University of Auckland(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 1

Senior IS executive: Stephen Whiteside, director IT Services
Reports to: Director administration
Size of IS shop: 350

PCs: 12,600
Mobile PCs: 1916
Terminals: 2000
Hand-held devices: 1790
Total screens: 18,306

Industry: Educational services
PC environment: Dell; Apple; HP; Lenovo; Windows XP, Vista; 7; Linux; Acer; Asus
Server environment: Sun, IBM, Dell, Apple, Linux, AIX, Windows 2003
DBMS: Oracle, SQL, MySQL
Address: 22 Princes Street, Auckland
Website: www.auckland.ac.nz
Key IS projects this year: Student campus solution; research management system; enterprise storage architecture upgrade; academic timetabling solution; copy and print service.

The University of Auckland's approximately 28,000 undergraduate students, 10,000 graduate students and 7000
staff are supported by 350 IT services staff led by director IT Services, Stephen Whiteside. This year, says Whiteside, IT will be used to enable improved end-to-end process, and to improve channel strategies and the university's web presence.

The general ICT project landscape looks much the same as last year, with investments continuing in several areas, including ERP, business intelligence, VoIP, wireless, virtualisation, business continuity and disaster recovery, cloud computing and unified communications. This year, however, additional investments will be made in financial management information systems and mobility, while upgrades will take place on the university's RightNow CRM software.

Whiteside's team will be focusing on several key IT projects in 2010 and will undertake a major review of finance processes and practices, commencing with an upgrade of PeopleSoft Financials in this year, adding additional functionality in project costing and asset management and reviewing processes over an 18-month period. A PeopleSoft campus solutions upgrade will incorporate enhancement of the University's service delivery model for applicants and enrolled students, as well as upgrade the system to incorporate greater self service, including advisement of courses required to graduate and introduction of a new Application for Admission system. Other streams of work in this programme include enhancements to identity management and reporting. System migration has been managed by Oracle, with the remainder of the project managed in-house and supplemented by contractors.

The research management system implementation will improve the university's capabilities to record research outputs and researcher capabilities in 2010, including showcasing outputs and researchers on its website, and will be completed in partnership with Symplectic (UK) and InfoEd (US).

A new timetabling system, Syllabus Plus, was implemented in 2009, and has initially been used for booking rooms. This year, a new timetabling unit will use the system to model timetables based on factors such as room size, capability and proximity, minimisation of student course clashes, and for the first time, staff availability. This will allow for a more efficient use of teaching spaces, with the intention being to free up less utilised spaces for use by the university's growing postgraduate student population. Major infrastructure projects include selection of a new second datacentre, improvements to systems monitoring and management, strategy for the replacement of central SUN servers, expansion of the central network backbone to 1GB, along with SAN storage expansion to meet research and general needs.