ABSTRACT
The Maricopa Community College District (http://www.dist.maricopa.edu/) was established in 1962. It comprises ten colleges and a skill center with numerous special purpose and distance learning satellite campuses serving 45k FTE students per semester and 95k headcount.
In November 1994 the voters of Maricopa County, Arizona approved a General Obligation Bond of $387 million for general modernization and of the Maricopa Community College District over the subsequent 7 and a half years. $87 million of this was earmarked for information technologies related improvements in business services and educational design and delivery and an additional $30 million was allocated for occupational training equipment.
Passage of the 1994 General Obligation Bond has permitted Maricopa Community College District to embark on what may be the most aggressive and comprehensive information technology transition in higher education today. In this presentation, we plan to share our approaches to planning and implementing this complex and interrelated set of projects. More importantly, we plan to share our experiences gained so far, and offer our insights to other colleges and universities who may be planning similar programs.
There are two significant engines of change driving information technology modernization at Maricopa. The first is the Apollo Project and the second is the Saratoga Project. They are interdependent on each other. Apollo is the name given to the district-wide transition from mainframe business applications to client/server-based learner-center business applications such as the SIS (or at Maricopa, the Learner Centered System as our next generation SIS is known), financials, human resources, office automation). In part, they involve migration from 15 year old legacy applications to a mixture of third-party and custom-built applications based on the Oracle RDBMS.
The core of the Apollo Project, the Learner Centered System (LCS) has been transformed by a year-long business process reengineering effort led by Axiom Management Consultants of San Francisco, CA. Hundreds of faculty, administrators, technical personnel and students have spent thousands of hours rigorously applying the Axiom "renewal" methodology to LCS which will be Maricopa's next generation SIS.
Furthermore, state-of-art software engineering tools and a rules-based, object oriented message passing architecture is being applied to develop LCS in a joint development effort between Maricopa and academic systems developer Buzzeo Inc., of Scottsdale, Arizona. The message passing backplane of Maricopa's LCS will be extended to link future client/server business applications (eg. HR, financials, budget, project cost accounting).
The Saratoga Projects are equally complex but much more extensive in scope. They transcend the Apollo business applications which are, admittedly, dependent on high-speed, high-bandwith communications to function. The Saratoga Projects include:
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