Exemplary Practices in Information Technology Solutions 2001 Award Winners

Georgetown University

HoyasOnline

Georgetown needed to build an electronic, worldwide community to foster communication among and with her 125,000 alumni. Accepting Newman's challenge in The Idea of a University to "know her children one by one," the university responded with an appropriate, long-range solution for the information. The resulting HoyasOnline, named after the university mascot, is a password-protected and secure online community that transforms a traditional alumni directory a unique Web-based resource. The service provides all alumni with an @georgetown.edu e-mail address for life, worldwide access to the alumni directory, career networking services, professional services directory, online discussions for various schools and classes, event information, and news.

The new service grew out of a trilateral partnership of the Georgetown Alumni Association, University Information Services, and an external directory service provider, leveraging the strengths of each. The project is notable in a number of ways: It focuses on a very strategic constituency, the largest and most enduring at any higher education institution. It uses rigorous authentication processes that will have long-term benefits to this and other institutions, and was implemented extremely efficiently, using existing resources with minimal expenses for outsourced database hosting and delivery.

Nearly 8,000 alumni claimed NetIDs in less than three months, with over 15,000 users today. All 12,500 students also have access to career networking with more than 14,000 alumni who have volunteered to mentor or provide job opportunities.

Louisiana State University

Personal Access Web Services (PAWS) or to an abstract?

Acknowledging the too-common problem of delivering administrative and academic services to a growing number of students, faculty, and staff with rising expectations, Louisiana State University set out to build a Web-based, one-stop shop to university services. The resulting Personal Access Web Services (PAWS) now delivers 45,000 unique intranet portals and approximately 24 broad-based applications to members of the LSU community, each portal customized to dynamically reflect the individual’s current relationship to the university. A unique plug-and-play framework allowed LSU to provide cost-effective automated account creation, credentials mapping, session management, and single sign-on-and allowed developers to focus on content rather than delivery, reducing development time for services from months to days. Sophisticated, real-time integration at the transaction level with legacy systems residing on an IBM S/390 allowed developers to unlock data previously vaulted at the source, and provided both a secure, robust solution and a means to leverage the extensive existing code base: the portal delivery application has evolved into a real-time legacy interface.

PAWS allowed LSU to absorb record 1999 enrollment with minimal effect on administrative offices, requiring an administrator-to-user ratio of just 1:10,000. During peak times as many as 24 percent of all legacy transactions are issued through PAWS. A return-on-investment study recently determined that LSU will obtain a three-year ROI of 78 percent, and that in 1999 the university provided more than $1.1 million in services through PAWS that it could not have provided through traditional methods.