PURPOSE:

Provide a reliable batch and transaction computing resource across the campus community in their access to the core administrative computing systems .

Provide legislative and normal business cycle support changes to the core administrative computing systems. Normal business cycle support is repeating a previous computing result with no significant changes. Legislative work is due to internal or external authority or problem recovery.

Admin Production Data Provide standards and services for the storage, processing and communication of University data across the campus community so a manageable and cost effective connectivity model exists among the inputs and outputs of the universities business processes across all administrative computing systems.

IMPORTANCE TO UNIVERSITY MISSION:

• Supports the basic activity of the University by ensuring that faculty, staff and students are reliably provided with administrative services such as marks processing, degree audit and payroll.

• These standards underpin the automated models of University operations and their associated record-keeping. They also enable the logical connectivity and sharing of the data resource across campus. As such they are an enabling ingredient in teamwork approaches to University procedures based on data processing.

• The requirements and methods for exercising control over access to data are necessary for the University to meet its statutory data privacy obligations, to assure proper authentication in upholding data integrity.

CUSTOMERS:

All faculty, staff and students. Customers include administrative staff in all departments, but with particular intensity in the central departments. As network-based computing expands, all faculty, staff, and students will be reached as customers through on-line self-help functions, instead of through paper.

HOW WELL IS IT DONE? HOW DO I MEASURE?

(a) Achievement of Objectives

The measures are:

1. Computing systems performance measures are within acceptable response parameters.
2. Completed work reflects documented requirements.
3. Software is maintained at a commercially supported level.

Objectives with respect to the design of data structures and their access arrangements are determined by consultation with the various University officers who are responsible for each data subject. These arrangements are implemented in rules and tables in a manner which is auditable. The measure is that they correctly reflect the stated requirements. " See also Other Activities. "

(b) Service Level

A number of statistics are provided on a monthly cycle and are reviewed by management, ie. uptime, transactions per hour and batch report statistics.

Applications are maintained to meet legislative and University regulations only. The hardware and operating software are being upgraded to ensure the University has a reliable computing environment.

Service level advances are required to accommodate the much expanded customer base that is imminent in the use of network-based self-help systems by faculty, staff, and students, typically using PIN # methods. As well, the network-based computing environment will soon demand a more secure foundation for user authentication than is available now, in order that more sensitive data security requirements that will be forthcoming can be reasonably assured.

(c) Cost

- information technology hardware and software is approximately $900K annually

-Service is provided by staff in Operations (4 FTEs), Data Control (3 FTEs), Software group (1 FTE), Data Services (4.8 FTE ), LAN support (1 FTE). Data Entry is outsourced to ensure demand can be met but has not provided cost savings ($170K).

-The cost of providing standards and services averages around 3.8 FTEs

EXTERNAL LINKAGES

-Provincial and Federal Government for Business Regulations, Payroll, Employment Equity, Stats Can, etc. and student reporting agenda.

-Some specific commercial EDI linkages have been implemented with external organizations, eg. pay deposits, cheque reconciliation, US$ payments, custom broker, and courier links. Some experimentation was started for the Speede- Express standard for the exchange of student transcripts.

- External Auditors

- External agencies such as SunLife, Mercers and Blue Cross

- Opportunities will increase for more such EDI linkages, hopefully based on national standards.

INTERNAL

All university administrative departments.

The logical data standards embodied in shared applications are implicitly reflected in the usage of those systems by various University departments. The commonality of the data specifications they share defines a common business language enabling a teamwork approach to record-keeping and data resource usage.

Periodic data quality audits need to be done to assess data entry controls and inconsistencies in data interpretation. These greatly impact university reporting problems and the transformation of data into information and knowledge.

See also Data Services Service Level Definitions for Application Access, Production Data & Systems support, Networking Strategies and Application Connectivity.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

Analysis of the existing production application portfolio yields data flow linkages (update, send-to, validate) between the various applications and platforms. These linkages will be significant in planning and any re-engineering, application enhancement or continuous quality improvement initiatives.

When documented and maintained this knowledge and its related subjects becomes a shared lexicon and definitive learning resource. Data and systems management and staff (technical and business) will be able to learn and develop a strategy within a common framework (MUVIT). A comprehensive and co-ordinated strategy for managing systems change is the expected result.

Note: MUVIT (McMaster University's Vital Integration Template). Consists of 5 integrated models.

1. Institutional Data Model

2. Business Processing Model

3. Authorized Access Model

4. Object Cross Reference Model

5. Component Interaction Model