Campus Financial Systems for the Future

IV: Determining Business and Technology Requirements

Documenting existing and planned institutional IT infrastructure

Team members will need to be able to determine the institution's current and future directions for information technology. While institutional culture in general--leading edge, conservative, moderate--will already have been considered in reviewing the steering committee's work, another, more definable set of characteristics can provide further insight into institutional IT strategic directions. That is, the team should identify and assess what technology choices and priorities are already in place, as reflected in the present infrastructure, in order to understand the basis for future technological recommendations and solutions, as reflected in the institutional IT plans and visions.

Address infrastructure issues
The information technology infrastructure of an institution can be defined as those building blocks that are not applications or programmatic in nature. In investigating these areas, the team might pursue some of the following questions:
- How is the information technology division organized, what is the structure of IT resources, and what are the current relationships with vendors or other external partners?
- What are the current technologies in place, for example: mainframe systems, open systems, distributed systems, client/server systems, proprietary operating systems, installed networks, terminal and workstation access to applications and databases, installed databases, query languages?
- What is the institutional strategy with regard to data warehouses? Will the IT organization provide data warehouse services or will those services be provided by offices such as the finance office?
- Is there an open institutional architecture for client/server solutions either now or in the planning stages?
- Do institutional and/or departmental standards exist with respect to the areas of security, access, databases, networking protocols, backups, recovery, and production operations?
An important part of this evaluation will be determining the true nature of computing at your institution. In this evaluation, the location of the physical equipment, servers, or processors is not necessarily the issue. Centralization may be in place for operational issues such as system and database backups and maintenance, but the true method of operation may be distributed, particularly related to development, purchasing, training, and support in the applications areas.
This consideration is becoming increasingly important as the technology provides for distribution of responsibilities from central to distributed environments. The infrastructure of the institution comes under scrutiny to identify how these various development and support resources will be deployed for the prospective financial information systems. There are models that indicate that the ongoing, first-level support of the applications, including interactions with the application vendors when outsourced, will be done by the "owning" departments. Implementation of new releases and interaction with the vendor's technical staff may be carried out through central staff with day-to-day application questions being directed to the help desk or response line of the application provider. The technology team can establish, and include in its profile, the model currently in use at the institution and use this in evaluating the impact of alternative system offerings.
In addition to assessing the current environment, the team should obtain the IT organization's strategic and operating plans and any vision or values statements the institution has developed for investment in information resources to ensure that future directions are taken into account.
Strategic plans, planning principles, and vision statements will provide the team with the necessary information about technology priorities for the future, preferred information architecture solutions, any institutional standards that are being planned or are currently in effect, and any other significant information technology priorities that may work in concert, or conflict, with this project. (See Appendix A for examples of planning principles.)
The operating plan will provide information about the current focus of the information technology organization, which will enable the technology team to better plan the level of institutional technology support that will be available for this initiative, as well as any currently existing standards or guidelines that should be taken into account in the immediate future of this effort. Having a thorough understanding of the already existing commitments of the technology organization will enable the technology team to make more realistic recommendations, and will give the project management team the necessary information for assessing how much of an additional burden can realistically be incorporated, institutionally.
Failure to understand the standards, policies, and procedures within the existing or planned technological environment will result in unnecessary conflict. Policies and procedures within the IT organization may be less obvious than the hardware and software currently in use for the existing financial system. However, issues related to access, security, job scheduling, database management, recovery, backups, and other areas may be generalized for all systems and not readily apparent in the specific financial systems area.
This can also be true for functions that may be carried out at the department level. Some departments may be printing their own checks or signing checks using hardware and software at the department level. Too much focus on central IT functions can miss these items. The team needs to be sure such points are not left out of the evaluation of the current technology environment because they will become significant during later stages (selection and implementation) of the project.
Articulate development and access philosophies
To evaluate your institution's philosophies concerning systems development and implementations, the technology team might ask the following questions:
- To what extent have existing applications been developed in-house? Is internal development the standard mode of operation? If so, what applications development methodologies and tools are being used?
- Do external vendors supply some or all of the administrative applications? What partnerships have been established between the IT organization and internal and external suppliers?
- Has there been movement toward an institutional architecture to support client/server computing? If so, is that architecture open and accessible to all institutional constituents or is it proprietary?
- What enhancements of services have been provided in recent months?
- What is the level of internal resources available, in hardware, software, space, and staff?
- Which applications or developments are driving the institution's technological direction?
- Which applications and/or databases have been integrated to provide enterprise data?
- Is enterprise data integration a basic approach to the ongoing development of new applications?
The team should also review current strategies and directions in the areas of transaction processing and decision support systems. Is the institution moving in the direction of providing more and easier access to data in institutional information systems? Are transaction processing systems being integrated into a common database in order to provide enterprise-wide access to information for decision-making purposes, or is the institution taking a data warehouse approach, reducing the need for transaction integration?
Often the achievement of significant business process change requires an ability to integrate data across major applications such as student information systems, human resources systems, and the financial systems. This issue is extremely important in the financial area, which has traditionally focused on processing transactions and producing formal reports, but in the future will look to decision support capabilities to play an increasingly important role in the success of information systems. The ability to access, review, and analyze online data in an interactive manner will replace the existing procedures that require requesting a standard report or requesting the design and programming of a special report to suit the needs of the departments.
Identify technological constraints and opportunities
Based on the awareness-raising that the team has experienced, team members next will need to determine any technological constraints currently within the IT organization. Some questions the team might raise include the following:
- Is there a significant reliance on proprietary operating systems, inhibiting flexibility of platforms and potential reduction of support and maintenance costs? (Although these systems represent a sunk cost to the institution, which is not relevant for future decision-making, the existence of such systems often inhibits the institution's ability to think creatively about new solutions, and may present significant hurdles if the implementation of new solutions must be done in a way that integrates with existing systems for some period of time.)
- What progress has been made on providing networked access to administrative systems to a broad range of faculty and staff, and what development is planned in this area?
- What has been the track record of the IT organization in responding to the changing needs of the institution, internally or through outsourcing resources, and how prepared is the IT organization for working in and supporting new technology environments?
- What IT resources will be applied to the financial information system?
In addition to identifying constraints, the team will also need to articulate technological opportunities that may have been identified within the IT organization. There may already be plans to migrate to open systems, expand network access, upgrade the database and query language, indicating that some of the constraints may already have been taken into consideration by the IT organization. To the extent that such plans are under way, the technology team can factor this into the evaluation of potential solutions to the financial systems needs.
On the other hand, the team's awareness of the technological environment and current constraints may in effect enable it to recognize opportunities that may not have already been identified, and in fact trigger support for new directions and initiatives within the IT organization. The IT organization and staff will obviously be most sensitive to issues within their area. Open communication on these issues, related concerns, and possible solutions can bode well for the success of the financial systems project.

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