UW IT Support Services Plan

Information Services Department
Self-Study 2004 - 2005

Purpose:

The purpose of this section of the DIS (Department of Information Services) Department Plan is to provide an overview of the services, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities identified during the three DIS self study meetings held October 25th, October 26th and November 5th, 2004.

Some of the overall strengths, weaknesses and opportunities listed below came from general conversations not specifically linked to the services provided by DIS. Others came from those specific service discussions.

Process:

To conduct the unit self study, DIS was split into three groups. One group contained the project managers and senior technical resources. The other two groups contained the rest of the resources, with representation in each group from all of the DIS units.

Group 2 (Oct. 25)	Group 3 (Oct. 26)	Group 1 (Nov. 9)
Dan Ewart – Facilitator Ralph Williams Bruce Lange PJ Vaske Sandy Gabriel Jothi Somavaram (absent) Dave Moehrke Brandon Stevens Eric Mattimoe	Dan Ewart – Facilitator Charles Marsh Brian Howshar Venkat Vankayalapati Dan McCrackin Maggie Scott Michael Kundert Scott Scheidemantel (absent) Gaylene Feldbush	Dan Ewart – Facilitator Cheryl Collins Chad Marley Jim Berrigan Tana Marsh Julie Schroyer Chris Ewing Jerome Cornelius

In each off-site meeting, the services and the customers for those services were identified. From there, University, IT and specific service strengths, weaknesses and opportunities were identified. In some instances, more detailed discussion was entered into.

Section IV contains ideas for improvement that do not directly relate to DIS as well as a more detailed recommendation concerning the restructuring of IATAC. The IATAC recommendation was developed at an off-site DIS management retreat in March, 2004.

Comparator Data:

There are very few metrics available for measuring the performance of an application programming and support unit. The University of Wyoming has not, at this point, implemented comprehensive tracking software that is capable of providing more quantitative measures of performance for application support.

In Section III of this document there is some information, primarily from the Higher Education User Group Technical Advisory Group and from Educause, that shows where DIS staffing is in comparison to other schools utilizing similar applications. This data shows that, for the most part, DIS is staffed sufficiently to accomplish its current mission. Within DIS, however, some units are not staffed to an optimal level. Specific instances of staffing issues are pointed out in the detailed analysis that follows.

Overall Value Added by DIS:

DIS effectively supports multiple campus administrative software applications with a high degree of technical knowledge and a strong focus on customer support. By maintaining a technical focus on applications, database integrity and security, we allow our customers to focus on using the systems to provide business value.

DIS Services:

Application Security and Access
Database Consulting
Application – Financials
Application – HR/Payroll
Application – Institutional Advancement
IT Project Cost Analysis and Effort Verification
Administrative Software and Tools Library
Applications – Student Information System
Telephone Fraud
Applications - Various

Overall DIS Strengths:

Customer service, including turnaround time on our work
Technical ability
Accountability and understanding the impact of our work
Intra-unit teamwork
Hiring philosophy
Flexibility in taking on new tasks
Management of DIS resources
Amount of work getting done and systems being supported
Feeling that there is management support for staff actions

Overall DIS Weaknesses:

Documentation
Constantly in fire-fighting mode
Project/issue tracking capabilities
Increased dependence on vendors for technical solutions
Communication with other IT departments
Occasion issues with inter-unit communication
Attitudes towards new/refurbished ideas
Understanding of client business processes
Use of available tools
Consistency in processes and procedures across units
Impact of personal relationships – invalid expectations, some people seem unapproachable
Improve IT information dissemination to the department
Lack of DIS Project Manager control over resources critical to the projects being managed

Overall DIS Opportunities:

Investigate using HEAT to become better integrated with IT. Investigate replacing PCS and xref with HEAT, in order to reduce the number of systems we support, save money and time in finding a PCS replacement, make better use of IT investments and provide opportunities for better integrated processes within IT
Better celebrate department successes versus those of individual units
Improve communication within DIS and with other IT departments:
common calendars/resources
accepting mistakes of other departments as just that – mistakes
feedback on results of directors meetings
continue to include status updates in monthly department meetings
Improve documentation
Run all documentation (vendor or DIS-created) through the library
Hire a student technical writer to help complete documentation
Web-enable internal documentation for easier access and version control
Improve understanding of client business processes – ask questions, review output with them, watch their testing to understand the process
Concentrate on learning from past mistakes
Complete a full review of staffing and determine a strategy for how to staff for upgrades versus non-upgrade periods
Provide additional methods for keeping up with new technology
Improve cohesiveness between DIS units, recognizing that we are all working towards a common goal – excellent customer support
Participate more in IT and campus committees – not just at the director level but at the staff level as well
Participate more in vendor focus groups, users groups and customer advisory boards – consider presenting at a conference
Obtain additional feedback from customers about the services we provide and the quality of work we are accomplishing; have them point out to us strengths, weaknesses and opportunities

Self-Study Analysis of DIS Services

Name of Service: Application Security and Access

This service ensures that the proper people have the proper level of access to the administrative software applications supported by DIS.

Stakeholders: Students, faculty, staff, Board retirees, IT personnel

Strengths:

Quality Staff: The Application Security Office (ASO) has an excellent staff. They have and display outstanding customer service skills, even in the most contentious situations (which they deal with often). They provide timely response to issues regardless of who is requesting the services, and in large part due to their customer service focus and responsiveness they have developed strong working relationships with IT and other departmental personnel. In particular, the ASO personnel have developed very good relationships with the programmers and the rest of the DIS staff, which has led to good teamwork, many successes, and the identification of a number of issues which can be avoided on future projects.
Staffing Level: With the recent addition of a full-time position in the ASO it is believed that the ASO is properly staffed to meet the current needs of its constituents with a high level of service.
Learning Opportunities: Changes in technology platforms and applications have provided many learning opportunities for the ASO personnel, which they have taken full advantage of. This has allowed the ASO to work with functional users and application developers to improve security processes and procedures within the applications supported by DIS and to meet certain long-outstanding audit requirements.
Use of Internet for Communication: The ASO has done an excellent job of using the IT internet site to provide information to customers concerning ASO processes and procedures.
Use of HEAT: The ASO has done an excellent job integrating HEAT into its daily operations, allowing for better and closer coordination with the rest of IT.

Weaknesses:

Standardization of Procedures: Significant progress has been made in standardizing security procedures across applications. With new systems, it is becoming easier to standardize security, but there is still work to do to complete the standardization, realizing that it will be impossible to do things the exact same way in all applications.
Staying Current: With the amount of work currently required of ASO personnel, it has become difficult for them to keep up with application changes and new security functionality. Additionally, changing philosophies in application security need to be studied and where applicable, adapted and implemented into the UW environment.
Confidence Level: While there is an extensive amount of experience and knowledge in the ASO, there is a need to continue to improve ASO members’ confidence in their abilities and to continue to push for the correct application security procedures, even in the face of strong user or IT pushback. While it is best to come to a consensus, some items will need to be required by DIS and the ASO in the best overall interests of the University.
Process for Retiring or Terminated Employees: One University weakness that affects the ASO is the process by which terminated or retired employees have their access to systems removed. Currently, unless the ASO is specifically informed to do so, access to the domain and administrative applications is left in place until the end of the employee’s terminal leave. This can provide months of access to University facilities (email, internet access, labs, etc.) and applications (HRMS, Financials, SIS, Advance and others) when a person is no longer really working at UW. Optimally, a process would be in place where HR informed the ASO and other IT units on the last day of actual work for an employee. Immediately after that last day of work, all access to UW computing facilities would be removed unless special arrangements had been made. HR has been made aware of the potential risks of the current process and work will continue with HR to see if there are process improvements that can be made.

Opportunities:

Additional Staff: While the current staffing level is acceptable for current tasks, it is believed that much more could be accomplished with additional staff – more investigation of new software features, more training opportunities, more proactive security investigations and other topics.
Standardization of Processes: One opportunity is to continue to standardize business processes across applications to the largest extent possible. This will require changes and those changes need to be effectively communicated across campus with the help of the respective DIS project manager and key functional users working in coordination with the ASO.
Increased Training: Training/seminars to improve confidence and facilitate consensus-building should be offered to ASO personnel so that they can better portray their abilities and propagate strong application security processes and procedures.
Using “ASK IT” Website: The ASO will be working with CSS to see if it is possible to integrate more closely into the “ASK IT” website to provide easier access to ASO information and to provide a more unified front of IT to campus constituents.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: DIS provides a standardized, impartial application security model for the mission-critical applications that it supports. If this service were decentralized, confusing process issues would arise due to differences in application security implementations, customer service would most likely be greatly decreased and possible security audit, HIPPA and FERPA issues could arise.

Name of Service: Database Consulting

This service provides, for a fee, the database expertise of the DBO to anyone on campus who requires it. The work is done as DBO resources are available.

Stakeholders: Campus

Strengths:

Experience: The DIS Database Office (DBO) has a broad range of experience with the Oracle database and its associated tools. Due to the large number of databases and applications they support, they have obtained a high degree of expertise.
Price: At the current Fee Book price of $50 per hour, this is very inexpensive consulting.
Campus License for Oracle Tools: UW has a campus license for Oracle and many of its tools. Campus entities are allowed to use the database and the tools free of charge under this license. Whenever possible (and whenever consulted), DIS advises that campus entities take advantage of this and use the Oracle products to not only save money but to be able to use the consulting services offered by the DBO.

Weaknesses:

Utilization of Service: Many people across campus seem unwilling to take advantage of this service. For some, it is because they did not know that the service was offered or even that UW has a campus license for Oracle. For others, it was an issue of payment. For others, it appears to be an issue of control in that they want their own database experts instead of having to rely on IT. For still others, the products they chose did not support the Oracle database platform.
Time Available: For those that have called the DBO with Oracle-related questions, the key weakness is a lack of time available for DBO personnel to consult. DBO personnel are (or will be by January 2005) responsible for over 53 database instances and have primary responsibility for 4 applications (including database and application programmer services). Given that Cheryl Collins is the manager of this group and given that she is only a part-time technical resource, this means that each full-time Database Analyst is supporting, on average, 13 database instances and 1 application – a load higher than the average of 12 shown in a recent Educause survey. Additionally, they provide backup for Application Security and Quality Assurance personnel within DIS. This gives them little time to consult on topics outside their core responsibilities and no time to actively seek consulting work.
Advertising: Database consulting services are not currently advertised, due in part to the DBO having little available time to complete any consulting work they did receive.
Billing: There is some confusion on the process of how we would bill for these services were they to be completed. The one time that we have billed for the service, the billing process was convoluted and confusing for both us and the client. In order to offer the highest level of customer service, we should be able to clearly describe the process of billing and we should make this process as easy as possible for the client. Additionally, clear guidelines have not been developed by which to know when services should be billed and when they should not. The DBO wants to be a resource for campus and want people to call and ask questions. Sometimes, if the effort is not great to answer these questions, clients should not be billed as the work is done in the name of good customer service. When the work extends beyond a call or a question, it becomes difficult to know when to begin billing for the services.

Opportunities:

Advertising: Clear opportunities exist to better advertise the value of our campus agreement with Oracle and to better advertise the consulting services that the DBO has to offer. This must be balanced against advertising and receiving too much business, requiring us to offer a lower level of service to both the consulting clients and the DBO’s existing clients.
Improved Billing Processes: UW’s Database Administrator and Director of Information Services need to work together to define clear, repeatable processes for when to bill for services and include that information with the advertising material mentioned above. Additionally, the Database Administrator and the DIS Director need to work with Business Services to understand the billing process so that it can be clearly explained to customers. Once the process is understood, DIS and Business Services should work together to make the process as simple as possible for the end client.
Potential Additional Staff: If the service is deemed as one that would be very valuable to IT (from a revenue source perspective) and UW (from a customer service perspective), an opportunity exists to add more staff to the DBO in order to have the ability to actively seek work in this area. When taken with opportunities in the application support area, a full-fledged services and staffing plan for DIS needs to be considered.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: There is the potential for this service to add significant value to DIS, IT and UW that it is not currently adding. This service could go a long way towards promoting IT’s strengths, abilities and knowledge of Oracle. It could also encourage UW departments to utilize Oracle when buying new administrative systems. Finally, it can add value by gaining some knowledge of the initiatives going on around campus as they are related to database work.

Name of Service: Application – Financials

This service includes providing programming, troubleshooting, database and quality assurance support for the PeopleSoft Financials application (known on campus as PISTOL). This software is at version 8.4 SP1 MP2 as of November, 2004.

Stakeholders: Primary: staff in Accounting, Asset Management, Purchasing, Sponsored Programs; Secondary: staff in all campus departments that use financial reports and certain online functionality

Strengths:

Customer Service: The team supporting the application provides a high level of customer service to its customers. Requests are acknowledged, prioritized with the help of the customers, and high-priority items are completed quickly and accurately. Team members are polite, honest and professional in customer interactions which has led to a high degree of cooperation between DIS staff and customers.
High Performance: The team supporting the application performs very well with a high degree of quality and good communication between the DBO, the ASO and programmers. The skills of these employees continue to increase, and with the increase in skill level comes improved communication and even higher quality results. Even during the difficult upgrade process, the team gained the knowledge necessary to successfully upgrade the product with minimal functional or data conversion issues (there were technical issues, but these were the result of poor vendor code and poor vendor recommendations). Programmers, even across applications, do an excellent job working with each other to solve problems and share coding techniques. Due to some individuals with experience on both the DBO and programming sides, DBO personnel have been able to help with programming activities at critical times. Finally, the team was, and continues to be, able to solve problems that PeopleSoft is unable or unwilling to solve. This is a testament to the skill present on this team.
Functionality: The application provides the functionality to accomplish the business purpose. Clients have responded favorably to the application, praising the functionality and the stability. Most clients have found new and improved functionality through the upgrades of the application that have improved some business processes.
Stability: Once initial implementation/upgrade issues were resolved, the production application is very stable.
On-Call Process: A DIS process is in place to accommodate after-hours production issues, but there are practically no after-hour production issues that must be dealt with by on-call employees.
Quality Assurance: A strong quality assurance process is in place to help keep the application stable. Clearly defined processes and procedures exist by which to migrate any required changes between test instances to production, mitigating risk and ensuring a stable production system. Furthermore, roles and responsibilities of clients, programmers, DBO personnel and quality assurance personnel are all defined in order to minimize the ability for mistakes or malicious behavior.
Improving Relationship with PeopleSoft: While the relationship with PeopleSoft in the past has been strained due to difficulties during the upgrade process, DIS personnel were able to secure significant concessions and free consulting from PeopleSoft through good negotiation and communication. Relationships have improved recently, culminated by DIS personnel securing an acceptable long-term maintenance cost promise from PeopleSoft.

Weaknesses:

Staffing Level: There are currently four programmers assigned to the Financials application, with one position which has been unfilled for some time and one position that is currently filled by a relatively inexperienced and junior resource. It has been very difficult to hire, even at an entry level. Because of generous University benefits on leave time, even four trained people makes it difficult to ensure an adequate level of support to our customers. According to a recent Educause survey, UW has significantly less developers working on its PeopleSoft applications than institutions of similar size. During the upgrade process, and during future upgrades, four FTEs will not be acceptable. Significant stress and burnout occurred during the upgrade process and DIS was fortunate to not lose an employee because of these factors. An analysis of staffing levels, utilizing data from Educause surveys of other institutions using similar applications, can be found in Section III of this document.
Time to Train: It takes over a year of training and experience in order for a new developer to become minimally proficient in PeopleSoft programming. Basic maintenance tasks can be tackled without supervision in slightly less time, but the complex nature of the application and the functional knowledge necessary to customize the software takes time to learn. The lack of trained personnel, particularly during upgrades, causes significant resource issues including overwork, high stress, and mistakes.
Reliance on Vendor: The University in general and the DIS staff on the application in particular have developed a significant reliance on the vendor to provide accurate information on upgrades and to provide timely fixes for issues discovered within the application. Based on the highly complex nature of the application (over 15,000 tables) and the architecture it runs on, it is our belief that this reliance is designed by the vendor.
Use of Available Resources: The staff is reluctant to use the PeopleSoft case submittal process due to a string of bad experiences involving PeopleSoft support. Cases have been ignored, have been dealt with by inexperienced support personnel, have been closed prematurely or have resulted in vendor-supplied patches that have caused more problems than they have solved. While some experiences have been more positive, the majority have been less than acceptable. When cases are not filed, however, there is no possibility of getting the help required and there is no trail with which to dispute PeopleSoft’s level of service.
Functional Knowledge: DIS personnel lack the basic functional knowledge to maximize their efforts and minimize testing for clients.
Project Tracking System: The current project tracking system, PCS, does not meet the needs of DIS at this time. It provides only the most basic functionality, does not integrate with other IT systems, is not used by other IT departments and will need to be replaced within the next two years as it is a mainframe applications and the mainframe will be decommissioned upon completion of the SIS replacement project. Additional functionality is required (a separate document outlines the required functionality) and the possibility for tighter workflow and integration with the rest of IT is greatly desired.
Communication: There is room for improvement in communication between IT departments. Progress is being made in this area.
Different Tool Sets: One weakness that prevents maximum resource utilization is the fact that PeopleSoft Financials and PeopleSoft HRMS are on different versions of the PeopleTools architecture. There are enough differences in key components that make it difficult for HRMS personnel to work on Financials, and vice versa.
Documentation: Due in part to insufficient staffing levels, part to the ever-changing nature of the application, and part to the lack of a full-featured project tracking system, documentation on this system is not as complete as it should be. Documentation often is not completed due to the criticality of work that is currently backlogged.
Resource Issues: The PeopleSoft applications require a significant level of expert resources, both from DIS and from TSS. The DIS Project Manager, however, has no direct control over the TSS resources that are a critical component of the success of the application. TSS resources often have priorities that are different from those of DIS, causing communication issues and delays in normal work and problem solving. The current split of duties between the programmers, the DBO, the ASO, the PCTeam and the Unix Team causes problems that could potentially be avoided by reassigning responsibilities within the team that makes up the support unit for PeopleSoft applications.
“Backdoor” Changes: There is some question as to whether DIS should be performing some tasks that it currently performs. Clients request that DIS staff make changes to Financials data through “the backdoor,” via SQL, even though the changes could be made through the application. Because it would take significantly longer for the clients to change the data, DIS has acquiesced to the clients’ requests. This is being done with the knowledge of UW’s internal auditors and unfortunately these types of changes leave no audit trail.

Opportunities:

Upgrade Planning: A detailed plan on future upgrades should be created that includes the pros and cons of hiring additional staff or hiring consultants. This will be a critical decision with long-term ramifications for the University and must be carefully deliberated, along with the University’s application software strategy.
Develop Support Budget: The University has an opportunity to create a line item in the budget process for support of the PeopleSoft applications. Included in that budget would be software maintenance, hardware upgrades, and on-going training for technical personnel. Additional training dollars would allow DIS to bring new programmers up to speed more quickly and provide a higher level of customer service.
Utilization of PeopleSoft Resources: DIS could make better use of the resources PeopleSoft has to offer. Even given the less-than-optimal response from PeopleSoft Global Support, cases should continue to be filed, documentation should be reviewed and Customer Connection (the PeopleSoft customer support web site) should be searched before significant efforts are undertaken to figure out the problems on our own.
Improve Functional Knowledge: DIS personnel should continue to work more closely with functional customers in order to better understand the business processes present in the software they are supporting. Some potential learning opportunities include campus training sessions put on by the functional customers, web-based seminars put on by the vendor, and attendance of conferences including the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) and the PeopleSoft Connect conference.
Use of HEAT: The investigation of HEAT as a project tracking system is an opportunity to improve the project tracking capabilities within DIS, to open new lines of communication within IT, and to streamline processes while reducing complicated and confusing email conversations. This investigation has been done in the past, but newer releases of HEAT and an increased knowledge of HEAT capabilities in CSS might lend to a positive result.
Improved Knowledge Management: HEAT also has knowledge management capabilities that could improve the documentation and cross-training situations. A central repository for known issues and their solutions would greatly aid new resources and resources covering for an area outside their normal realm of responsibility.
Hiring of a Technical Writer: Another opportunity to improve the quality and consistency of DIS documentation is to hire a student part-time technical writer or to provide an internship in technical writing. DIS personnel could create the content of the documentation (which is normally done through the course of development work) and the technical writer could properly format and check the documentation, saving DIS employees time and allowing them to focus on technical tasks with more direct value to their customers.
Consistency in Tool Sets: One opportunity for more cross-training will come after the upgrade of HRMS to version 8.9. This will put Financials and HRMS on the same PeopleTools version, allowing the programmers to share more common experiences and for the DBO and ASO to implement standard policies that are currently impossible due to functionality differences in the toolsets.
Archive Data: As mentioned before, the PeopleSoft Financials upgrade was extremely difficult, time consuming and expensive. One reason for some the difficulty was that fact that no data has ever been archived from the PeopleSoft system. The size of the database caused long run times for the upgrade scripts and long periods of lost time when mistakes were made or bugs were identified. The creation of a data warehouse and the archiving of data would allow users to find data more quickly, would allow more robust reporting, would provide faster access times and would speed up and simplify future upgrades.
Communication within IT: Planning and discussion must occur at the Director level to find the best “moving forward” approach to support of these applications. To aid in troubleshooting problems and in order to improve communication between IT groups, it is critical to know what activities other IT groups are working on. An important opportunity is to continue building on the IT Project Calendar currently being implemented and reviewed in directors meetings.
Independent Audit: An independent information technology financials audit by an outside agency is an opportunity to convince clients to make appropriate changes to Financials data through the application as well as to potentially identify areas for improvement in security and financial business processes.
Relationship with Oracle: With Oracle’s recent purchase of PeopleSoft, it will be critical to expand our already good relationship with Oracle into the area of ERP applications. Good relationships result in lower costs and improved service over time.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: The University would cease to function financially for some time without the PeopleSoft financials application. DIS provides the database, application security and programming technical skills required to provide a secure, reliable application for use by hundreds of staff members across campus. Additionally, this group has the knowledge, skills and abilities to provide backup for technical staff working on the PeopleSoft HRMS application.

Name of Service: Application – HR/Payroll

This service includes providing programming, troubleshooting, database and quality assurance support for the PeopleSoft HRMS application. This software is at version 8.3 SP1 as of November, 2004.

Stakeholders: Primary: staff in Human Resources and Payroll offices
Secondary: staff in all campus departments to enter time and use certain online functionality

Strengths:

Customer Service: The team supporting the application provides a high level of customer service to its customers. Requests are acknowledged, prioritized with the help of the customers, and high-priority items are completed quickly and accurately. Team members are polite, honest and professional in customer interactions which has led to a high degree of cooperation between DIS staff and customers.
High Performance: The team supporting the application performs very well with a high degree of quality and good communication between the DBO, the ASO and programmers. The skills of these employees continue to increase, and with the increase in skill level comes improved communication and even higher quality results. Even during the difficult upgrade process, the team gained the knowledge necessary to successfully upgrade the product with minimal functional or data conversion issues (there were technical issues, but these were the result of poor vendor code and poor vendor recommendations). Programmers, even across applications, do an excellent job working with each other to solve problems and share coding techniques. Due to some individuals with experience on both the DBO and programming sides, DBO personnel have been able to help with programming activities at critical times. Finally, the team was, and continues to be, able to solve problems that PeopleSoft is unable or unwilling to solve. This is a testament to the skill present on this team.
Quality Assurance: A strong quality assurance process is in place to help keep the application stable. Clearly defined processes and procedures exist by which to migrate any required changes between test instances to production, mitigating risk and ensuring a stable production system. Furthermore, roles and responsibilities of clients, programmers, DBO personnel and quality assurance personnel are all defined in order to minimize the ability for mistakes or malicious behavior.
Stability: Once initial implementation/upgrade issues were resolved, the production application is very stable.
On-Call Process: A DIS process is in place to accommodate issues, but there are practically no after-hour production issues that must be dealt with by on-call employees.
Functionality: The application provides the functionality to accomplish the business purpose. Clients have responded favorably to the application, praising the functionality and the stability. Most clients have found new and improved functionality through the upgrades of the application that have improved some business processes. In some instances, particularly in the payroll area, clients are reporting that the application has decreased the amount of time required to process payroll, resulting in less overtime requirements and less employee stress.
Improving Relationship With PeopleSoft: While the relationship with PeopleSoft in the past has been strained due to difficulties during the upgrade process, DIS personnel were able to secure significant concessions and free consulting from PeopleSoft through good negotiation and communication. Relationships have improved recently, culminated by DIS personnel securing an acceptable long-term maintenance cost promise from PeopleSoft.

Weaknesses:

Staffing Level: There are three positions currently allocated to HRMS programming support. One position, a CP Senior, was recently transferred to the team but is empty. One employee is chronically ill and has been unable to provide any significant level of support to the project. This leaves one programmer to do all the required work, which creates high stress due to the significant workload. Additionally, when this programmer is on leave, there is essentially no backfill. According to a recent EduCause survey, UW has significantly less developers working on its PeopleSoft applications than institutions of similar size. During the implementation process, and during future upgrades, three FTEs will not be acceptable. Significant stress and burnout occurred during the implementation process and DIS was fortunate to not lose an employee because of these factors. An analysis of staffing levels, utilizing data from Educause surveys of other institutions using similar applications, can be found in Section III of this document.
Time to Train: It takes over a year of training and experience in order for a new developer to become minimally proficient in PeopleSoft programming. Basic maintenance tasks can be tackled without supervision in slightly less time, but the complex nature of the application and the functional knowledge necessary to customize the software takes time to learn. The lack of trained personnel, particularly during upgrades, causes significant resource issues including overwork, high stress, and mistakes.
Reliance on Vendor: The University in general and the DIS staff on the application in particular have developed a significant reliance on the vendor to provide accurate information on upgrades and to provide timely fixes for issues discovered within the application. Based on the highly complex nature of the application (over 12,000 tables) and the architecture it runs on, it is our belief that this reliance is designed by the vendor.
Project Tracking System: The current project tracking system, PCS, does not meet the needs of DIS at this time. It provides only the most basic functionality, does not integrate with other IT systems, is not used by other IT departments and will need to be replaced within the next two years as it is a mainframe applications and the mainframe will be decommissioned upon completion of the SIS replacement project. Additional functionality is required (a separate document outlines the required functionality) and the possibility for tighter workflow and integration with the rest of IT is greatly desired.
Communication: There is room for improvement in communication between IT departments. Progress is being made in this area.
Different Tools Sets: One weakness that prevents maximum resource utilization is the fact that PeopleSoft Financials and PeopleSoft HRMS are on different versions of the PeopleTools architecture. There are enough differences in key components that make it difficult for HRMS personnel to work on Financials, and vice versa.
Resource Issues: The PeopleSoft applications require a significant level of expert resources, both from DIS and from TSS. The DIS Project Manager, however, has no direct control over the TSS resources that are a critical component of the success of the application. TSS resources often have priorities that are different from those of DIS, causing communication issues and delays in normal work and problem solving. The current split of duties between the programmers, the DBO, the ASO, the PCTeam and the Unix Team causes problems that could potentially be avoided by reassigning responsibilities within the team that makes up the support unit for PeopleSoft applications.
Dependency on Functional Resources: One current weakness is a high level of dependency on functional resources to solve technical issues. In part due to a lack of DIS programming resources, these individuals were forced to take on technical tasks during the implementation, thus beginning the reliance on their skills. Due to resource shortages in the Payroll office during the implementation, functional resources were allowed access in the system that they should not have had. These resources do not work in the Payroll Office but were allowed access to those screens in order to troubleshoot and rectify problems. This access has continued on as the Payroll Office has become somewhat reliant on their services.

Opportunities:

Upgrade Planning: A detailed plan on future upgrades should be created that includes the pros and cons of hiring additional staff or hiring consultants. This will be a critical decision with long-term ramifications for the University and must be carefully deliberated, along with the University’s application software strategy.
Develop Support Budget: The University has an opportunity to create a line item in the budget process for support of the PeopleSoft applications. Included in that budget would be software maintenance, hardware upgrades, and on-going training for technical personnel. Additional training dollars would allow DIS to bring new programmers up to speed more quickly and provide a higher level of customer service.
Utilization of PeopleSoft Resources: DIS could make better use of the resources PeopleSoft has to offer. Even given the less-than-optimal response from PeopleSoft Global Support, cases should continue to be filed, documentation should be reviewed and Customer Connection (the PeopleSoft customer support web site) should be searched before significant efforts are undertaken to figure out the problems on our own.
Improve Functional Knowledge: DIS personnel should continue to work more closely with functional customers in order to better understand the business processes present in the software they are supporting. Some potential learning opportunities include campus training sessions put on by the functional customers, web-based seminars put on by the vendor, and attendance of conferences including the Higher Education User Group (HEUG) and the PeopleSoft Connect conference.
Use of HEAT: The investigation of HEAT as a project tracking system is an opportunity to improve the project tracking capabilities within DIS, to open new lines of communication within IT, and to streamline processes while reducing complicated and confusing email conversations. This investigation has been done in the past, but newer releases of HEAT and an increased knowledge of HEAT capabilities in CSS might lend to a positive result.
Improve Knowledge Management: HEAT also has knowledge management capabilities that could improve the documentation and cross-training situations. A central repository for known issues and their solutions would greatly aid new resources and resources covering for an area outside their normal realm of responsibility.
Technical Writer: Another opportunity to improve the quality and consistency of DIS documentation is to hire a student part-time technical writer or to provide an internship in technical writing. DIS personnel could create the content of the documentation (which is normally done through the course of development work) and the technical writer could properly format and check the documentation, saving DIS employees’ time and allowing them to focus on technical tasks with more direct value to their customers.
Consistency in Tool Sets: One opportunity for more cross-training will come after the upgrade of HRMS to version 8.9. This will put Financials and HRMS on the same PeopleTools version, allowing the programmers to share more common experiences and for the DBO and ASO to implement standard policies that are currently impossible due to functionality differences in the toolsets.
Communication within IT: Planning and discussion must occur at the Director level to find the best “moving forward” approach to support of these applications. To aid in troubleshooting problems and in order to improve communication between IT groups, it is critical to know what activities other IT groups are working on. An important opportunity is to continue building on the IT Project Calendar currently being implemented and reviewed in directors meetings.
Relationship with Oracle: With Oracle’s recent purchase of PeopleSoft, it will be critical to expand our already good relationship with Oracle into the area of ERP applications. Good relationships result in lower costs and improved service over time.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: Without this application, the University would have an extraordinarily difficult time hiring, terminating and compensating the people who work here. DIS provides the database, application security and programming technical skills required to provide a secure, reliable application relied upon by students, faculty and staff. Additionally, this group has the knowledge, skills and abilities to provide backup for technical staff working on the PeopleSoft Financials application.

Name of Service: Application – Institutional Advancement

This service includes providing programming, troubleshooting, database and quality assurance support for the SunGard BSR Advance and associated applications. This software is at version 8.1 as of November, 2004.

Stakeholders: Primary: Employees of UW Foundation, the Alumni Association and campus department personnel; Secondary: alumni and donors

Strengths:

Quality Assurance: A strong quality assurance process is in place to help keep the application stable. Clearly defined processes and procedures exist by which to migrate any required changes between test instances to production, mitigating risk and ensuring a stable production system. Furthermore, roles and responsibilities of clients, programmers, DBO personnel and quality assurance personnel are all defined in order to minimize the ability for mistakes or malicious behavior.
Stability: The production application is very stable, even during upgrade periods. DIS team member skill in executing the upgrades has made upgrading the core application a relatively smooth process.
Relationship with Vendor: DIS personnel have an excellent relationship with the vendor, developed over a long period of time and helped by consistency in the core DIS personnel supporting the application. In part, this excellent relationship is due to good vendor documentation, good code quality, and strong customer support.
Client Relationship: DIS personnel have a strong relationship with and affinity for the clients. DIS personnel show a willingness to do whatever is required to aid clients in their jobs.
Functional Knowledge: There is a good understanding of client business processes and how the application is used to accomplish the business mission.
On-Call Process: A DIS process is in place to accommodate issues, but there are practically no after-hour production issues that must be dealt with by on-call employees.
Functionality: The application provides the functionality to accomplish the business purpose. Clients have responded favorably to the application, praising the functionality and the stability. Most clients have found new and improved functionality through the upgrades of the application that have improved some business processes.
“Vanilla” Application: The core application has only minor modifications, making the application much easier to support and upgrade. In part this is due to DIS personnel aiding clients in finding ways to adapt and/or implement their business processes through functionality available in the system.
Data Quality: Through hard work by DIS employees, data integrity and data reliability have improved greatly and processes have been put in place to ensure that this continued.
IT Relationships: DIS personnel have developed good working relationships with TSS personnel involved with supporting the servers on which the applications reside. Programmers, DBO and ASO personnel interact well and exhibit strong teamwork when standard processes and procedures are followed.

Weaknesses:

Resources: There is a limited number of programming resources in DIS that have any functional and technical knowledge of the Advance system, and only one that is familiar with Harris Connect and Ruffalo Cody. While it has not been a significant problem to date, it is concerning from a redundancy perspective and could, at any time, become a serious issue. An analysis of staffing levels, utilizing data from Educause surveys of other institutions using similar applications, can be found in Section III of this document.
Job Scheduling: The current job scheduler (software component that schedules batch jobs on the server) is not reliable and is has limited features. Additionally, job scheduling is controlled by TSS, occasionally causing delays and raising concerns that this job function does not reside in the most applicable department.
Client Dependence on IT: Clients are overly dependent on IT to provide fast answers instead of researching the issue on the issue on their own. DIS personnel enable this behavior which causes backlogs of work for which DIS is responsible. This situation is being actively addressed.
Alumni Association and UW Foundation: DIS personnel are forced to act as the go-between between the Alumni Association and UW Foundation when issues on system use and data availability arise. This puts DIS in a precarious situation that is outside our responsibilities.
Documentation: Technical “how-to” documentation (data loading, queries, etc.) needs improvement, especially in the event that the key DIS resource becomes unavailable.
Data Maintenance: DIS has become responsible for a high level of data maintenance. Up to 90% of the client requests received by DIS are to modify data. Typically, the modification of production data should be done by the client through the application so that there is a clear audit trail on the information.
Operating System: The application is written for UNIX, but we run it on Windows. Converting upgrade scripts written for UNIX complicates support and requires the purchase and maintenance of a software tool (MKS Toolkit) that would otherwise not be required.
Responsible for Reporting: DIS is responsible for reporting functions that would typically be the job of a client. This is due to the complexity of the tools used for Advance reporting.
Support of Subsystems: There are a number of sub-systems, such as OnBase (document imaging), Ruffalo Cody (telethon call support), systems for memberships into the Cowboy Joe Club, WPR and many others that Advance is required to interface with. These non-IT supported subsystems are causing more work and their number is increasing when Advance could most likely do what many of these systems are doing.

Opportunities:

Investigate Scheduling Product: Investigate Advance Scheduler 2.0 (free) and other scheduling products to determine if newly-available products can reduce workload and technical issues. Also investigate whether responsibility for the scheduling software can be moved to the DBO.
Documentation: Make documentation of DIS roles, procedures and “how-to” documentation a priority for the prime DIS resources assigned to Advance. Cross-training and resource redundancy is important, so continue to improve the documentation while also ensuring that the resource formerly assigned to Advance (but now assigned to the Banner project) continues to work on assignments for Advance to keep her skill level high.
Improve Client Skill Sets: Continue to work with clients on helping them with their problem investigation skills and encouraging them to do so. Encourage client resources to continue to attend available training and conferences and encourage them, whenever possible, to make data changes through the application, even if additional time is required on their part.
Adherence to DIS Procedure: DIS personnel should continue to follow all DIS processes and procedures related to DBO and ASO activities. Suggestions for improvements on these procedures should be provided to the Project Manager in charge of the application.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: The University would have extensive difficulty tracking alumni, current donors, potential donors and the resulting donations without the use of this application. DIS provides the database, application security and programming technical skills required to provide a secure, reliable application for use by hundreds of staff members across campus.

Name of Service: IT Project Cost Analysis and Effort Verification

This service allows departments to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) for an administrative application before they purchase it and to ensure that similar functionality is not already available somewhere on campus.

Stakeholders: Specifically: campus executives and application purchase decision-makers; generally: campus community

Strengths:

Methodology Content: Much of the associated methodology is industry-standard information that has been in practice for years. While it is not higher education specific, it contains best practices from a number of different industries.
Practice: The methodology and tools (including detailed excel spreadsheets) are in place and have been used in practice on PeopleSoft, SIS and other projects at UW.
Scalability: The methodology and tools are scalable so that they can work on any size of project.
Insight: Completion of this process provides an insight for IT into the requirements of other departments on campus that are not being met by current solutions.
Advance Notice of Potential Work: Completion of this process would give IT in general and DIS in particular advance notice of work that might need to be accomplished in the future (network runs, server installs, application interfaces, etc).
Promotes Understanding of Necessary Funding: Completion of this process provides valuable information before the purchase of software systems and helps ensure that sufficient funds and resources are devoted to the project to make it successful. It might also help a department determine that they can not successfully complete the project or that they do not need to undertake it because similar functionality is already available in another campus system.
Campus Education: In some circumstances, this service is an opportunity to educate campus on revenue-generating services offered by IT including database consulting, general consulting, server management and backup/recovery services.

Weaknesses:

Methodology Documentation: The methodology needs to be better documented so that more people than the Director of Information Services can run one of these projects. More IT personnel need to be trained to deliver these services to IT clients and to know that these services can be offered to our clients.
Lack of Business Case Template: The methodology needs to be expanded to focus also on a helping the client create a business case and detailed requirements for the system being considered. This will greatly aid them in the RFP process as well as to ensure that a system is truly required.
Identifying Budget Sources: The methodology needs to be expanded to better provide assistance in locating budget sources for the project and how particular sources can be best utilized.
Not a Formal Service: This is not yet truly a formal service being offered by DIS. It has not been advertised and has only been done when DIS is informed of a potential administrative software purchase.
Lack of Oversight Team: Currently, no oversight team is in place to ensure that this process is undertaken. IATAC is currently non-functional and needs to be completely revamped. This will be discussed in a different component of the DIS self-study.

Opportunities:

Improve on Weaknesses: All of the weaknesses above should be thoroughly analyzed and a plan of action for the true formalization of this service should be developed.
Development of UW Oversight for Technology: When a reorganization of IATAC occurs, this service should be integrated into the new IATAC. Reorganization of IATAC is discussed elsewhere.
Revenue Opportunity: This service could lead to revenue opportunities for IT if IT takes on system support for any identified software packages.
Expansion beyond Software Applications: This service could be easily expanded for projects that are not administrative application related projects. Major IT initiatives and significant business process reengineering issues on campus could also benefit from a similar analysis.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: This service is not, to IT’s knowledge, offered by anyone else on campus. If the process is followed, a department will have a better idea, for a software implementation process, of what is already available on campus, the project’s total hard dollar costs, the risks, the resource requirements, the funding mechanisms and the opportunity costs. Without a good understanding of these components, the risk of failure on a software implementation increases substantially, as does the total cost of a project.

Name of Service: Administrative Software and Tools Library

This service provides DIS staff with the software, documentation and licenses they need to do their job. It also serves to make Oracle software available to campus users.

Stakeholders: DIS staff, general faculty and staff

Strengths:

Organization: The information and media contained in the library has been organized and cataloged. Due to this, the information is easily retrievable. The librarian ensures that current versions are downloaded, non-supported versions are removed from availability and that the information is available to all those who need it.
Standardization: Most DIS production system documentation goes through this service, ensuring that the documentation that does go through is current and meets appropriate standards. It also ensures that the documentation is in a central location, available to anyone who may need it. This is of particular importance given the cross-training efforts and absence coverage issues faced by DIS.
Available to Campus: For software on which UW maintains a campus or enterprise license, this software is available for checkout by anyone on campus. This is especially true of the Oracle database software and related tools.
Backup Resources: Librarian functions are backed up by Application Security Office and Database Office personnel, allowing library contents to be available even when the librarian is not present.

Weaknesses:

Amount of Stored Material: There is a significant amount of software and information stored in the library. Some programmers feel that they do not know what is available when it becomes available. Some feel that the reports currently provided on the library content are not sufficient for their needs.
Not Everything in the Library: Despite the best efforts of the librarian, there is still a significant amount of documentation (both vendor and DIS created) that does not reside in the library. One area where this is true is the documentation for the Advance system, which is currently stored on a share outside the \\warehouse\dis share. Originally this was because there was not enough room on the DIS share, but that situation has been rectified and the documentation needs to be moved.
Network Share Security: Currently, the librarian has to go through PCTeam to setup security on shares (who can access what documentation) that are for the exclusive use of DIS programmers and clients. This is an extra step that is not, in our opinion, necessary and the control over these components and who has access to them should be given to the librarian.

Opportunities:

Use of Intranet: In order to improve access to the primarily-online documentation that is received with the newer versions of the software, one opportunity is to put documentation on the intranet.
Better Announcing of New Availability: In keeping with a desire to continue to use the intranet more, the way that documentation is announced for availability should be changed so that new announcements are placed on the intranet (where the documentation will also be loaded) and then DIS employees should be trained to look on the intranet to see what documentation is available.
Expansion of Librarian Role: The librarian’s role should be expanded to take our documentation and make it available as seen fit by DIS employees.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: Without this service, it would be difficult to track the amount of software and documentation available to both DIS programmers and general staff and faculty on campus. Additionally, these groups would spend a significant amount of time downloading software from the Internet that is already available for their use.

Name of Service: Application – Student Information System and Student Portal

This service includes providing programming, troubleshooting, database and quality assurance support for the legacy IDMS SIS (including Hole-in-the-Wall) and the implementation of the Banner SIS, Luminis portal, Operational Data Store (ODS) and workflow module.

In future versions of this document, the Luminis portal should be its own service, but it is too early in the project right now to clearly define strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for Luminis specifically.

Stakeholders: Primary: students, faculty and staff

Strengths:

Customer Relationship: SIS staff has very supportive clients and have developed strong relationships with those clients, both individually and as a group. The clients, as a group, are knowledgeable in their business processes and the technology that supports them.
Customer Service: The team supporting the application provides a high level of customer service to its customers. Requests are acknowledged, prioritized with the help of the customers, and high-priority items are completed quickly and accurately. Team members are polite, honest and professional in customer interactions, leading to a high degree of cooperation between DIS staff and customers.
High Performance: The team supporting the application performs very well with a high degree of quality and good communication between the DBO, the ASO and programmers. The skills of these employees continue to increase, and with the increase in skill level comes improved communication and even higher quality results. Due to some individuals with experience on both the DBO and programming sides, DBO personnel have been able to help with programming activities at critical times.
On-Call Process: A DIS process is in place to accommodate after-hours production issues, but there are few after-hour production issues that must be dealt with by on-call employees.
Quality Assurance Process: A strong quality assurance process is in place to help keep the application stable. Clearly defined processes and procedures exist by which to migrate any required changes between test instances to production, mitigating risk and ensuring a stable production system. Furthermore, roles and responsibilities of clients, programmers, DBO personnel and quality assurance personnel are all defined in order to minimize the ability for mistakes or malicious behavior.
Stable Staff: DIS has a stable, technically competent staff working on SIS. The staff experiences low turnover and has been able to train new staff members to quickly become productive.
Project Manager’s Functional Knowledge: The project manager has extensive knowledge of the business processes on the functional side from working as a member of their team for many years.
Teamwork: There is good teamwork within the unit. There is good sharing of knowledge and a deep skill set in the existing technology, allowing programmers to be gone without fear of clients suffering during their absence.
Excitement with Opportunities: There is a lot of excitement about the SIS replacement project and the Luminis portal implementation. New opportunities to learn technology and functional business processes are being actively pursued by all levels of DIS.
Relationship with SCT: SIS programmers and the project manager have developed strong relationships with SCT employees working on the legacy system. This has helped to speed issue resolution a number of times in the past.
Staffing Level: Outside of the current implementation mode, it is felt that the team has sufficient staff to provide a high level of customer support on the legacy application. It remains to be seen, but is expected to be true of Banner once the implementation is complete. An analysis of staffing levels, utilizing data from Educause surveys of other institutions using similar applications, can be found in Section III of this document.
Budget Situation: Budgets exist to cover the projected costs of the project over the next six years. This reduces stress and addresses a key weakness (lack of dedicated budget) faced by some of the other applications that DIS supports.

Weaknesses:

Functional Knowledge of Programmers: DIS personnel lack the basic functional knowledge to maximize their efforts and minimize testing for clients.
Project Tracking System: The current project tracking system, PCS, does not meet the needs of DIS at this time. It provides only the most basic functionality, does not integrate with other IT systems, is not used by other IT departments and will need to be replaced within the next two years as it is a mainframe applications and the mainframe will be decommissioned upon completion of the SIS replacement project. Additional functionality is required (a separate document outlines the required functionality) and the possibility for tighter workflow and integration with the rest of IT is greatly desired.
Unknowns: There are currently a lot of unknowns with Banner, Luminis, ODS and Workflow. This may cause significant changes in staffing requirements, programmer tools and other topics that will not be truly understood until deeper into the project or even after the project is complete.
Project Plan: At the time of this document, there is no comprehensive project plan for the Banner, Luminis, ODS and Workflow projects. No overall roadmap has been supplied by the vendor. With so many activities occurring at once involving many people across campus, it is very hard to accurately state the progress of the project.
Communication: There is room for improvement in communication between IT departments. Progress is being made in this area.
Technical Experience with New Tools: There is some concern about how the relative lack of experience with the new Banner tools will impact the level of customer service provided by the group. SCT training is still on-going, but to this point there is still little to judge the effectiveness of this training. The team must be patient as the implementation process progresses. Experience will come, and with it better decisions can be made about staffing, training and other topics.
“Analysis Paralysis”: The team exhibits a (valid) desire to analyze each and every option fully before making a decision. This has led to “analysis paralysis” and delays in certain isolated instances.

Opportunities:

Improve Functional Knowledge: DIS personnel should continue to work more closely with functional customers in order to better understand the business processes present in the software they are supporting. Some potential learning opportunities include campus training sessions put on by the functional customers, web-based seminars put on by the vendor, and attendance of conferences including SunGard SCT Summit and Educause.
Use of HEAT: The investigation of HEAT as a project tracking system is an opportunity to improve the project tracking capabilities within DIS, to open new lines of communication within IT, and to streamline processes while reducing complicated and confusing email conversations. This investigation has been done in the past, but newer releases of HEAT and an increased knowledge of HEAT capabilities in CSS might lend to a positive result.
Knowledge Management: HEAT also has knowledge management capabilities that could improve the documentation and cross-training situations. A central repository for known issues and their solutions would greatly aid new resources and resources covering for an area outside their normal realm of responsibility.
Technical Writer: Another opportunity to improve the quality and consistency of DIS documentation is to hire a student part-time technical writer or to provide an internship in technical writing. DIS personnel could create the content of the documentation (which is normally done through the course of development work) and the technical writer could properly format and check the documentation, saving DIS employees time and allowing them to focus on technical tasks with more direct value to their customers.
IT Project Calendar: To aid in troubleshooting problems and in order to improve communication between IT groups, it is critical to know what activities other IT groups are working on. An important opportunity is to continue building on the IT Project Calendar currently being implemented and reviewed in directors meetings.
Communication within IT: Planning and discussion must occur at the Director level to find the best “moving forward” approach to support of these applications. To aid in troubleshooting problems and in order to improve communication between IT groups, it is critical to know what activities other IT groups are working on. An important opportunity is to continue building on the IT Project Calendar currently being implemented and reviewed in directors meetings.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: The University would find it very difficult to function and provide quality service to students without this application. DIS provides the database, application security and programming technical skills required to provide a secure, reliable application for use by literally everyone at UW.

Name of Service: Telephone Fraud Analysis

This service assists Business Services in identifying potential telephone fraud.

Stakeholders: Directly, IT Business Services; indirectly, the entire University

Strengths:

Save Money: Potential to save the University a considerable amount of money on unauthorized use of the University dial tone.

Weaknesses:

Lack of Authority: The Application Security Office (ASO) is not directly responsible for taking any action and is too busy to devote enough time to do proper analysis. The task is still being done but not on a daily basis and daily reports are not being sent to Business Services. Business Services apparently hasn’t noticed that they are no longer getting these reports. Business Services is capable of performing the task which is accomplished through gathering information from the switch and the Axis database. DIS compiles the information, notes any anomalies and sends the information to Business Services for follow-up.
Clerical Task: DIS has no authority to take action or follow-up, rendering this a clerical task for the people in the ASO, performed for Business Services.

Opportunities:

Use of Student Labor: This could be an opportunity for our student assistant but we have never been able to get things properly set up on the desktop system used by the current student assistant. The task was formerly performed by the DIS student assistant.

We do not see any missed opportunity by DIS continuing this essentially clerical service. This service definitely needs to be performed but it is unclear as to who should actually be doing it. IT needs to review this service, its value and who should be doing it. The DIS opinion is that Business Services should take on this role.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: We do not believe that there is any value added because DIS compiles the information and sends it to Business Services for further analysis. The work done by DIS is strictly clerical; DIS has no authority or responsibility beyond compiling and reporting the data.

Name of Service: Application – Various

This service includes providing programming, troubleshooting, database and quality assurance support for a number of campus applications. These applications are:

TouchFit (database, upgrade and interface support) – Campus Recreation’s system for facilities use
HEAT (database and upgrade support) – CSS’ system for call tracking and knowledge management
AXIS (database, upgrade and programming support) – Business Services’ telephone billing system
Resource25 (database, upgrade and interface support) – Facilities Planning’s system for classroom scheduling (also used by the Union for ad-hoc scheduling)
TCS (minimal database support) – old time entry system, replaced by HRMS; should be offline soon
VSL (minimal database support) – old vacation/sick leave entry system, replaced by HRMS; should be offline soon
VisuaLab and associated systems (full support at time of writing) – Wyoming State Veterinary Lab’s system for case tracking and billing
OnBase (database support) – UW Foundation’s document imaging solution
SmartMailer (application support) – campus mailing system from Pitney Bowes
Eliquoia (database support) TSS’ system for packet shaping
FRS Data Warehouse (database support) – campus accounting data prior to 1997
ODS Datamart (full support) – campus system for reporting from the new Banner student system

Stakeholders: Primary: many staff across campus; secondary: students, faculty and staff who utilize the services and facilities supported by the applications

Strengths:

Ability to Quickly Adapt: It is extremely difficult to take on the support for these applications with little assistance or documentation. DIS has been able to take on these applications and provide acceptable level of support for them using only existing staff due to strong technical expertise in Oracle and basic troubleshooting techniques. DIS takes a great deal of pride in doing a good job on these applications even though it could be argued that they are not our responsibility. DIS understands that the quality of work in this area reflects on IT and can create positive attitudes on campus towards IT.
Customer Service: DIS maintains a strong focus on customer service with these applications. We attempt to set attainable expectations with clients but take into account their needs, especially those based on the academic calendar.
Coordination of IT Resources: Recent work with the Wyoming State Vet Lab has shown a high degree of coordination between different IT departments in identifying the correct solution and promoting that to the client.

Weaknesses:

Lack of Resources: DIS is spread too thin to provide the level of service we would like to provide on each of the applications. The sheer number of applications and different skill sets required to support them make this a difficult proposition without additional trained staff.
Limited Flexibility: Due to staffing constraints, DIS has limited flexibility to take these on with little lead time. Often times clients (or potential clients) are forced to wait for us to provide support until other priorities have been accomplished.
Documentation: DIS needs to improve its documentation on some of these smaller systems to improve coverage in the event of employee absences at critical times.
Leadership: The DIS director has allowed DIS to take on additional responsibilities without compensation (R25, TouchFit) and without the addition of resources to help the DBO, who has primary responsibility for many of the smaller applications.

Opportunities:

Strengthening of IATAC: IATAC Through the restructuring of IATAC (discussed elsewhere), DIS in particular and IT in general would have a better understanding of campus needs as well as any systems being implemented that will require IT support. If possible, these projects should be run through IT (through a project management office (PMO) or through a group of dedicated IT personnel) that can more effectively run the projects.
Dedicated Resources for Small Systems: The addition of a PMO and/or a group of dedicated technical resources would greatly aid IT’s ability to take on new projects and provide a higher level of support on existing applications. The services of either (or both) of these groups could be a source of revenue for IT, although more likely they would serve more of a centralization/customer service need.
Advertising Service: DIS needs to improve our advertisement of what we already own from Oracle, encouraging departments to buy Oracle-compatible software and use the tools that UW already owns.

Value Added by DIS Providing the Service: Many campus departments have one person supporting an application, and often the technical skills of that person are not at a truly acceptable level to support a key application. By providing this service, DIS (and IT) allows its customers to focus on their business and not on maintaining technology.

Staffing Comparison Data

The following table shows DIS technical staff that work on the Financials, HRMS and SIS systems and the relationship of employee count with other institutions. As the survey upon which this data is built had some questions that were upon for interpretation, the data could be skewed but does show that UW has a staff roughly equivalent with other institutions utilizing similar software. This data is from a December 2003 Higher Education User Group survey of participating institutions.

DIS technical staff that work on the Financials,
HRMS and SIS systems and the relationship of employee count with other
institutions

The following table shows that UW database analysts are, in general, supporting more database instances than database analysts at other institutions. This data is from a December 2003 Higher Education User Group survey of participating institutions.

Institutional comparison of student, faculty, database analysts, database instances and database data quantities

Additional Information

Overall Opportunities for IT Improvement:

All of the items below will require a significant amount of work to provide a more detailed analysis, but all were identified as opportunities during the DIS self-study process.

Creation of a Project Management Office, under DIS, to tackle projects currently being taken on by departments
Creation of a group of technical resources that could take on technical projects across campus, freeing departments from hiring new technical resources or from over-allocating existing resources
IT should look at itself as IT and not a collection of individual departments, especially when discussing things with clients
Improve information flow between directors and between departments
Improve teamwork between IT departments
Get outside opinions
- What are we not doing that we should be?
- What are we doing that we should not be doing?
Continue to improve understanding of clients’ changing needs
Improve timeliness of communication to campus concerning IT initiatives

Suggestions for Possible UW Initiatives:

During the DIS self-study, certain initiatives were identified that could benefit the University but that must be accomplished at the University level.

Complete restructuring of IATAC
- please see notes below
Encourage selective centralization – where it makes sense from a University perspective
Document and advertise services for helping to evaluate software products and helping departments understand the true costs of software implementation and support
- A written document, distributed to Deans, Directors and Department Heads as well as VPs
- Offer a seminar on the Total Cost of Ownership for software
- Put the information on an IT web page, IT newsletters
- Hold face-to-face meetings with high-level clients to explain issues and gather input on their needs
Offer Oracle software to academic units (Computer Science in particular) for use in course work
Make better use of available student labor
Continue to push for budget line items for application support
Continue to push for the backfill of functional employees on software implementation projects
Incentives for employees are limited – one option might be to pay out for vacation – for instance, provide one day’s pay for turning in two days of vacation.

Discussion Points on IATAC Restructuring

A key opportunity for the University to improve its use and support of information technology is to approach it from more of a University perspective rather than just from the needs of a specific department. The current IATAC, whose purpose is to do this, is not currently functioning and does not have the true support behind it to make it successful. The following tactics should be considered if the decision is made to restructure IATAC.

The committee should be renamed when it is restructured to highlight its new structure and role
Because there is no functioning IATAC, DIS has taken on many small systems without corresponding increases in training, budgets, or staff
All of IT (CSS, TSS, DIS) resources need to be taken into account
Support for IATAC and processes must come from the top down and must be obeyed by all
1. IATAC should have the authority to do what needs to be done.
2. It should not be gone around or superceded by individual VPs.
3. Without authority, IATAC is useless.
The rules governing which projects are submitted to IATAC need to be changed to be inline with the same dollar figures used to determine whether something needs to go through Purchasing.
1. Clear guidelines need to be created and published to campus. It is not just the software cost that needs to be considered – it is the whole project cost.
2. Purchasing should bounce requests that have not gone through IATAC
No more administrative projects should be funded through the Plus Budget without having gone through IATAC and without sufficient funding for the entire project
A full 5 year budget for the project should be developed (the PeopleSoft and SIS Replacement spreadsheets are a good start)
1. IATAC should provide resources to the requesting department to help them do a proper estimate. This resource should probably be someone at a manager level or above in IT
A complete analysis of required personnel resources (IT, functional, consulting) should be completed and included as part of the full 5 year budget mentioned above
All projects should be looked at from a UW perspective – prioritization, budget, comparison to other (even non-IT related) projects
Project submissions to IATAC can come from any campus department head. Recommendations to accept or deny the project, centrally fund it or not, and what IT resources to devote to it should come from IATAC and be put in front of the President’s cabinet for final approval.
IATAC should be notified of academic unit IT projects so that the impacts on campus network security, bandwidth and IT resources can be measured.
1. IATAC should have the ability to order a review of the project if there are significant concerns in any of these areas.
The Chair of IATAC should be picked by the President’s Cabinet
1. Guidelines on what type of person should be chosen need to be created
2. The Chair should report to the Cabinet
3. The Chair should have their workload analyzed and/or their compensation increased while serving. This will help to ensure proper focus on the position.
Require a business case for each purchase
Require that all administrative software fall under this committee, even if it is being bought by an academic department
Mandate that a funding model be created that will support the project for at least three years

Information Services Department Self-Study 2004 - 2005

Purpose:

Process:

Comparator Data:

Overall Value Added by DIS:

DIS Services:

Self-Study Analysis of DIS Services

Staffing Comparison Data

Additional Information

Overall Opportunities for IT Improvement:

Suggestions for Possible UW Initiatives:

Discussion Points on IATAC Restructuring

Information Services Department
Self-Study 2004 - 2005