Posts Tagged ‘Banner’
As we are beginning our transition to Workday, yet again, the issues surrounding data integrity, definitions etc. which I am fond of writing about, are surfacing. Despite the fact that Chaos theory in itself is a huge field and I don’t necessarily understand all aspects of it, its vastly simplified definition struck a chord with me.
“Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior and condition of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. […] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[3] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.”
and
a quote from Edward Lorenz “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
The take home lesson (a stretch, I understand!) from this is “We are beginning a major administrative systems project and we are essentially dealing with a lot of (deterministic) dynamic data and we have a golden opportunity to get our initial conditions right so that at least for a long time to come we can avoid divergence and chaos”. (more…)
I am so excited that Dr Paula Johnson has been named the 14th president of Wellesley College. I was unable to be on campus today, so I just listened to her introduction and her brief speech through the livestream. As with all the changes, I am sure that the campus will be re-energized and I am looking forward to the changes that await us.
On a different note, I am happy to be able to publicly say that Wellesley College has decided to move to Workday as our ERP. As you can imagine, this is another huge change for us and there is both considerable enthusiasm and anxiety about this change.
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Data integration is a fact of life for those of us who are in the information technology business. Since we are yet to invent a single system that does everything for everyone in an enterprise, it is inevitable that we have to support and deal with multiple systems. It is equally true that unless the data from these diverse systems are integrated, we will not be able to understand the data in a coherent fashion. With the proliferation of “best of breed” solutions we have a complicated mess in hand.
Most institutions have a large administrative system like Banner or PeopleSoft that is considered to hold the authoritative data. In addition, for the purpose of reporting, we all have a data warehouse or a data mart into which data from the central systems is inserted typically on a nightly basis. The general premise of this is that the administrative systems were originally designed to take in the transactional data and therefore optimized for that purpose. They were not designed for complex reporting. Combining both of these in one system means a drain in resources and everyone suffers. Modern systems like Workday claims to have designed their system in ways that you can do all activities in one system. When you have multiple systems, generally, the data is integrated with the administrative systems, though in some cases, directly into the data warehouse.
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I constantly refer to EDUCAUSE in my blog, which is the organization that fosters the professional relationship amongst Higher Ed IT leaders. Prior to EDUCAUSE, there were two organizations, one called EDUCOM and the other called CAUSE. EDUCOM was primarily the gathering place for academic computing and CAUSE was for administrative computing. In 1998, the two merged to form EDUCAUSE. If you look at what is happening at EDUCAUSE conferences lately, they tend to be light on administrative systems because administrative systems professionals gather more at the meetings organized by the major ERP vendors – Ellucian Live, PeopleSoft HEUG and Jenzabar JAM. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a collaborative effort between EDUCAUSE and NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) to bring together CIOs and CBOs (Chief Business Officers) of about 150 institutions for an Administrative IT summit in Chicago in June.
A report was produced based on the proceedings in the summit, which I have found to be very informative and easy reading. One of the most important things, while obvious, is not stated often enough, can be found in this report:
“Although administrative IT systems and services are essential to the operations of our institutions, most of them do not significantly differentiate one institution from another. For example, hiring and paying employees, handling procurements, and managing budgets are all important—even mission-critical—functions, but they don’t influence a student’s decision to attend an institution.”
I thought it would be nice to review the recommendations from this report and see how we are doing with respect to these.
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EDUCAUSE is one conference that I have attended for the last several years. I was not happy that this year’s conference was was scheduled to start on Election Day. I went to our home in CT on Tuesday night and watched the results with my wife, who was pretty nervous, while I was not. As I tweeted that night, In NATE SILVER we trust. It was amazing how close his predictions were to the real results. After listening to the concession speech by Mitt Romney, I went to bed around 1:30 PM. I listened to the fantastic acceptance speech by President Obama only later. The reason I had to go to bed was that I needed to leave home by 3:30 AM to catch my flight to Denver, so I can get there on time to attend a good chunk of the conference. I arrived in Denver to 70 degree weather, while leaving the east coast where it was cold and snowy. The electoral college weighted map of the USA (a cartogram where the scaling is based on different criteria, in this case the electoral college votes) from Mark Newman is on your left. For those of us who are election stats junkies, these kinds of representations are real fun.
I enjoyed the conference very well. Connecting with other colleagues and some vendors was very useful, but the presentations were below par, with the exception of the general sessions. While talking to the colleagues, I felt very good about the various things we are doing at Wellesley.
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It was such a gorgeous day on thursday, Oct 11, 2012 & I took a short walk around Lake Waban. It was so refreshing. I counted the time towards Wellesley’s Walktober. Unfortunately we found out that only three of us signed up for our team and a team means 4 to 10 people. So, I can count the walking towards my personal commitment only and not towards a team competition. Since I don’t need this as a personal nudge (I am pretty diligent about my exercise anyways), I am not going to keep the Walktober data up to date.
Enjoyed watching the vice presidential debate last night and may end up watching the Orioles vs Yankees this evening. It was amazing to see Twitter and Facebook filled with instant feedback from so many people during the debate. Whereas it is great to see how these technologies are helping such instant feedback, most data are rather predictable. What is great is how you instantly see how many others independently are posting similar feelings towards what is said or done.
As I was walking around the lake yesterday, I was beginning to think about all the different things that are going on in LTS. Despite the fact that we wanted this year to be a year of stability because we had gone through significant changes during the past year, I am simply amazed at all the things that are going on. I will stick to my practice of not naming individuals in the descriptions below 🙂
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Last week was a fantastic week weather-wise, not so fantastic a week for the Red Sox (who are doing well in Minnesota so far), but then we are back to “seasonal weather” again. Today is a big day at Wellesley where there are over 150 presentations by students in the Ruhlman Conference. I am very happy to say that we designed the application that the students and their advisors used during the submission and approval process – one of our PHP app connected via the My Wellesley portal. In the true spirit of collaboration, we shared the collected information with the CS department, who have developed an excellent online tool called RAPP, by which you can browse the program and create your own schedule. I plan to attend a few talks in the afternoon. I would love to attend a few in the morning on protein modeling to relive my years as a researcher in molecular modeling, but I have other commitments in the morning 🙁
The annual performance cycle is upon us and this provides us a great opportunity for reflections on how much we accomplished during the past year. It is a LOT and LTS staff should be proud of all of our collective accomplishments. It is also a time that we plan ahead for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned in the past, I was a skeptic of this whole process for a while mainly because we were all beginning to do this for the first time and didn’t do it right. I now am a believer because we have tools and mechanisms to help us manage these tasks better. Most criticisms come from the fact that goals go by the wayside because unexpected things happen during the year that takes away time from us to be able to achieve the goals. Whereas there is some truth to this, I believe this can be handled through constant communication, setting achievable and realistic goals (taking into consideration the time it takes to put out fires) and time management. If you are still a skeptic, talk to me!
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This was yet another great summer for me and I am sure it is true for many of you. Now, the phase of getting ready for the start of the Fall semester begins. Gone are the days when this used to be the most stressful part of the support services, especially the technology side. The network bandwidth was never enough, students brought computers that would not easily connect to the network, registration systems were too slow because of the lack of compute power, so on and so forth. Most of these are non-issues, unless we want to make them into issues by introducing some unnecessary and overcautious administrivia in the middle.
All of our summer projects have gone really well, many of which I have already mentioned. Especially worth mentioning are Google Apps transition and Drupal. Given the relative enormity of these projects, we have made amazing progress in such a short time thanks to diligent and creative work by the respective teams. This in no way minimizes several other important projects we have completed, of course.
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With the prevalence of information on the web and all the communication overload, it is very rare that you have to wait for an annual meeting to find out about new things. I remember attending meetings in the late ’80s and early ’90s (mostly related to my interest in Chemistry) after which you came back energized with all sorts of great ideas. Now, I am disappointed about the presentations in most meetings because it is very rarely that you hear of something new.
However, the networking is invaluable. Almost always, it allows you to gauge how your organization is doing in comparison to the others – and we are doing great, than you, and also you pick up little things here and there regarding directions others are thinking about moving in, feedback regarding products that we may be thinking of purchasing (that they are unlikely to put it in writing) etc.
I attended the Executive Summit organized by SunGard, the Banner vendor, in New Orleans from Friday to Sunday. It precedes the Summit, which is essentially a massive Banner User Group meeting. This year, there are over 6100 attendees!
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