Campus Financial Systems for the Future

IV: Determining Business and Technology Requirements

Identifying technological alternatives

A technology awareness-raising exercise will enable the technology team to place the scope of the project within the context of the current state of financial information systems technology and identify possible technological alternatives. Team members will benefit significantly from such an exercise and from information on the concepts and language of the newer technologies.

In some cases, the team members may lack current knowledge in the field, mainly because day-to-day work loads have precluded them from being involved in new technology projects. Even some of the IT staff on the team may require some updating on newer hardware, software, and development capabilities, for the same reasons.

Understand new technology terminology and concepts
Some exposure to the technological concepts and language will be most valuable for the team. As various discussions are held, the technology language will become part of the day-to-day communication between people and an awareness of alternatives will occur. Appendix B provides a glossary of terms with brief conceptual descriptions that can be distributed to the team members to promote a better understanding of the language and concepts. The appendix list is by no means exhaustive, and these concepts will change over time. The team may wish to add other items as terms are discussed as part of the awareness-raising activities.
The tools available for technology solutions are changing constantly, so the technology team will need to examine emerging trends as part of its evaluation. Reviewing the latest trends will allow financial systems staff and other nontechnical members of the team to become more aware of the environment of current technology, understand its impact on the possibilities for business process improvement, and help to set out the right kinds of questions on the evaluation of technology relative to the needs of the institution. Of course, your institution will have to decide, based on the institutional culture, available resources, competing needs, and so forth, what position on the "technology curve" is appropriate. Some overall technology directions apparent at the time of this book's publication include the following.
Ubiquitous use of networks. Migration to a client/server environment, particularly for transaction-intensive processing such as is required in financial systems, is not moving as rapidly as many had assumed, but it appears that network-based management of data is becoming more prevalent in all institutional applications. The technology team will therefore need to evaluate the current and future campuswide network availability, and take into account the hardware, software, and management issues that these services present.
Client/server developments. Particularly for many of the decision support systems or subsystems that are incorporated into financial systems development, a client/server environment will be viewed as facilitating an appropriate level of data management tools for each decision-maker. This does not mean that "the mainframe is dead"; indeed, many of the servers being introduced in the new world of client/server are performing the tasks of a traditional mainframe, relying on the client machines for very little transaction support. Technology team members will need to understand the impact of these new tools on current and future technology management at their institution.
Open systems. The movement away from proprietary operating systems and databases, and toward an environment where moving information across systems and platforms will be "seamless" is likely to continue. Proprietary systems and databases have historically partitioned institutions into administrative, academic, financial, student, and development "camps" that did not work together effectively. Financial systems and information systems, in general, require wider participation than in the past, and these partitioned solutions are being reexamined. Financial systems must be increasingly available to nontraditional users who may or may not be in the right proprietary camp.
How quickly the reformatting of these proprietary systems into truly open systems can take place, and what impact the existence of proprietary tools (within an open structure) will have, is not yet clear, but incorporating the ability to support an open architecture will be an important point of discussion in planning for future systems implementations.⁷
Object-oriented technology. Object-oriented technology is having an impact on the development, enhancement, and replacement of systems, whether vendor-supported or homegrown. Institutions will likely be greatly challenged by the loss of technical support for the "legacy" systems that have been supported by traditional programmers, many of whom may perceive an advantage to being trained in object-oriented programming for their own professional growth.
Electronic commerce. It is now possible to reduce paper, reduce filing, and improve institutional productivity using electronic commerce. There are a number of important components to electronic commerce solutions, each of which represents improved business processes. In considering these technologies, the technology team should be sure to collaborate with the business process teams.
- Electronic approval (or electronic signatures) can streamline internal processes within the institution.
- Electronic data interchange (EDI) can be used to place orders for equipment, stores items, travel, and vehicle reservations, and is already being used to exchange student transcripts by several hundred colleges and universities.
- "Smart-card" technology offers many advantages--procurement cards can be used to place small orders without prior approval, and debit cards can be used to automatically deposit student loans.
- Electronic funds transfer (EFT) can be used to deposit student loan tuition payments without clerical involvement. Automated Clearing House (ACH) is a federal funds transfer technology that can electronically deposit or receive funds in the institution from students or businesses. ACH can replace expensive paper check transactions (that may cost as much as $35 per check) with inexpensive electronic transactions at a few cents per transaction. While these technologies may not be direct components of the financial system, the financial system needs to be designed in a way that encourages and accommodates their use.
Identify "best practices"
If an expectation for change has been established, the technology team will need to be exposed to external "best practices" to understand the potential for improvements in the current processes and systems. A key responsibility in this stage is the identification of other institutional experiences that can add value to the discussions on technological alternatives. Such investigation will almost certainly also identify potential hardware and software products for financial systems in the marketplace.
Some preliminary work in this area will have been done by the steering committee, but it will be up to the technology team to investigate in more depth the practices already identified as well as to identify additional ones. There are various ways that this can be accomplished. The technology team can consider the following suggestions and develop other approaches to meet the particular needs of its own project scope, time frame, and other factors.
The team can develop relationships with other institutions and individuals to learn from the external expertise that is available. Organizations such as CAUSE, NACUBO, and the League for Innovation in the Community College will prove to be excellent sources of information about financial systems and institutions that have recently developed or installed new systems. In many cases, existing documentation can be provided by those groups on actual or proposed installations. Several consulting firms also work with colleges and universities in planning for new financial systems.
Site visits to other institutions that have implemented financial systems can be arranged to provide peer-to-peer communication on what is installed, what works, and what doesn't. This needs to be a selective process (since there is normally a limit on the funds allocated for such activities) that can often most effectively be done in concert with the review of peer institutions and their business process changes that the business teams are conducting.
Current vendors in the field can provide an overview of their products and services. A significant number of vendors provide financial systems applications on a variety of hardware platforms. Some of this information can be accumulated from brochures and other printed materials, through discussions and conversations, and by linking to product information available on the World Wide Web. ⁸

Keep in mind that this consciousness-raising is not directly related to how vendors' products fit the specific needs of the institution, but more to identify the overall approach of vendors in using technology to provide products. The technology team should note which vendors appear to be close to meeting the needs of the institution, since this list can be used at a later stage to issue an RFI.

A note of caution is warranted here. It is wise to discourage vendor visits to your institution for presentations or product demonstrations at this stage of the project, that is, before requirements have been fully articulated. The greatest technology-related project land mine is to become prematurely committed to a particular solution before the review process has been completed or the requirements document prepared. The ultimate determination of the technology to be used will be that it can effectively support the business processes that are being defined by the business teams, within the strategic technology direction of the institution. In other words, the latest and greatest technology is not necessarily the appropriate solution to the business process requirements. In many cases, members of the technology team will be responsible for the implementation of the system. If they buy into a technology that is later not selected, the implementation path may become much more difficult.

Endnotes:

⁷Two standards-based technologies emerging at the time of this book's publication are Open Database Communication (ODBC) and the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). Some institutions (such as the University of Colorado) are beginning to stipulate DCE compliance as a requirement for their new systems.

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⁸See Appendix F for a list of CAUSE and NACUBO corporate members with products and/or consulting services related to the financial management systems area.

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