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 The University of Mississippi (UM) is experiencing a renaissance unparalleled in the school's 155-year history. Enrollment is at a record high, with 14,500 undergraduate and graduate students spread across its campuses. Plus, Ole Miss (as it's affectionately known) has seen dramatic growth in its endowment, a huge jump in funding for research, and an explosion of innovative new academic programs. This growth prompted the university to study and re-engineer certain business processes. Its experiences can serve as a valuable lesson as you face the challenge Ole Miss faced -- namely, how do you build a technology infrastructure that's cost-effective, easy to manage, and capable of supporting new initiatives? Replace Mainframes with Newer Systems UM took a look at its existing technology to see if there was a better solution. As you might guess, the school focused on outdated technology.  The university decided that it wanted to modernize its IT infrastructure to achieve cost and manageability benefits, and to position the school for new technology initiatives. Therefore it needed a new, more flexible system. In 1998 the university embarked on its own five-year project to migrate its mainframe systems to a packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. What do you need to consider when undertaking such a big project? Ole Miss had several goals, reflecting the thinking of many universities that want new technology platforms. If you're going to adopt a new technology platform, you want make sure it uses the latest, open standards so you don't need to replace solutions years down the road. It should be reliable in order to avoid costly downtime, and scalable to handle new applications when you're ready to use them.
The university selected SAP Campus Management (CM), the software maker's student administration system, because its integrated applications and open architecture would enable Ole Miss to improve service and internal operations. SAP CM would streamline and support core academic processes, including student financial accounting, course planning, admissions, registration, degree auditing, and related academic services.  "From a business perspective, the ERP system would resolve the lack of integration among the various information systems while exploiting best practices within SAP," says Buster Hale, Associate Vice Chancellor of Information Technology. "In addition, our faculty and students were hungry for Web services, so we had the opportunity to deliver better service to these 'customers' of the university." UM became the first North American institution -- and one of the first four universities worldwide -- to implement SAP's integrated system, and students and faculty appreciated the changes. Now they use the Web for a variety of tasks, including applying to the university, reviewing academic programs and course offerings, registering for classes, paying tuition, and uploading and checking grades. What to Look for in a Hardware Platform What should you look for in a hardware platform to run your new business systems? At UM, several criteria came to mind. "Security is a huge deal on a university campus," explains Kathryn Gates, Director of Academic Computing and Support Services. "A lot of our hack attempts come from our own students and we've had more problems protecting Windows NT-based machines than we have with Solaris-based machines." The university also needed considerable flexibility. "As the project progressed, if we were unsure about what kind of resources we needed, we could dynamically allocate [them]," says Hale. "That was very important because we were treading on new ground. The ability to make hardware and software changes continually gave us a chance to test things out." The university quickly learned about the advantages of having a flexible platform. When it first deployed Web services, its front-end Web server was unable to handle the load. Literally overnight, the IT staff was able to move the Web services onto a third application server. It was a simple process because both servers were running the same operating system. A scalable technology base was also important, says Gates, when the university needed more power for its SAP system. "The software is set up so that we can easily add another application server and make no changes to our code." And reliability was paramount. "As a public university, funding is always an issue. So we may not have the luxury of having redundant servers everywhere. That means we have to have a very reliable base hardware system," explains Gates. "And because all these systems interact, if one piece is down, they're all down. So it's very important that we have a solid infrastructure." How a New ERP System Benefits the School After implementing the Web-based admissions functionality of SAP Campus Management, the university began using the student accounting, bill payment, and student master data functions. "Perhaps the biggest advantage in the move to SAP is that it got us into a current, modern technology base, which allows us to do a lot of self-service for our students, faculty and staff. It even lets us do things for prospective students," Gates said.
In addition, the university now uses its ERP system to disburse financial aid, post and monitor grades, deliver online assistance, generate bills, and more. UM also gained advantages by integrating front and back office functions in one application that runs on one platform. It reduced the costs of maintaining multiple systems, including training. It no longer needed interfaces between various systems that it had to run and maintain. In the end it had just one system that everyone learned to use. For its innovative approach to campus-wide computing, Sun Microsystems recognized the University of Mississippi as a Center of Excellence in 2003. This gives the university priority access to new technology as it continues to explore ways of improving operations. | ||||||||||||||
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