Campus Financial Systems for the Future

IV: Determining Business and Technology Requirements

Evaluating the Technology Environment

The expected outcome of evaluating the technology environment is the identification of a set of technological alternatives, potential impacts, and recommendations to the project management team for inclusion in the requirements document. The work of this phase is performed by a technology evaluation team--appointed by and including some members of the project management team--whose overall goal is to develop proposals necessary to align the institution's IT infrastructure with the strategic direction and business requirements of the financial systems project. To develop these proposals, the team will:

assess the technological scope of the project,
identify possible technological alternatives through technology awareness-raising,
document the institution's existing technological environment, and
collaborate with the business process evaluation teams to assist in the articulation of realistic and supportable (with technology tools) process change recommendations.

The composition of the technology team must balance strong technology leadership with equally strong business representation. Such strong technology leadership is essential, particularly when there is a greater paradigm shift required (for example, if the steering committee gap analysis has identified a large gap between the current mainframe environment and a proposed client/server technology strategy), and the team members will need to arrive at a consensus.

The team will need to become thoroughly familiar with current and emerging technology products and trends, especially those in the proposed environment. In particular, an IT staff member familiar with the existing financial system applications should be assigned to the team. IT staff representation on the team should include both "desktop" expertise and "data systems" expertise, especially if the technology direction of the institution as a whole assumes a move toward distributed solutions. Equally strong business representation on the technology team will provide necessary user insight into the issues related to the institution's installed systems and the viability of any proposed new technology.

The technology team will likely look at current systems from a technological standpoint rather than from the view of the business processes that the technology supports. As an example, the documentation of the existing IT environment would identify the hardware, software, file sizes, production times, number of online users, response times, and other information of this nature, but would not necessarily identify the functional processes provided by the technology, such as processing checks for accounts payable every day versus every two weeks or analyzing payments for potential duplicates. The level of knowledge of the team members from the IT staff with respect to current applications will depend on the technology currently in use and whether the existing systems were purchased or developed in-house.

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