office, Financial Systems, Purchasing, Property Control, the Budget Office, and Grants and Contract Management.

Due to the size of the enterprise system, it is sometimes confusing to understand who handles training for different parts of EIS. The training model is a colaborative effort between CITC and EIS data owners.

There is a group in CITC named EIS Training, Communications, and Administration (EISTCA). One of the team’s responsibilities is for the overall training strategy as well as training technologies utilized by any EIS training coordinators and documentation specialists. The manager of the group also has fiscal responsibilities with outside vendors, such as Oracle University, for technical and functional users who need training for new and upgraded Oracle/Peoplesoft applications. Training is only conducted by the EISTCA Manager if a global application need is identified, such as PeopleSoft’s query tools.

An online Audit Roll for faculty to use in the EIS Faculty Center is now available. Faculty are required to report to the Registrar’s Office on the attendance and academic progress of every student enrolled in their classes. This is required so that the University can submit accurate data to the Coordinating Board for funding purposes. In the past, all Audit Rolls were printed and faculty had to complete the rolls by hand, then return the document to the Registrar's Office where updates are made to add students who were missing, or remove students as necessary. There was no functionality for recording academic progress, or the lack thereof.

Tracy Hansen, Computer Systems Manager, Enterprise Systems Technical Services, CITC

UNT is currently implementing the ImageNow electronic document management, imaging and workflow solution by Perceptive Software in several areas across campus where paper-intensive processes hinder efficiency. ImageNow integrates with EIS applications to give users instant access to document images directly from their EIS screens rather than having to leave their desks to search for paper files. With a button click on an EIS transaction record, users can view all the corresponding paperwork in ImageNow. Additionally, ImageNow Workflow allows electronic routing of the documents.