Campus Financial Systems for the Future

New Technology and the Need to Rethink Project Roles

The proliferation of "shadow systems" throughout the institution has helped address the concerns over functionality and ease of use raised in local academic units and auxiliaries. In doing so, however, these systems have greatly complicated accounting and financial reporting at the institutional level, have fostered concerns and problems regarding data quality and synchronization, have created tensions between central organizations and the local units they support, have spawned control issues, and have contributed to varying amounts of workload duplication across the institution. These issues and concerns have played out, in varying degrees, at higher education institutions across the country, as well as in the private sector.

In essence, the proliferation of personal computers, the widespread influence of the campuswide network, and the use of spreadsheets and desktop financial packages have heightened and broadened interest in financial information systems. This increased awareness and the growth of computer and financial literacy across the institution are reshaping the roles and politics of the financial system design process. Financial information systems, in general, can no longer be developed exclusively through the bilateral agreement of the institution's chief financial officer and chief information technology officer. Under today's conditions, the support of these key decision-makers is likely to be a necessary but insufficient condition of project success.

While it is perhaps easy to point to the need to change the project and organizational structures and roles that are needed to support the design of new financial systems, it is not easy to elucidate these new roles or structures. On many levels, the answer to these questions is "it depends." The roles, project architecture, ownership, and other key aspects of planning and implementing financial management systems depend on what changes the institution is seeking, who is seeking the change, who commands which institutional resources, and who, in the final analysis, will really step up to the mark and provide project leadership.

As long as computing cycles and accessibility were scarce resources, the natural leadership of projects of this nature often fell to the institution's technology chief. In the current environment of networked computing and diminishing higher education resources, financial managers throughout the institution have an increased stake in the performance and capabilities of the financial information system and are likely to be more interested in and capable of assuming or sharing the leadership of these projects. In fact, some central financial organizations now assume the direct responsibility for providing information systems support.

There is no absolutely right or wrong answer to the question of how to balance project responsibility. The essential message of this book is that this balance of perspectives, skills, and ownership is central to the vitality and success of the project. For this reason, much of the book is devoted to identifying structures and approaches to balancing project responsibilities that can be shaped and adapted by readers to accommodate institutional differences in complexity, objectives, leadership, funding, and other key project success factors.

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