Maximizing Educational IT Assets - An Integration Strategy for
Educational Institutions
PROBLEM: Among the unique challenges
facing educational institutions in the early years of the twenty-first
century is how best to serve a diverse user base with new technologies
in a time of tight budgetary restrictions. While many businesses
in the private sector can focus on the handful of software solutions
that fit their particular needs, colleges, universities, and other
institutions must attempt to integrate large-scale solutions for
the entire campus community with a myriad of applications and business
methodologies used at the individual department level.
To make this mandate even more challenging, many
state-funded educational institutions are facing belt-tightening
measures that put a cramp on their information technology budget
and force them to focus on crucial services, often at the expense
of innovation. Consolidating core software functions and getting
existing and new applications to "play well together"
makes perfect sense in such a climate.
While the current economic slowdown may have stalled
some bold and exciting plans for the future, it also may provide
a chance to clean up some of the sloppiness left behind after ten
years of rapid, often directionless, growth.
SOLUTION: The needs of each department
of an educational institution are so diverse that it would be foolhardy
to try to develop one application to meet them all. However, there
is no reason the basic functions common to all departments, the
"business infrastructure," cannot be tapped by each department
for its own purposes. The salient reasons for developing on a common
framework include:
Efficiency -- The integration of accounting and
billing methods allows departments that use their own software for
business services to directly tap the data provided by a centralized
entity that provides services to the entire campus, such as a Financial
Services office. By the same token, a common platform such as the
web allows a facilities management department, for instance, to
provide utility billing and work order information to departments
in a paperless format, as well as to streamline common services
such as work order submission.
Security -- Every application with sensitive or
private information requires a database to store user logins, passwords,
and permissions. The ability to use one central database to store
this information for many applications means each user need only
remember one login and password, and authentication can be handled
in one place, meaning fewer access points need to be secured.
Interdisciplinary study -- Institutions are beginning
to recognize the value of linking different disciplines for a common
good. For instance, a researcher into online security issues might
find it useful to share information with a behavioral scientist
to understand why people are willing or unwilling to provide credit
card information online. Or an historian might find it useful to
plumb data from a molecular biologist's lab to understand the dispersion
patterns of ancient human populations.
METHODS: Fortunately, technology
can be used to ease many of the unique headaches universities, colleges,
and academies must endure. The emergence of middleware solutions
using standard data formats like XML can be powerful tools in the
right hands. While the IT department for the institution itself
must provide some support for these methodologies, there are concrete
solutions individual departments and other organizations on campus
can use to get themselves up to speed:
The Central Authentication Service (CAS) -- Developed at Yale University,
CAS is an open source method for authenticating users in one place
for many different applications. Integrating existing applications
into a CAS solution allows users to provide their login and password
combination once, and these credentials are passed to every application
the user accesses during that browser session, including uPortal,
webmail, and custom software. Applications large and small can capitalize
on this technology with a good developer and a little help from
the central IT department.
Adopting a web-based interface -- The proliferation of web technology
is approaching a level of sophistication that will eventually rival
that of desktop technology for even heavily data-intensive applications.
While we may never live in a web-only world, it's not too soon to
capitalize on the unique advantages a web-based application or a
web interface for an existing non-web application provides. Aside
from making the application available to any machine with a web
browser (the other kind are very hard to find these days), a web
solution in many cases replaces paper and phone calls as a means
of doing business.
Maximizing existing assets -- While it would be nice in the best
of all possible worlds to replace an aging application with a brand-spanking
new one, it is not always feasible. Under tight budgets, getting
the most out of existing applications is often the right way to
go. While not all applications are worth salvaging, a surprising
number can be retooled or replaced one piece at a time, keeping
the underlying data structure intact until it makes sense to upgrade
to newer back-end technologies. Additionally, even legacy databases
can often be coaxed into providing their essential data in a usable
format, even if it has to be converted from raw text. Often, such
a conversion leads to a streamlined data structure after columns
and tables that are no longer used have been dropped.
SUMMARY: While universities face a set of challenges
rare outside of academia, highly diverse user bases and shrinking
budgets need not mean substandard application design. An intelligent
mix of integration, centralization, and the incremental replacement
of outdated technologies can ease these challenges and allow an
educational institution to focus on its primary objective, to educate.
* * *
Solid Blue Development provides
application development for colleges, universities, and other educational
institutions, with a special focus on integrating legacy applications
and developing web-based solutions. Please contact Solid Blue owner
Peter Binkley for more information.
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