Chasing the Boulder Down the Hill: Reengineering and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

Penn is one of the first universities to combine the reengineering of business processes with an information technology architecture. At CAUSE 93 we talked about pushing the boulder up the hill-convincing people to play when the stakes are so high, negotiating consensus, and planning for flexibility. A year later, we're running to keep up with the boulder as it plunges down the other side. Financial processes will look very different at Penn, a data warehouse for management information has been built, and the first pieces of a new client/server financial system will be in place nest year. Partnership is still the issue-the pairing of reengineering and architecture, the partnership between the central information technology group and the Division of Finance, and a new set of relationships as the application vendor has joined the mix. And as boundaries shift in the client/server world, we're finding that the old rules for partnership are changing. This session follows Penn's partnership of reengineering and architecture as it moves from courtship to reality. Paper presented at CAUSE94, the full proceedings of which are available through this Library as PUB1094.